Male Anxiety Movies That Fear the Future is Female
Considering how often films and stories are told from a male perspective, it might seem unnecessary to write a piece specifically about male anxiety. Sure, you enjoyed my coining the genre of female anxiety films, but does it really work for men? Looking at 90% of content out there, what movie doesn’t feature male anxiety? I won’t argue, but the films that follow contain more than just your run-of-the-mill nerves and concern. These are movies that fear for the future of men, and directly confront what it means for them to lose their standing in society.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the 1970s boast a whole slew of movies wringing their proverbial hands over the state of the genders. With women’s lib taking off and people brazenly disregarding societal conventions, the collective consciousness of movies played with the female and male sides of this new gendered battle. Some films like Vanishing Point or Two-Lane Blacktop dealt with destructive men who had nothing to live for except burning their way through the celluloid. Others, like the uncomfortable cult movie The Baby (1973), found fertile ground in the belief that women were out to conquer, emasculate, and own men.
The Baby starts with social worker Anne (Anjanette Comer) arriving at the Wadsworth house, a family devoid of men except for one 21-year-old who still acts like a baby. The Wadsworth women tell Anne that Baby (David Manzy), as they call him, is mentally disabled and won’t ever progress beyond the infant stage. All three women, the mother (Ruth Roman) and two sisters (Marianna Hill and Suzanne Zenor), use a cattle prod to keep Baby in check, insisting it’s for his own good. Meanwhile, Anne is reeling from what we believe to be the death of her husband due to an accident.
Anne is fascinated with the case and starts spending an inordinate amount of time with Baby, much to the chagrin of the Wadsworths. She teaches Baby how to stand and walk and seeing if she can teach him words; all the while asking why he was never brought in for psychological testing. Mrs. Wadsworth attempts to kidnap and kill Anne during a party but she escapes and absconds to her house with Baby. The Wadsworths find her at home where Anne kills the two sisters then buries the mother alive next to them. She tells Baby he’s alright, he’s safe, then brings him into a playroom where her shockingly alive but seriously handicapped from the accident husband eagerly awaits his new playmate.
Right off the bat, let’s just cover one base: The Baby is trash. It’s brimming with fear about how women are itching to treat men like objects and toys. (Ya’ know, like the way women have been treated for most of time.) The male anxiety is thick and beautiful, and it’s worth a watch to see how pants-shittingly scared the guys behind this movie are. The take-away from their film is that when women have power, they will use it to subjugate men; they will spend all of their time keeping men weak and dependent on them. From the 21st century perspective, that’s the exact opposite of what women want. I mean, for God’s sake, can you imagine modern day feminists excited to be changing a grown man’s diapers for the rest of his life? That’s pretty much the exact opposite goal of feminism.
The Skin I Live In (2012) is a considerably more enlightened and complicated movie. As Almodovar’s film plays out, the anxiety it covers subtly changes shape. The Skin I Live In starts without letting the audience know much of what’s going on and I hesitate to spell it all out here because as the story slowly unravels the twists are just jaw-dropping. In a nutshell, Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is a brilliant surgeon who is keeping a beautiful young woman Vera (Elena Anaya) trapped in his house. He lost his wife to suicide following a horrific car accident where she was burnt over most of her body. The movie plays out in disjointed time so that we see how Vera came to be stuck here well after her character is established.
As it turns out, and here’s the biggest spoiler, Vera turns out to have once been Vincent (Jan Cornet)–a young man who met and engaged with Ledgard’s daughter Norma (Blanca Suarez) during a party while he was on drugs. Vincent begins kissing and undressing Norma who suddenly starts screaming, startling Vincent so badly that he strikes her. Norma, already unstable, needs to be committed for years after developing a fear of men. Eventually she kills herself the same way her mother did, starting Ledgard down a road of Dr. Frankenstein-like revenge. Ledgard finds and kidnaps Vincent, turning him into a replica of his wife over the course of six years. Once Vincent has been forcibly transformed into Vera, she exists in a whole new world of fear and anxiety. Her autonomy is disrespected every step of the way as she navigates rape, a loss of power over her own body and living at the whims of a man who believes he owns her.
The Skin I Live In is as much about identity as it is about gender dynamics, and the morals of the movie are kept intentionally murky. Vincent’s violence towards Norma is framed as accidental but still unforgivable. Ledgard is justified in his anger up to a point; when he infringes on another’s right to exist and control their own body, he becomes as bad as the man he hates. Vincent skips through life blithely, hanging out at wealthy parties and doing drugs, and not thinking too much about his safety–a topic no woman can ever stop thinking about. What we see throughout this complex, unpredictable tale is someone seeing their own guilt and place in the world through a fresh perspective. It’s like all those men who suddenly realize how they’ve contributed to rape culture unconciously; Vincent sees how easy it is for Vera’s autonomy to be disrespected and used by others even if Vincent is still the one behind the eyes.
The final male anxiety movie is unlike the other two in that it has a cautiously optimistic view of what the modern and future man will be. Down There In Heaven (2019) is a German film about a group of men who all receive invitations to a meeting where they find themselves locked in. Most of them know each other, and know a significant amount about each other’s lives. The tension from being trapped and thinking themselves to be set up eventually takes its toll but not before plenty of conversation, because let’s face it: boys like to gab.
What gives this indie-ensemble movie its hook is the morphing morals and dynamics between generations and lifestyles. Karl (Mario Mentrup), who lives in his car and cares not for participating in the modern world, declares it ridiculous that women are considered “the fairer sex,” yet he doesn’t seem to be attracted to men. Mario (Roger Bonjour), a young and bright kid who likes to party, rolls his eyes at the older folks in the group telling cheap, sexist jokes. There are men who have open marriages and shrug at the idea of their wife sleeping with someone else while a religious type walks the line between enlightened and reactionary. Black and white versions of the world and what it means to be a man are dispelled as the conversation spirals into personal choice, free will, autonomy, and the notion of being in control.
For a more in-depth write-up of this movie, look for the upcoming transcribed interview with the director (and actor) Felix Schaffer coming soon. We had lots to discuss.
It’s taken quite a lot of time and effort for female characters to get complicated, weird, and imperfect. The off-shoot of that is that all roles are starting to shift away from one dimensional archetypes. Humans in general are multi-layered and contradictory, so trying to keep male characters as stoic, unblinking alpha men that don’t ever feel the sting of anxiety simply doesn’t accurately represent the array of personalities that exist. In a day and age where lines have blurred between gender, sexual orientation, and what those mean to each individual, the axiom of the “every man” is readily fading away. If you ask me, which no one ever does, not a moment too soon.
