For a roughly 10 year period between 1985 and 1995, Michael Douglas was on what they call in sports a “heater.” Douglas starred a string of box office hits playing everyone from police detectives to the President of these United States. He got flashed by Sharon Stone and went on South American adventures with Kathleen Turner. And at his peak, he nabbed an Academy Award for his portrayal of the venal Wall Street trader Gordon Gecko whose “greed is good” speech helped define the ethos of the Reagan years.
In Jessa Crispin’s hands, Douglas’s oeuvre is the jumping off point for her examination of modern masculinity in her recently released book What’s Wrong With Men? By examining the characters Douglas played, Crispin argues that you can track the slow death of “the partriarchy” which, in lay terms, was a societal structure where men, whether their colors were white or blue, were assured of a steady job, a stay-at-home wife to care for his kids, and whose primacy was never challenged. Men basically did whatever they wanted and rarely suffered consequences for their actions.
And in this way, Douglas makes a compelling avatar. Although not technically a baby boomer (Douglas was born in 1944, two years before the start of the post-war baby boom) by the mid-1980s, boomers were ascending into positions of power but doing so in a workplace that was more racially, ethnically, and sexually diverse than ever before. But Douglas’s characters were often at sea in this evolving cultural moment. In movies like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction, Douglas is confronted with women who have agency and power, money and lives that are not reliant on the things men were traditionally relied on to offer. He can’t blithely ignore Glenn Close after their weekend fling anymore than he can match the wealth and success of Sharon Stone. The former is done in not by Douglas but his doting wife and the latter outfoxes him and is going to bury an ice pick in him as we fade to black.
As society evolved during this time period, this sense of emasculation reached its apotheosis (at least in the Douglas canon) in Falling Down, where he plays a divorced, recently laid off defense contractor. Stripped of the traditional roles of husband and provider, Douglas’s character lashes out in ever increasingly violent ways, not against his former employer, but by punching down against those who subject him to petty indignities like the fast food manager who refuses to serve him breakfast as the restaurant shifts to its lunch menu. Falling Down is a sort of canary in a coal mine for the mass shooters of the modern day whose manifestos were littered with similar feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and rage.
On the other end of the spectrum is Gordon Gecko. Who uses all the tricks in the book to accumulate wealth and power. For decades, this kind of behavior was winked at and nodded to, a passing mention of a deal in a country club locker room or over drinks in a university dining club where no one was the wiser, but those days were coming to an end and Gecko is ultimately brought down by his surrogate son, the dirt under his nails protege who finally realizes that breaking the law in the service of getting rich is not worth losing your soul.
And it was a bit surprising that Crispin gave Wall Street short shrift in her book because that movie also telegraphed where we are today. The zero sum tactics in that movie, the idea that if you’re not cheating you’re not trying, and that wealth is its own reward perfectly define the era we now live in. Look no further than who is occupying the White House right now and how that person has bent and broken laws, stiffed business partners, and marketed himself as a business genius while hocking everything from crypto coins to sneakers to his gullible supporters who all believe they too can get rich like him. In retrospect, the only surprising thing about Wall Street is that Gecko ends up going to jail.
In Crispin’s telling, the fall of the patriarchy was simply replaced by a new and equally flawed model - meritocracy - which promised a level playing field but in reality simply allowed people who already had wealth and power to consolidate their standing and shut the door behind them, leaving the masses out in the cold. As Crispin traces this post-patriarchical world, she argues that the splintering of society manifested on the left in renewed interest in socialism (most notably through the Occupy Wall Street movement) and on the right by manosphere influencers and bloggers who preached a lewder, more hateful version of male superiority that belittled women, demonized minorities, and told alienated men they had been sold out.
But when it comes to offering solutions, like many critics, Crispin is light on details. Perhaps it is because she has a tendency to paint with an overly broad brush, particularly when she directs her fire at the political system. To her, the Sorkin-esque version of government reflected in Douglas’s role as President Andrew Shepherd in The American President, fetishizes a moderate, common sense liberalism divorced from reality and the Obama Administration’s failure to prosecute bankers after the 2008 housing crisis created the space for Trump’s populist pitch to alienated white working class voters. She is also quick to call out the two party system but in doing so, goes too far in suggesting there is no difference between the two. While Crispin is entitled to her opinion, T\that type of nihilism, manifested in voters who turned to Ralph Nader in 2000 and Jill Stein in 2016 had a devastating effect on the future of our nation. At best, she suggests community-based solutions with low bore stakes that do not demand a CVS receipt-length checklist of qualifications and interpretation of a man’s views of the world in order to have allyship. It’s a weak tea finish for an otherwise engaging and thought provoking book. I encourage you to read it and draw your own conclusions.
