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.
The author seems more compelled by less blatantly villainous Douglas characters, who were tempted and transgressed but meant well, or found themselves trapped in situations not entirely of their own making.
Such as the lawyer in “Fatal Attraction” (1987), happily married to a stay-at-home mother but taking advantage of her weekend away to cheat with a sexy book editor who turns out to be a psychologically unstable bunny boiler.
Then there was “Basic Instinct” (1992), in which — well, who can remember the plot really, except that it involved Sharon Stone in a white minidress with an ice pick under her bed and Douglas as a divorced police detective named Nick, wearing what Crispin rightly calls “a very upsetting sweater” to a nightclub?
This was not even his first turn at playing a divorced police detective named Nick. That was “Black Rain” (1989), in which he whizzes about on a motorcycle in Japan, then a threat to American economic primacy. Indeed, pile on “The War of the Roses,” the same year, about a marital split of chandelier-crashing contention; and “Falling Down” (1993), wherein a just-fired (and divorced) defense engineer steps out of his car on a Los Angeles freeway and begins a violent rampage, and (the IRL happily married) Douglas becomes an actual poster boy for divorce. Specifically no-fault.
“What Is Wrong With Men” is all over the place, riffing bitterly on heteropessimism, consumerism, the military, parasocial paternity and paleo diets. But it locks in when drawing parallels between Douglas, born in 1944 just before the official baby boom, and the two-years-younger Bill Clinton, both coming of age during America’s purported apex. The “liberal, tolerant and clueless” characters Douglas played in his 40s and 50s, rife with midlife crisis, mirror onscreen the mild pleasures and vague discomforts white men felt — and continue to feel — when women and racial minorities encroached on their long-held turf.
What Susan Faludi termed the backlash — the endnotes here cite her feminist blockbuster of that title, but not “Stiffed,” the treatise on men that followed — manifests in nostalgia, an “active form of delusion” and a “useful political tool” that “distracts citizens from the disappointments of reality.” These days, it’s a sledgehammer.
Crispin is clearly sympathetic to men unmoored by changing norms and scornful of those who would dismiss the whole sex as toxic. Her tone is free-associative, irritable and rat-a-tat. Her book is a gas, in a dark-cloud-moving-quickly kind of way. Sometimes the reader feels swirled and dizzy. One sentence goes on for three pages. Several paragraphs are mostly questions. But you get the drift.
Maureen Dowd asked, “Are Men Necessary?” Hanna Rosin proclaimed their end. They’re still here, damn it! Including, bless his dimpled punim, Michael Douglas.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH MEN: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything | By Jessa Crispin | Pantheon | 288 pp. | $27
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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