EXTENDED VERSION: Michael Douglas Movies And The Crisis Of Masculinity

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Thanks for tuning in to On the Media's Midweek Podcast.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Last week was frankly nuts.

I mean, from a production perspective here, because so much news broke on Thursday night and Friday, which is when we spend the week's last few hours doing final cuts, last-minute fixes, putting in the music, and then mixing the episode before sending it out by, you know, close of business.

But then there was all this extra stuff we had to fit in, so we had to go at everything with a hatchet.

Especially the interview we did with Jessa Crispin on her new book, What's Wrong with Men?

Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and how, of course, Michael Douglas films explain everything.

Anyway, we decided to give you a chance to hear the long version.

Jessa, welcome to the show.

I'm so happy to be here.

So before we get to the list of movies qua case studies that you dive into, you begin the book in a very different setting.

Francis Petier Sal Petrière Hospital in the twilight of the 19th century.

It was known then as a neuropsychiatric teaching facility focusing on women with hysteria.

Why did you start there?

This was a moment we started to understand

that women have a specific political, psychological, social reality that is based in their gender, both a combination of how society treats them and how they understand themselves and the clash they're in.

Because prior to that, it was merely seen as women's frailty and weakness.

Hysteria, the word is related to the womb and the belief that it was moving around all the time.

So it ceases to become solely a problem of women and becomes a broader problem of women and their unhappiness with the limited role that they're asked to play.

Aaron Powell, yes.

So much of the treatment for hysteria in the past was based on: well, we have to more firmly lock women into their roles, right?

Get them married, get them pregnant, get them nailed into the domestic space.

In this moment of the 19th century, you had this understanding that it wasn't just about women failing to fulfill these roles of mother, wife, caregiver, etc.,

that there was something else going on with them.

And thus began 150 years or so of us trying to figure out what do women want.

That began not just the Freudian concept of the unconscious, but political organization around these issues, which is what gave us feminism.

Now, in the book, you argue that Michael Douglas, despite being kind of a sexy protagonist, was cast in a series of films as essentially a male hysteric, right?

You wrote, after all, what did Michael Douglas present to the world in his string of blockbuster films through the 80s and early 90s, but a performance of being extremely unwell?

As I was trying to figure out why I was so drawn to this figure of Michael Douglas, I was reading a lot of film reviews and press from mid-80s to sort of late 90s when he was in his peak.

And I often saw him being referred to as a symbol of a new masculinity.

I thought that was very funny because when I watched his movies, he was always wide-eyed and waving his arms around and yelling about something or other.

And so I just thought, what if I take this seriously?

The idea that Michael Douglas is a symbol of a new masculinity in order to look at what masculinity that was emerging in this time was really all about.

In the 80s, we're seeing the rise of, well, frankly, fiercely right-wing media that condemned feminism.

People like the AM radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Feminism was established.

So as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream society.

But Michael Douglas's characters didn't didn't hate feminism.

He saw himself as a good guy, but we saw in his condescension and in his fragility that wasn't quite true.

A lot of the vitriolic rhetoric around feminism really gave cover to a large segment of men who just didn't think that this had anything to do with them.

The Michael Douglas figure conceptualizes himself as the center.

He doesn't have to adapt to a changing world.

The world should adapt to him.

And he's afraid of what's going on around him.

So let's get to some specifics, starting with his two biggest hits of the era, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct.

And a warning, countless spoilers ahead, but come on, these movies are 40 years old.

Fatal Attraction features Douglas as an attorney who has a steamy affair with an editor played by Glenn Close, but Close then simply will not go away.

I just want to be a part of your life.

Oh, this is the way you do it, huh?

Show it up at my appointment.

What am I supposed to do?

You won't answer my calls.

You change your number.

I mean, I'm not going to be ignored, Dan.

Her character stalks him, threatens his family, boils that rabbit.

I mean, it's a very sort of vile little film if you really get into the sexual politics, because there's always been the disposable woman for the man who is successful.

There's the mistress, there's the sex worker, there's the courtesan.

The reason why women who were mistresses were disposable is because they didn't have the right to own property, right?

They didn't have access to education or to their own income streams.

Women couldn't have their own credit cards until the 70s.

And so if a politician or somebody who has a lot of resources or has

the ability to threaten you, you have to do what they say, which is to shut your mouth.

And if you don't, there's a threat of not just scandal, but also death.

And in this case, the marauding mistress isn't taken out by the man.

She's murdered by his wife.

Yes.

That's a kind of tension we often see set up, the raging feminist versus the trad wife.

These wives, and the wife certainly in this movie, isn't just protecting her home, she's also striking back at at the feminists' seeming contempt.

And she's not entirely wrong about that, is she?

No, I mean, there was definitely a backlash from women to the idea of feminist progress.

Things like the development of the no-fault divorce, which was a political demand that women had been making since the 19th century.

What you saw was a backlash from women like, you know, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, and so on, afraid that this would make women like them, upper middle class, vulnerable because then their husbands could leave them without warning.

This is a legitimate fear, but no fault divorce dropped women's suicide rates.

It helped lower the rates of domestic violence that ended in homicide.

One point which really surprised me is that the notion of midlife crisis, the man buying the motorcycle and looking for a younger woman to have an affair with, was rewritten.

The midlife crisis was experienced by the woman who was much more likely to leave the marriage than the man.

Yeah, so beginning in 1980, divorce rates skyrocket.

No fault divorce was being sort of rolled out state by state.

Approximately two-thirds of these divorces were being instigated by women, Even though they faced really serious consequences, right?

Their income dropped, they had mostly the custody responsibilities at the time.

They would still rather suffer all of these things than to stay married to their husbands.

And so I think the midlife crisis fantasy was a sort of cover for men to protect their egos.

And it's like, you can't fire me, I quit.

Because so much of media was run by men

they reinforced it with these movies about the midlife crisis guy running off into the sunset with a 21 year old secretary in a sports car who coined the term a woman journalist uh Gail Sheehee actually

passages yes in the in the book passages she was describing a change that women were going through once their children became less dependent on them.

It would set off this kind of searching moment of, is this all that there is?

This reminds me of Kramer v.

Kramer.

Oh, sure, yeah.

Meryl Streep in that film leaves Dustin Hoffman.

Here are my keys.

Here's my American Express card.

Here's my Bloomingdale's credit card.

Here's my checkbook.

Oh, is this so kind of joke?

Here's the cleaning.

Here's the laundry ticket.

You can pick them both up on Saturday.

You.

Well, I'm sorry that I was late but I was busy making a living all right she's treated as an object of contempt nevertheless there it is where does that leave Michael Douglas though in fatal attraction he's trying to recreate a kind of masculinity that no longer exists that says I can cheat on my wife and she can't really do anything about it and when I'm done with this woman then she'll just disappear into the ether somehow

so sad You know that, Alex, slowly and very sad.

Don't you ever pity me, I'll pick me up, you bastard.

I'll pity you.

I'll pity you.

Why?

Because I won't allow you to treat me like some slut you can just bang a couple of times and throw in the garbage.

Now, let's move on to basic instinct.

Here he plays a detective charged with bringing a crime novelist, played by Sharon Stone, to justice since she appears to be offing her lovers one by one.

Basic Instinct, you've said, basically comes down to a sweater in a way.

Yes.

Yes, the sweater that started this whole book, honestly.

You know, it was a pandemic, and so I was watching Basic Instinct a lot.

And

it's just such a good, it's such a good movie.

And I was texting with my friend about this sweater that Michael Douglas wears.

Maybe the most upsetting sweater.

in cinematic history.

He's going to the club to meet Sharon Stone and all of her friends.

He's investigating her, but they do like weird flirtation in the interrogation scene right before the club.

You never tied him up?

No.

Johnny liked to use his hands too much.

I like hands and fingers.

You describe a white silk scarf in your book.

I've always had a fondness for white silk scarves.

They're good for all occasions.

But you said you liked men to use their hands, didn't you?

No, I said I like Johnny to use his hands.

I don't make any rules, Nick.

I go with the flow.

So he's going to seal the deal with Sharon Stone by wearing a sweater to the dance club.

It's not just any sweater.

It is a V-neck, olive green.

The V is just too deep,

clearly made.

with synthetic fabric.

And so you can just tell what it's going to smell like the next day.

Sweat and cigarette smoke and spilled beer.

And he's like, this one is going to go home with me despite the zero effort that he's put into his looks, the way that he talks to her, the way that he dances.

He doesn't have to think about any of it.

Sharon Stone, the character she plays, is very successful.

She lives in a house that is sleek and beautiful.

She wears beautiful clothes.

It's not just that she looks amazing.

She's always on the shoreline with the waves crashing against the cliffs.

And every time you see Michael Douglas at home, he's falling asleep in a recliner with the TV still on, right?

He goes to work.

And it's fluorescent lighting.

They're drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups that you know has just like tastes like cigarettes and somebody made four hours ago and has just been sitting there.

And they're all wearing the worst polyester ties.

And it's just...

Now, you sound a little bit like a snob.

Why do you focus on this cheap garbage that he lives in?

There's such a suspicion within Basic Instinct that the men have toward anything that is beautiful, soft, pleasurable.

And I think that it's a kind of paranoia built into this moment where women had the power to create things on their own.

It used to be we had dandies in masculine culture, artists and poets, but now as women take space in the public realm, there's this paranoia about, am I going to be mistaken for being a sissy for being gay?

This is a good place probably to talk about an observation you make several times in your book that during this period, women were creating support systems to enable them

to

talk to other people, to figure out their place in a changing world.

And men did not allow themselves that.

It's not enough to say, okay, divorce your.

I have a credit card now.

Right.

I have a credit card now, or I have access to a divorce attorney, whatever.

You have to create support systems so that women can access the things that they need.

So if you're in a violent marriage, divorce court isn't going to be enough.

You have to create things like domestic violence shelters.

It's not enough that you can now go to the university.

You have to create scholarships.

You have to create mentorships.

And so, when things started to shift away from a man-ruled society, it was women who were in a better position to take advantage.

That's why men started to fall behind.

Which brings us to the second category of Michael Douglas films, the economic actor.

And in a way, this is the heart of the argument you're making.

The economic actor, starting with the movie Wall Street, where he plays the hugely successful, unabashedly amoral banker Gordon Gecko.

Greed,

for lack of a better word, is good.

Greed is right.

Greed works.

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit, greed.

The admirable qualities that once defined American manhood, you wrote, hard work, loyalty, ethics, they no longer have value.

Only money matters.

Like when Trump said during his first campaign, when challenged on paying hardly any taxes, that's because I'm smart.

Or he had smart lawyers anyway.

So Wall Street was released in 1987, what Susan Strange called the beginning of casino capitalism.

In 1980, you have the first real financial reform in the banking industry in decades with the Monetary Control Act.

And what it does is incentivize speculation over long-term investment.

It makes money by taking things apart.

Yeah, by basically stripping businesses of assets and selling it off for parts.

This is why we don't have local newspapers anymore.

No one faces any consequences for the bad decisions at the time, and they continue the process of deregulation without creating any systems of oversight.

This creates the foundation for the 2008 economic crash that affected the whole world, a much worse version of what Gordon Gecko became such a symbol of.

If you're not inside, you are outside, okay?

And I'm not talking about some $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff flying first class and being comfortable.

I'm talking about rich enough to have your own ship, rich enough not to waste time.

$50,000, $100 million, buddy.

A player.

Talk about how Wall Street commented on the impact of this change across generations.

Yeah, you have a couple different father figures in Wall Street, and then you have this young man who's basically trying to figure out which father he's going to become like.

You know, the young man's played by Charlie Sheen, the father who raised him, is working class, but he's built a stable existence for himself and his family.

He's a union man.

The rug is being pulled out from under his feet by men like Gordon Gecko, played by Michael Douglas.

And he's a representative of this sort of new financial system.

And he does not play by the rules, right?

And so he does insider trading and he does all of these unethical, illegal acts in order to attain wealth, but it works.

You note in your book that the movie is actually less bleak than real life because the canniest perpetrators almost never go to jail and Gecko did eventually for insider trading.

Now there Michael Douglas plays the winner even though he goes to jail ultimately.

In Falling Down he plays the ultimate victim.

In Falling Down he plays a man named Defense

and he had been laid off after

years of loyalty to his employer.

He's also been rejected by his family for being erratic and violent, and his wife has put out a restraining order on him.

So in this moment of stress, he's stuck in traffic and he is sort of fuming about the injustices done to him.

He decides to essentially walk across the city to go home and reclaim his place in his family, but also in the world.

So in this sort of march across the city that he does, one of the first confrontations he has is at a convenience store.

And it's owned by a Korean gentleman.

And he thinks that the prices of the goods he would like to buy, which include aspirin and a can of soda, are priced too high.

Drink, 85 cent.

You pay, I'll go.

It's a fi.

I don't understand a five.

There's a V in the word.

It's five.

You don't got Vs in China?

Not Chinese.

I'm Korean.

Whatever.

You come to my country, you take my money, you don't even have the grace to learn how to speak my language.

You're Korean.

You have any idea how much money my country has given your country?

How much?

I don't know, but it's got to be a lot to get bet on that.

And so he gets a bat and he destroys the store while yelling at the owner.

And you observe that even the reason why the prices are higher in the convenience store is because the owner is getting screwed by a system that enables the big chains to have cheaper prices.

Yeah,

the reason why small independent businesses have higher prices is because

everything

in corporate culture in the United States is set set up against the mom and pop.

The American dream is a setup.

It's a lie.

And Michael Douglas is just outraged that the world isn't operating to his expectations.

You say that the reason why falling down still resonates with so many people is because it really gets to that kind of frustration of contemporary life where everyone is seen as your competitor or an obstacle.

And yet, as you wrote, the Reagan and Bush presidencies romanticized the post-war boom times.

I'm reading from your book.

If we could simply recreate the conditions of that era by jacking up the white birth rate, recreating the racial, gendered, and sexual roles of the time, strengthen the powerful institutions of Christianity and the military, then America could recapture its glory.

But that's not what caused the problem.

Yes.

Your third section had perhaps the most self-explanatory header: a white man in a brown world.

Take it from there.

I was really interested in the tendency in these Michael Douglas movies to treat the rest of the world outside of white upper middle class masculinity as irrational.

So, what happens in falling down?

He goes on a rampage.

He goes on a rampage, and everyone that he meets is essentially a representative of every scapegoat that right-wing politicians have been trying to use in order to explain why white men are having such a bad time, right?

He meets with the immigrant from Korea.

He meets with the homeless person.

He meets with the homosexual.

In each case, it is them who is making Michael Douglas's life harder.

And this is the changeover between the 80s and 90s.

This is when white flight was creating these environments where downtowns of cities were in financial precarity because of the removal of the white tax base into the suburbs.

And

also where there were these fantasies of what life was like in these cities without the steadying force of the white man, that it was descending into chaos.

So falling down seems to be a crossover between the economic actor category and the white man in a brown world category.

The other movie in the latter category, The American President, was released in 1995, but you argue that it drew on the marketing politics of the 80s, you know, courtesy of that Reagan and Bush nostalgia.

Given America's current military operations, it seems relevant that this movie, you say, lays bare the similarities in which men view themselves and how Americans view themselves, simultaneously victims and victors, plagued by a glorious past they just can't seem to get back to.

Yeah.

American President was 1995.

And I think that the Michael Douglas presidency

is kind of a continuation of this fantasy that men don't have to change.

They are the deciders.

They are the ones in charge.

They are the stabilizing force.

And if women want to get involved, that's nice.

But it is essentially just going to be the addition of women into a male-run society.

And I think that this is also part of the American mindset, which is that our way of doing things is the only legitimate way of doing things.

And that if other countries can't get on the American democracy train, then we feel free to bomb them into submission.

How does he do that in the movie?

In the movie, he bombs Libya.

And this is treated as a kind of terrible responsibility.

What you did tonight was very presidential.

Leon,

somewhere in Libya right now, a janitor's working the night shift at the Libyan intelligence headquarters.

He's going about doing his job

because he has no idea in about an hour, he's going to die in a massive explosion.

You just see me do the least presidential thing I do.

It's treated as this really bizarrely heroic moment.

It's treated as his tragedy and not the Libyans' tragedy.

So we move forward one year in 1996 comes the movie Disclosure.

which I think can be distinguished as the one you find most reprehensible.

Here we watch a man getting passed over for a promotion for a stereotypically undeserving woman.

She is using her looks to get the job that he deserves.

You said you sexually harassed her.

She harassed me.

Get back to him.

You finished what you suggested.

You're dead.

Do you hear me?

You are dead.

We just have to hope he's smart enough to see he doesn't have any options.

And you wrote, it's a film not meant to entertain or to enlighten, but to rant loudly at you, up close, the the spittle misting your face as you try to turn away.

It is the 1990s, and out of every story that they could possibly tell, they are making a movie where Michael Douglas is victimized by his female boss, and ultimately he has to punish these women in order to put the world right.

And the world is only right when Michael Douglas is in charge.

Now, that's your least favorite film in the Michael Douglas catalog, but your favorite character that he plays is in the game.

You say it's the only time that you felt real tenderness towards a Michael Douglas character.

It was the only time that he plays vulnerability in a real way on screen.

So in the game, Michael Douglas plays a finance guy again, but this time he is playing essentially the son of the last patriarch.

His father dies by suicide, and he, as the eldest son, is tasked with replacing his father within the family.

He takes over his father's business, takes over his father's home, takes on his father's social responsibilities.

He doesn't have a sense of self outside of his father's identity.

And so his brother buys him this game that is an all-immersive experience to force Nicholas to figure out who he is by stripping his father out of his identity.

What do you get from the man who has everything?

Consumer Recreation Services.

Call that number.

Why?

They make your life fun.

It leaves him in a state of having to admit that he doesn't know who he is, what he wants, what he has to contribute, and he's left in a really vulnerable place as a result.

There are definitely times where Michael Douglas is put into a position of vulnerability in these films where he's being stalked, chased by the police, persecuted in some way.

But the game is the only movie that pushes him past hysteria or self-defensiveness.

How does this speak to the current moment?

Patriarchy used to tell men what the world wanted from them.

It wants you to make money.

It wants you to have a family.

It wants you to get an education.

It wants you to be respectable.

This is how you're supposed to dress.

This is how you're supposed to behave.

And this is where you're supposed to go to work and all of these other things.

Now that's no longer really true.

Just because you fulfill old expectations for what a man's life is supposed to look like, that doesn't mean you're automatically rewarded.

So, what you see are men struggling to figure out what other roles can they play?

And there's a nostalgia for the patriarchy because at least then they were told what to do.

It's kind of like the nostalgia for the Cold War, right?

Things made sense.

Yeah.

Things made sense.

This was the bad guy.

We were the good guys, right?

And our flourishing was America's flourishing.

Now you can be other things, but men see that as threatening.

The uncertainty creates anxiety rather than excitement.

I mean, look at Jordan Peterson, for example, right?

He's a man who has been telling men that their problems are essentially rooted in contemporary madness.

feminism or Marxism or trans rights, right?

That they don't have to adapt their understanding of themselves.

It's everybody else who is wrong.

And so you don't have to think about what masculinity is supposed to be for.

We just have to keep being who we are.

And it's everybody else who has to change.

Michael Douglas.

We shouldn't confuse here the roles he played with the man himself.

Right?

I'm not really interested in who Michael Douglas is as a person.

If he's a bad person, a good person, it doesn't matter because what matters is the work that he was doing.

And I think that he became, you know, probably unintentionally

a kind of vessel

for these very specific changes that

Americans and men specifically were going through.

And it seems like maybe it was a bit of a burden to kind of act out an entire nation's sickness, but I appreciate his contribution.

Jessa, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Jessa Crispin is the cultural critic and author of the new book, What is Wrong with Men?

Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and how, of course, Michael Douglas films explain everything.

Thanks for checking out the Midweek Podcast.

The big show posts on Friday, a little before dinner time.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.