It’s been twenty years since Fight Club and there are loads of people who still don’t understand what it’s actually about -those who see it as a mere psychological thriller, or worse a justifiable encapsulation of rage against the system, rather than the dark cautionary tale it is. Which is understandable given how the intended text of the film and the aesthetics are rarely compatible. It’s the story of one man channelling his mediocrity into brutish violence, fascist ideology, and domestic terrorism, but through David Fincher’s stylish direction, composition, cinematography, etc., these things are made to look cool and tough and smart and appealing so that the point is easily misconstrued. It did after all directly inspire real unironic fight clubs and a number of terrorist acts. I’m not here to break down Fight Club though (Maggie Mae Fish already did that expertly), but to look at its latest descendent, a film that knows exactly what it’s about and makes no attempt to appear otherwise.
That film is The Art of Self-Defense, a vicious commentary on and bleak satire of toxic masculinity written and directed by Riley Stearns. It’s a movie that both deeply understands its region of focus enough to mock vehemently and is, even in this exaggeration, uncomfortably close to reality. The attitudes of most of the men depicted are not unfamiliar to anyone who’s spent much time online where archaic notions of manhood and organized misogyny thrives. The internet doesn’t exist in The Art of Self-Defense –it’s set in the commodore computer days, but that recognizable destructive sensibility is still pervasive.
It’s enough to make the ultimate outcast out of Casey Davies, played by a perfectly fitting Jesse Eisenberg as exactly the kind of socially awkward defeatist “beta male” easily lured into a pathological cult. His story could read like the bio of any white nationalist: a timid man living alone with his devoted dachshund is mugged and beaten by street thugs one night, compelling him to take karate classes at a local dojo run by an emphatically masculine Sensei (Alessandro Nivola), only to get swept up in the ideology of violence his mentor propagates. While tempering it with such ridiculous notions as maintaining a strict musical diet of heavy metal and wearing one’s karate belt in everyday life to feel more manly, the film highlights incredibly effectively how dangerous ideologies prey on male insecurity and loneliness. Casey is made to feel weak and lesser due to his personality, his interests, even his name (“a very feminine name” as Sensei puts it); but is likewise comforted by Sensei’s extreme willingness to “help” him, to assure him he can be better. With no time he becomes the teachers’ pet, even though his skills are mediocre, and because of the positive attention, the precepts he learns translate to his life outside the dojo. It’s heightened for comedic effect obviously –he refuses to pet his dog, he openly watches porn at work, he head-buts his boss; but the character is all too genuine.
And it’s driven home by the anticipated though no less disturbing dark elements. This movie never achieves Sorry to Bother You levels of the unsettlingly hilarious (it’s world is too rigid for that), but there is a twisted humour in the direction it takes. All the while the film builds in intensity as the action becomes steadily more violent. Sensei’s brood doesn’t reach the Project Mayhem phase of their evolution (a part of me would have preferred that it had in a mockingly Proud Boys/QAnon cultist fashion), but the film makes clear they have the capacity to. Thus it’s an important remedy to the bleakness that Casey isn’t completely oblivious to what’s going on, and that the class happens to have one female member Anna, played by a tough and impressively resolute Imogen Poots, who brutally bests her male classmates yet can never attain a black belt or the respect of Sensei.
There are times though where the satire is too shallow to almost be ineffective. Though much clearer with its overarching thesis, isolated moments pose the same danger as Fight Club or American History X in inadvertently glorifying its content. Additionally, there are a few narrative and thematic points that aren’t thought through and thus come with unfortunate implications.Excessive maleness is linked to homoeroticism through an insistence that massages can only be performed by “strong male hands”, a candid dismissal of the pleasures of heterosexual sex, and in how one post-lesson ritual has orgiastic connotations. But in making this connection as a way of mocking toxic masculinity, the film walks a tenuous line between ridiculing male ego and fragility and ridiculing acts of homosexuality itself. Are we supposed to laugh at a group of “alpha males” engaged in such an intimate, implicitly non-masculine display (itself a suggestion rife with homophobia), or are we supposed to laugh at the sight of a bunch of naked guys stretching and massaging each other on a rug?
But the most noticeable and less subtextual thing is that with martial arts acting as the primary violent outlet, and a few significant plot and thematic beats revolving around the perceived weakness of firearms, the movie accidentally (or perhaps not) comes off as pro-gun, which doesn’t gel right. Any movie attempting to plume the depths of toxic masculinity, especially if it’s as clear cut in that purpose as this film, can’t ignore the male fetishization of guns, one of the most vital and widespread of harmful masculine vices. While there’s something to be said in how the chosen expression of masculinity by this group of largely white, entitled guys happens to be one of cultural appropriation, and the movie does take a couple light jabs at gun culture, in not satirizing it with the veracity of its other targets and in fact making it look reasonable in comparison, the absence of critical commentary where guns are concerned is a pretty major oversight by a movie otherwise sharp and in tune with the subject of its ire.
Notwithstanding that, The Art of Self-Defense manages to sharply and derisively tap at an important subject that’s gotten very little direct attention in film. It’s not as brutal in its mockery as it could have been, perhaps more wisely choosing to emphasize the harm of toxic masculinity, but it does portray both the idiocy and the danger of such behaviours and outlooks, which counts for a lot. A movie that needs to be seen, especially at this point in time.
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