Tony remembers the
night everything went wrong.
2016 was, to say the
least, a strange year. It was a year in which all the comforting
certainties in which we lived, both in the US and in Europe, were
ripped off (phrase used advisedly), and the cesspool of bitterness,
racism, sexism, misogyny, lies, betrayal, hypocrisy and simmering
hatred within all our shrivelled, calloused hearts was unleashed and
sent to work, to drive us over one of any number of cliffs.
All the years since
2016 have sounded the same. Trump won, Brexit won, all the concerns
of those hard done-by rich white men that had been apparently ignored
for all that time, or poor white men who weren’t racist, but…
have been paraded as if they were real things, rather than
prejudices given political punch, and have had to be taken seriously
because we believe numbers have meaning, irrespective of the
direction in which they’re expressed. Meanwhile women, people of
colour, minorities, gay people, trans people, and everyone with a
bleeding heart (or indeed a functioning sense of compassion) have
seen their voices shouted down, their rights reduced, their lives
imperilled, and every dinner table, every bedroom, every canteen has
been put under a Fifties-style moratorium – don’t talk politics,
it just upsets everyone.
Because that’s where
we are now – not so much the Age of Enlightenment as the Age of
Upset. The right gets upset if you suggest its concerns aren’t
valid, the left gets upset in any number of startlingly fragmented
ways as its members seek to out-care each other and intersectionalize
their woe to the point of ultimate pointlessness. And meanwhile the
Idiot Genius rules over everything, using the poor, rewarding the
rich, and continually giving the finger, if not the full-on
pussy-grab, to every decent principle he can find.
If this is not quite
what you were expecting from a geeky film review, two things:
firstly, you really haven’t been paying attention lately, have you?
And secondly, more importantly, I say all this because The
Misogynists is a movie that sounds like every conversation of the
last three years that breaks free and gets held around those dinner
tables when Uncle Chet comes over and there’s just no way to head
him off at the pass. It’s a movie for people who want to
listen to political conversations, who want to engage with the
other side of the argument, who want to be challenged and revealed
and find themselves shown in their darkest moments, their sharpest
crises, their hidden prejudices. Ultimately, it’s a film for all
those people who are not yet exhausted by it all.
While the film is
written and directed by Onur Tukel, it’s a movie for people who
like David Mamet – full of words, full of opinions and revealed
personalities and encounters and clashes, it would work on stage, but
is given an extra spin on film by the mostly insular setting of a
hotel room on election night 2016, with two Trump supporters
celebrating the surprise win of their candidate. One of them, Baxter
(Lou Jay Taylor) is shabby, married and has cheated on his wife,
while the other, Cameron (a name that could have been especially
chosen for a UK audience), played by Dylan ‘William H Macy’s Evil
Cousin’ Baker, is divorced and has an unhealthy fund of
internalized misogyny to spew out at the world. Is it stereotypical
to suggest these are the only types of people in the world who could
actively cheer a Trump victory? Why yes, yes it is, but that doesn’t
largely matter – this is a polemical film, but it shows wherever
possible the worst of everyone and that’s probably not by accident,
as though the dawn of Trump brought out every poison from every heart
in the country.
There is much pro-Trump
opinion spewing from Cameron, who regards the victory as the only
thing that will stop a tide on ‘enabling women’s neediness and
stealing our freedoms,’ while Baxter, much more equivocal, is
occasionally harangued on the phone by his wife, Alice (Christine M
Campbell) who is weeping at the Trump victory and demands he come
home – thereby adding fuel to the fire of Cameron’s arguments
that Baxter is under his wife’s thumb and made to feel
‘unreasonably’ guilty for his infidelity.
As the night moves on,
and without for the most part changing the setting, various other
voices and viewpoints are brought into Cameron’s increasingly
drink-fuelled, cocaine-fuelled bubble-rant world, the hotel room in
which he’s been living since he split from his wife (it’s never
of course stated that it’s a Trump hotel, though it seems like a
natural choice, given his support of the man). There’s a woman of
colour next door who complains about the noise of his ranting and
gets sent away with a flea in her ear, and who rants herself about
‘crackers’ taking over the country and ‘black power’ taking
on this particular idiot, while her white husband argues with her
about the flammability of her phrasing. There’s a mutual friend of
Cameron and Baxter who pops over to see them, (Matt Walton as Grant),
and who tries to talk some sense into the pair, while also revealing
Cameron’s history of sexism in the workplace, refusing to hire or
promote women who were more than qualified. Grant, he tells us, voted
for Bernie – though his vote in the general election is never
revealed. A server from Virginia brings them some room service, and
Cameron won’t rest until he winkles out the man’s family history
in Mexico. The server, it turns out, and most of his friends, didn’t
vote. ‘So you voted for Trump,’ says Cameron with a knowing grin.
Perhaps most telling
though are the sex workers.
Determined to have a
good night no matter what, Cameron calls a sex worker he knows, and
gets her to bring a friend for the hang-dog Baxter. While charging
double for the two-hour appointment, because who in their right mind
and body wants to have sex with a jubilant client the night a man
like Donald Trump is elected to power, Sasha (Ivana Milecevic) and
Amber (Trieste Kelly Dunn) run the gamut before they go to Cameron’s
room, talking about the rights and wrongs of bodily autonomy turned
to sex work, the societal standards which mean Amber won’t tell her
mother what she does for a living, but also the potential to
establish their own autonomy through the work – Sasha has a ranch
property in the mountains and a villa in France for which she paid
cash as a result of the work she does, which is arguably a hell of a
lot of autonomy, whereas Amber the questioner, who wants to invent
something or market something or even go to work in a store rather
than do the job that pays her hugely well, has little to show for it
but a $40,000 impulse-bought couch.
In keeping with the
film’s determination to show the worst impulses of all its
characters though, they get into a fracas with a Muslim cab driver en
route to the Trump-triumph gig, over his wife’s wearing of the
hijab, with Amber ultimately yelling that he’s a terrorist. Before
we get too firmly on his side though, it is he who initially butts
into their conversation while they’re in his cab, to tell them they
should get other jobs because in his country, sex is something
sacred. See? Plenty of opinions, very little that shows people in
their best light. You’ve really got to want to engage with
this movie, but in itself, what it does is show the degree of
freedom with which we fling our views at people these days, the
moment there’s anything in their make-up that triggers our
outrage-radar. The cabbie throws them out of his cab for
disrespecting his prophet. Amber yells the lazy terrorist stereotype
at him because he holds to the Koran… It’s like social media writ
large and in the real-life moment.
And yet, when they
reach Cameron’s room, there’s a sense of intensified perspective.
While initially, Sasha and Amber decided to go through with it,
because $3000 each for two hours’ work is absolutely not to be
sniffed at, while they’re out of the room, Cameron, revving up
Baxter for the debauch ahead, throws off the final cloak around his
objectifying sexism and woman-hate, counting the ‘holes’ ahead of
them and likening the women to a round of golf (an obviously
significant sport, given the President’s business interests and
in-office record of golfing breaks). The women leave. Some things are
clearly worth more even than money to sex workers, some people too
vile, too compromised and corrupted by disrespect to even touch with
anyone else’s bargepole. They might have issues and get into
screaming matches with intrusive cabbies, but even they still have
standards.
There’s a device
throughout the movie where the hotel room TV occasionally flashes on,
and shows a range of footage running in reverse – an electronic
prophet of regression, of backward motion towards negativity, the
past, you name it, the TV’s a mostly mute commentator on the events
of the night, and this is ultimately the tone and message of the
piece – everything begins running backward, everything begins going
in the direction opposite to positivity and progress on that night.
There is, also, a gun – because of course there is, it’s a party
to celebrate Donald Trump. By the end of the movie, that gun becomes
a central prop to the drama, as more and more people line up at
Cameron’s door to tell him to leave, to tell him his credit’s run
out, his views are objectionable and loud and causing a disturbance
among the staff and the guests. Outside his door though, the movement
to get rid of him breaks up into intersectional outrage – who’s
going to tackle the coked-up right-wing maniac in the room, who hates
men, women, weakness, freedom-stealers, the state of the country he
claims to love, while he’s sinking into a pit of wallowing rage and
narcissistic, misogynistic self-loathing and fury? The opposition to
him, to his rants, his violence, his hatred, is enormously busy
out there, defining exactly why they hate him, and what they can
safely call him, and who among them is just as bad as him for saying
what they say about him, and yadda yadda yadda…the noise floor
elevates as his opposition talks itself into irrelevance, while
inside the room is the man with the hate and the coke and the whiskey
and the gun, going ever more desperately mad and wanting to do
something spectacular – there’s a climax to the movie which we’re
not going to spoil for you, but it feels distinctly like a potential
prophecy of the future of the man in the White House himself. Hate
has to go somewhere, has to do something or it festers. The question
ultimately is whether it goes inside to self-destruction or outside
to something worse.
The Misogynists is
an exhausting, very ‘talky’ movie, a tour de force of point and
counterpoint which mirrors all the conversations America and the
world has been having since that election night in November 2016.
You’ve got to be distinctly into that kind of conversation
to really get the most out of it, and there’s every chance that if
you are into it, you’ll find the worst of yourself shown and
to some extent parodied as the movie goes on. Dylan Baker
particularly makes the movie throb with sickness, hate, casual sexism
and rage, in a way that anchors the whole experience in a character
you want to see fall – you want to see him fall as an avatar of the
man whose election he’s celebrating, because Cameron brings some
(though only some) of the worst elements of Trump and his supporters
to the screen. Ultimately though, the conclusion is more in the line
of ‘a plague on both your houses’ for delivering a reality where
Trump could be elevated to the seat of ultimate political power in
the world. It’s a movie that refuses on any level to fictionalize
the situation – Trump is named throughout, rather than given an
alias. And while it never dares claim that each side is as bad as
the other – it would be farcical to do so - it does acknowledge the
petty prejudices, the intersectional dispersal of impact, and the
easy conclusions of the left, as well as the bubbling loathing of the
Trump supporters. It’s a movie that will give you your fill of
political debate and stoke your sense of absolute injury that Trump
and his followers were elected, but it will also make you look at
your own glass house with a tad more honesty and perspective than you
might be used to.
Tony lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly
nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who,
Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the
70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By
day, he
runs an editing house, largely as an
excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book.
With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk
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