Masculinity has long been amorphous and tricky; it’s an endlessly fascinating and complex concept to all except those who need it and those who sell it. Its myriad contradictions were laid bare in the 20th century as the most powerful men in the world were no longer the generals and kings. As purchasing power began to trump political power, the businessmen and the finance wizards — even those nebbish, quiet, and physically weak — rose to take their place. Was it then more “masculine” to be at the top of this field, even if those at the top looked like Bill Gates? Even if they were forced to answer to a “feminized” democracy, perhaps; like Machiavelli once said, these were successful qualities of the fox rather than the lion. Or, was the ideal masculinity living outside this system and emulating a cartoonish blue-collar life where one’s muscles earned them their petty kingdom of a self-sustaining household, like the pioneers of yesteryear? Of course, most masculinists found themselves in neither position — they worked in middle management in office jobs. Robert Bly once attempted to give the poetic answer to this question in his 1990 Iron John: A Book About Men, in order to recover a mythic stability in the face of such contradiction. But one artist had already beat Bly at this game: David Mamet.
Mamet’s men inhabit the office; they work with paper and they work with a phone. They’re con men, real estate agents, businessmen, detectives — anyone who can use their words like bullets to secure a trivial amount of power. The worst thing to be in Mamet’s universe is a “cocksucker,” the archetypical subordinate and powerless man (or, for them, even worse: woman), so each of his characters hurl that term at everyone else, lest they become one themselves. In Henry Johnson, Mamet’s first film in a decade, the characters are nearly completely reduced to their words and their Napoleonic ambition to conquer others by using them. Just like in Robert Bly, this is mythopoetic territory.
That’s because the film, an adaptation of Mamet’s own play, is structured like a Greek tragedy, containing only four conversations among four different characters (with no more than two hardly ever sharing screen space) in only three locations, with the action mostly happening offscreen and in the past. The title character, played by Mamet’s son-in-law Evan Jonigkeit, first spars with his boss Mr. Barnes (Chris Bauer) at his office job, the set implying something like a distinguished law office. Though Johnson works his way, stumbles, and backtracks through a story about helping a down-on-his-luck friend get a job at their firm, Barnes pushes back at each stage of the story, painting this unnamed friend as a master manipulator and Johnson as a sucker — one who was suckered so badly that he embezzled $300,000 of company funds in aid of this friend. Bauer’s no-nonsense performance is one that seeks to not just contradict but humiliate the more timid Jonigkeit at every juncture; that Barnes knew about the crime all along and that this conversation was merely a trap to keep him in the building as the cops arrive simply twists the knife into Johnson’s pride. Now in prison, Johnson listens to the misogynistic sermons of his cellmate Gene (Shia LaBeouf), who can smell Johnson’s insecurities and is eager to mold him into a stooge. They both attempt to manipulate their way out of prison, and, though this leads to predictable results, they do get surprisingly far.
Johnson here is the middle-of-the-road white-collar nothing, and for him, Gene’s blue-collar street smarts and tough-shit attitude might as well be ancient Vedic texts of a preternatural masculinity that this world has long forgotten. Mamet’s sparse set design and accentuated use of reverse-shots keep the film’s focus on the conversations themselves, allowing the audience to see a glint in Jonigkeit’s eye at certain points that could hint at disbelief or admiration (or, most likely, both) at LaBeouf’s amoral strategizing. By the film’s end, Henry tries using Gene’s lessons on his hostage (Dominic Hoffman) during his escape attempt, only for Hoffman’s meeker form of manipulation to win over Henry’s gun. Extremely basic effects — the lights in this locked library turn off, helicopter lights and sounds appear sporadically — imply an outside world collapsing as Henry’s psyche once again falters. This minimalist production highlights the film’s past life as a play and creates an effect that neither matches the radical nakedness of Lars von Trier’s Dogville nor the more cinematic chamber plays of Ingmar Bergman, leaving a feeling that something was missing in the translation process. Then again, why would Mamet play to his weaknesses? Here are the characters, and boy, do they talk.
Since our incel-dominated Internet culture has lead young men to use terms like “wagecucks” (the gig-economy era’s updated “cocksucker” used by rise-and-grind scammers and NEETs alike) to emasculate the Henry Johnsons of the world, and since neo-Nazi influencers like Nick Fuentes have stated with wry irony that having sex with a woman is “kinda gay,” it’s clear that our culture has merely multiplied the contradictions of masculinity rather than exploring or resolving them. To make a connection from Gene to someone like Andrew Tate and from Henry to the listless young men who wish to be masculine but have no roadmap is almost too easy. Similarly, to explain this behavior through simplistic buzzwords like “toxic masculinity,” both works and simultaneously does a disservice to the subtle interchange of power, especially found in Hoffman’s performance. Though Mamet has many times presented himself as a reactionary, his films have long been critical of the worst instincts of grifters who’ve disguised their scams as a masculine power-brokerage. For Mamet, this hard-headed masculinity, a well poisoned long ago, contains another contradiction: it is inescapable, yet the attempt to escape is always worthy.
DIRECTOR: David Mamet; CAST: Shia LaBeouf, Chris Bauer, Evan Jonigkeit, Dominic Hoffman; DISTRIBUTOR: 1993; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: May 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 25 min.
Comments are closed.