From What Is Wrong with Men, a study of how portrayals of the American man have changed in films starring Michael Douglas, which will be published next month by Pantheon.
wall street (1987)
In an interview for Alec Baldwin’s podcast, Michael Douglas expressed surprise that so many men have approached him on the street over the years to tell him that his iconic Wall Street character, Gordon Gekko, inspired them to go into finance: “Hey, I was the villain.” And, yes, how could anyone possibly make the mistake of wanting to be like Gordon Gekko, what with his sex workers on call and his stockpile of wealth and his stash of good drugs and his connections at the best restaurants and the best tailors and works by the hottest visual artists of the time hanging on all his walls? Everyone is either in awe of him or terrified of him, and everyone wants to know what he thinks. He’s the villain, but he’s also a tremendous success. It was a problem of the Eighties and Nineties, with Martin Scorsese’s gangsters and David Mamet’s closers and David Fincher’s nihilists and Oliver Stone’s bankers. Artists and writers and filmmakers may have thought they were depicting the thick filth that was running through the world of men, but a lot of men were taking it in and thinking, Yeah, that looks pretty cool. A lot of men watched Fight Club and started their own fight clubs. A lot of men watched Glengarry Glen Ross and took Alec Baldwin’s sociopathic monologue as an inspirational speech. A lot of men watched Wall Street and decided to go work on Wall Street. (A lot of men also watched Goodfellas and then decided to endlessly quote Goodfellas.)
black rain (1989)
Black Rain, released the year the Berlin Wall fell, is essentially a midlife-crisis movie—for the Michael Douglas character, but also for America. Michael Douglas traded in his car for a motorcycle. Recently separated from the partner that had defined his existence for most of his adult life, our hero decides to let his hair grow out, get a leather jacket, and generally be an embarrassing cliché in front of everyone. He’s got a chip on his shoulder, something to prove, and a total absence of shame.
falling down (1993)
In 1986, the forty-four-year-old U.S. Postal Service employee Patrick Sherrill entered the post office in Edmond, Oklahoma, with a gun and murdered fourteen of his co-workers before killing himself. In the shockingly high body count and the overwrought media coverage of the shooting, people recognized a pattern: men were walking into their places of work, shooting everyone they could find, and turning the gun on themselves. A new American archetype was being created: the mass shooter. And he looked an awful lot like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, the story of a man who abandons his car after getting stuck in a traffic jam and decides to walk home, despite the restraining order his wife has filed against him and the bad neighborhoods he has to traverse. Falling Down is ultimately the story of white-male grievance. The city used to be his domain, the family used to be his kingdom, and institutions like the police used to be there to serve him. In his final moments, he seems confused about when he became the bad guy, and it’s a question worth considering.
the american president (1995)
“Americans can no longer afford to pretend that they live in a great society.” This is a line from the speech of the fictional American president Andrew Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas in the film The American President. It’s the true American dream: our Michael Douglas character can ascend from the depths of the unemployment and mass-shooter potential of Falling Down to The American President’s Oval Office. The film was released in 1995. America has gone off track; it has a “lost greatness” it must recover. Wisdom and strength are required to get things moving in the right direction again. Andrew Shepherd’s administration is also nostalgic. The character is very much in the Michael Douglas mold: He is professional, cosmopolitan, educated, with liberal politics (vaguely defined). He has a Kennedyesque air to him, like a handsome, East Coast version of Clinton. He longs for the ambitious days of FDR, when the government did the right thing, whether the American people wanted it to or not, back when Americans didn’t fight sweeping structural changes, and a powerful leader was able to form the world into the shape he knew was right. All that is needed to get us back to this place, the movie suggests, is another bold and intelligent father figure put in a position of power.
the game (1997)
In the 1997 film The Game, Michael Douglas seems to have been distilled into his purest form. All the facets of his previous movie roles are revealed to be part of the same crystalline structure. The wealth of Wall Street, the personal failures of Falling Down, the authority and power of The American President, the daddy issues inherent to all of them. Here Michael Douglas is Michael Douglas™. The release of the film was timed perfectly to depict the way the power structure of the world was changing—or had changed. Here we have the end of the patriarchy, as shown by the fall of the last patriarch, the Michael Douglas character Nicholas Van Orton. Even in the details, we see how the values and the mission of patriarchy, both good and bad, have gone away. These obligations and responsibilities have become a shell, and the men underneath them need to emerge, soft and vulnerable, like cicadas crawling out of the underworld and shedding their exoskeletons.
