The White Male Fragility Movie Era Is Upon Us

There's a scene in the new Catman movie where Robert, played by Hollywood's favorite madman (scary) Nicholas Brown, describes every text message that the main character, Margot (Emilia Jones), sends him that makes him think she's loves him. He took the time to count the messages that gave him the wrong impression and there were over 100. So far this revelation is horrifying and shows Robert Margot's unhealthy obsession and his reluctance to let her go. But later when I watched the movie, I had to laugh because I couldn't help but think that Nicholas Brown was going through hundreds if not thousands of fake messages every time this girl was interested in him. . For example, who has time?

This movie, along with another movie that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last week called Fair Game , proves that the age of male frailty is upon us. In particular, films about tender white men. And frankly, I'm excited because in these hard times we need to be able to laugh at the men on the flop. (Not all men are losers, but most are. That's like saying not all apples are red. Sure. Technically true. But if you want to, go for it.)

Fair Play is about a young couple struggling with money. They're newly engaged and seem madly in love, but when Phoebe Dinevar's character, Emily Alden, takes on the role of Luke Ehrenreich, she quickly becomes the worst boyfriend ever. He sabotages her in the office because she can't handle his success and he starts to lose her. At Cat Parsons , student Margot meets thirty-year-old Robert at work. They text, go on a pretty bad date, and she cancels it. Just like that he lost it. He just can't accept the fact that he was interested in her for a moment and is no longer interested.

These movies are not comedies. Both are actually psychological thrillers and even have violent storylines. (Both have scenes where a male character rapes a female character, one has a rape scene and the other has a physical fight/domestic violence.) The violence is not funny at all, please don't get me wrong. But both films show what women already know. men are insecure. And they don't take no for granted. And eventually they... get embarrassed.

To be clear, the idea of the troubled white male has been around for a long time in film and television. To watch: Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (1976) or more recently Joaquin Phoenix in Joker (2019). But these two, and especially the Joker , portray men as victims of the society around them. We feel for them and want to see their side of the story.

This new generation of work forces us to do the exact opposite. There is nothing in these men that makes them feel sorry. In Fair Game , Ehrenreich's character Luke lives a life of extreme privilege, earning more money than most people can hope to earn in a lifetime. When you watch it happen, you don't think , poor thing . Do you think this guy is a ****** ? And there is no redemption arc. We don't need to watch the third act where he tries to fix everything. The director (Chloe Dumont, in her feature film debut) is smart enough not to believe or be moved. He didn't deserve it.

Emilia Jones and Nicholas Brown appear in Suzanne Vogel's Person Cat, an official selection of the Sundance Institute's 2023 Sundance Film Festival Premiere Program.

Cats do something similar. Robert is set up as an outsider, and you can tell he's not a "get the girl" kind of guy. And the character clearly wants us to feel bad for him, but the movie itself doesn't want us to believe him. His attempts to win her sympathy were so painful that at one point I cried out loud. And when Margot tells him she's not interested anymore, we're relieved for her, because it's a very real fear to tell a man we're not interested, and we wonder how he'll react.

These films do not see the women they portray as the real cause of men's despair and downfall. They see men as the people who are most likely to fall because they are not safe, and these women were unlucky enough to be around when that happened. Their success and rejection of these people is not against them. It was done by men and only men. And that's exactly how it should be.