In the Company of Men (1997)

If you want to watch a merciless, all-embracing critique of masculinity, you might want to give In the Company of Men (dir. Neil Labute) a shot. It's far from a perfect or even good film, but its unflinching criticism of sexism is praiseworthy. It's hard to come up with a film with a more detestable asshole than Chad, one of the two main characters: he's a guy with an enormous self-confident belief in himself and his own skills, both in the world of business and the world of, well, what shall we call it, men's pursuit of women. He teams up with his pal, the slightly more timid, and a lot more self-pitying, Howard, in a game of masculinity. They view it as an innocent, fun little diversion while working for awhile in another town: they will both pursue a woman in the office, but they will keep their secret. Labute places these guys in a sterile surrounding of offices, dull corridors, coffee-machines, anonymous hotel rooms and boring restaurants. The film brilliantly establishes the film's universe in the very first scene, in which we see a sparsely decorated airport-lounge. The men gossip and complain while planes rumble in the background. As the film develops, they find their victim, a woman who seems fragile and vulnerable because she is deaf, and they both start dating her. And then they laugh at her behind her back. The fun, obviously, will be that this is just a temporary thing, and they will then leave her, supposedly devastated. But of course reality turns out different. But the film offers no consolation: these are types who will not go through magical transformations of maturity or sensibility. Chad and Howard are supported by an entire machinery of gender roles and corporate power: their positions are safe, and if they don't get what they want, they turn bitter, self-loathing and hateful. The anonymous nature of the places they occupy is a backdrop of lives taken up by power and careers. Labute's film falls short in one sense: it gives a too one-sided image of these men's relation to other people. Now, we only see what one could call an instrumental attitude, people used for pleasure or for consolation. What we don't see, or what is only hinted at, is the way these guys repress and distance themselves from the way other people approach them. The power relations here are suffocatingly cohesive and all-encompassing. Even though the story prsents a very realistic image of two different responses to power - the ruthless guy and the guy who wants to convince everybody that he's 'the good guy' - I would like to see other sides still, what happens when these power structures are challenged. What we have here, and this is perhaps not a bad thing at all, is a film that shows how power is upheld in many guises, and how it is upheld and spread. It's a gloomy, but familiar, sight.