Men (2022)
Directed by Alex Garland
“If only one knew what to remember or to pretend to remember.” It’s a quote from Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1979 stream-of-consciousness novel, Sleepless Nights. Frequently described as a scrapbook or collage, the novel examines the memories of a woman looking back at her formative years and her struggles with relying on the increasingly fuzzy textures of her recollections. And so we fixate on the inalterable past, replaying a memory of a memory of a memory, until the facsimile of the original is a blur.
Alex Garland’s Men details a young woman’s retreat to an English country cottage. Harper (Jessie Buckley) makes her way to the vacant and quaint countryside, parks her Ford Fiesta, and plucks an apple from the garden of her retreat. In deep-focus and slow-motion, she takes a bite. The sequence, like many throughout Men, is intended to highlight the metaphor. If nothing else, it’s a warning of things to come, the blaring siren song leading you to shipwreck.
Harper’s solo retreat is motivated by the death of her husband James (Paapa Essiedu). Flashbacks in red hues capture the two fighting, with Harper confessing her need for a divorce and James threatening suicide as a consequence. It’s a despairing situation, with Harper and James imprisoned by a system of patriarchal thinking that undermines their mental health and ability to communicate. James’ abuse reaches the physical as he strikes Harper, ultimately leading to his apparent suicide. After the fight, Harper kicks him out of the apartment. James desperately pushes his way to the neighbor’s upstairs’ balcony in a crazed attempt to reach Harper’s patio to continue the conversation, but instead he slips? Perhaps he just lets go. Harper will never know. But now she bears the weight of the unknown.
These sequences amount to little more than ten minutes of Men’s runtime, but they inform every image of the film. They pour into Harper’s subconscious, where she’ll encounter the mutilated body of her ex on the streets of Cotswolds. James’ severed hand, slashed from the metal fence that ornated their old home, becomes a gruesome detail that hold Harper’s mind captive, a noose tightening around her neck.
Harper’s stay in Cotswolds is marked by the few but painful encounters with the men of the countryside. The landlord, a toothy, annoyingly agreeable type (played by Rory Kinnear), overstays his welcome. And quickly you’ll observe that all the men of the village possess Kinnear’s face deep-faked over them – whether it’s the local priest, bartender, or a child, they all look the same. The two other women in the film, Harper’s friend seen through FaceTime and a police officer, provide brief but ultimately fleeting voices of benevolence.
Garland frames the film’s climax as a siege of Harper’s cottage, with the men that she’s encountered throughout the duration of the film’s runtime serving to harass her into oblivion. Patriarchal, dominator culture serves to propagate, spawning from one man to the next, each hobbled by the defects of their gender, until Harper reckons with her past. And what does the past want? What does any man want? Love.
This is where I’m not sure what to think of the film. As someone who’s been rewarded with discovering the work of bell hooks this year, I thought Garland’s gory and visceral depiction of patriarchal masculinity to be profoundly effective. But there’s something to that ending that suggests scoffing at a man’s desire for connection. Without a framework for understanding, Garland’s examination of masculinity through myths and canonical stories – Ulysses and Leda and the swan –leads nowhere beyond conjuring surface level comparisons. But perhaps that’s the great horror that Garland’s trying to expose. hooks notes that “shutting down emotionally is the best defense when the longing for connection must be denied;” when the poison of patriarchy has infiltrated our culture, even quote unquote feminist women will “use their anger to avoid being truly committed to helping to create a world where males of all ages can know love.” Or to reduce it to hooks’ most salient point: “If men are to reclaim the essential goodness of male being… we must envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We must all change.”