Spoilers ahead for Manodrome.
Here’s a question: is Manodrome supposed to be funny? South African filmmaker John Trengove’s portrait of masculinity is a lot of things, many of which it’s consciously trying to be, but I don’t know if funny is one of those things. The film stars Jesse Eisenberg, one of the de facto faces of a type of modern American man whose descriptions can range from “progressive” to “soy boy”, as Ralphie, an Uber driver with a serious girlfriend and a kid on the way. In his spare time, of which he fundamentally has none, he works out. Job. Girlfriend. Gym. Money. Love. Endorphins. Society. Society. Truth.
If the title wasn’t enough to give away the game, Manodrome is a singularly-focused film about Ralphie’s quick ascension through a misogynistic incel cult where each of the members have proudly left their relationships and the concept of sex behind to live in a large house on the outskirts of town. The delectability with which its members call various women the c-word is enough to make those of us with a penchant for British and Australian media remember the severity of the word in many US circles. These men aren’t misogynists by personality, they’re misogynists by trade. They love it. For most of the film, it’s an obvious but not ineffective stare at this sort of behavior; we all know people like this, and their mentalities being shown so brazenly is almost refreshing, the film acknowledging that such venom does in fact live under the surface of dog whistles and double-talk, and you’re not crazy for seeing the signs. As validating as this sort of examination can be, the film starts to crumble when it remembers that Manodrome is not an essay, but a narrative film.
Ralphie is a deeply unsympathetic character, and entirely in the sort of way where unsympathetic characters are deployed for the story to make a point. It’s worked before, it’ll work again, but it doesn’t work here. Where a film about cults like Midsommar goes to great lengths to let you empathize with Dani before she’s fully succumbed to a white supremacist hellscape, Manodrome is content with the audience coming in knowing that cults warp your sense of self with precision and malice. Not being inducted into these sorts of groups is not a matter of intelligence or fortitude, it’s a matter of preparedness and support systems; this is a central tenet of cult narratives that survivors of these groups are trying to make the public understand. Alas, they have not fully succeeded at this point, so to craft a film around that base assumption is not terribly fair. Even knowing how susceptible the human mind is, even knowing how susceptible young, disaffected men are to this sort of hoo-rah right-wing grift in particular, the movie never conjures the empathy for Ralphie required to get past his actions in the second half of the film. He’s not a brute, he’s a child in brute’s clothing, and it’s just pathetic to watch. He’s not like this by personality, he’s like this by trade.
This is where the unintentional comedy of Trengove’s film comes into play, as Ralphie loses himself, as he wavers back and forth with the group, the only reaction I could conjure is to laugh at this man. Laugh at how lonely, how angry, how bitter he is for no real reason. He lost his job recently, that’s…it. The world sucks, the gig economy sucks, having a kid when you don’t have money sucks, but a good amount of people don’t start listening to Joe Rogan, so that’s no excuse. And then he almost beats the shit out of his pregnant girlfriend.
The fight between Ralphie and his girlfriend Sal is genuinely tough to watch, just because Eisenberg feels so out of place with this sort of miserable rage. When Adam Driver punches a hole in the wall in Marriage Story, he’s violent, but he’s not looking to kill. It’s a brutish act, a childish one, one that screams “somebody notice me”. When Jesse Eisenberg slams his fist next to Odessa Young (Sal)’s face in Manodrome, he’s saying “it’s taking all of my strength not to put my fist through your skull”.
You know how people online will sometimes complain when a brutal, uncomfortable movie like Blue Velvet plays in reparatory screenings and the Gen-Z kids in the audience laugh at inappropriate times? Especially when it’s a film like Blue Velvet that discusses violence against women pretty thoroughly, I can understand seeing this reaction and feeling your soul drop, like the world has gotten even more calloused when you weren’t looking.
Manodrome is the kind of film that builds those callouses. Not because Ralphie’s fight with Sal is terribly funny, even in the most ironic, bleak sort of way, but because it tints all of his further actions. When the cult leader (a wasted Adrien Brody) tells Ralphie “there is no god but [him]”, you can’t help but laugh. Sure, this deification of the self will lead to more violence and isolation, but he kind of deserves it, right? And the best thing anyone around him can do is run as far away as possible. More people get caught up in this descent; in a scene I still don’t know how to tonally parse, Ralphie goes cruising at the gym, and has sex with another of the regulars before shooting him and running back home. The violence is so blunt, so limp, that it can only be a punchline. Ha ha, internalized homophobia covered up by a masculinity death cult? This almost reminds me of a different movie, if only I could put my finger on it.
By the time Sal gives birth, Ralphie is a tornado with the temperament of a toddler, and even with his escape from the cult a few scenes prior, he did just kill that nice man he slept with, so what is the movie trying to say? This hits the problem with Mandrome, it’s a masculinity movie wrapped in a cult movie, so Ralphie can’t just leave the cult, because that’s not how toxic masculinity works. His child is born, his family is once again whole, but the vibes are strange, and that’s not just because there’s time left in the film. It’s like we’re waiting for Adrien Brody to show back up at Ralphie’s apartment, to pull him back into Mandrome (the cult), to fulfill his place as the villain of the piece and give Ralphie a bad ending. This doesn’t happen. Ralphie goes to grab groceries and finds Sal gone, leaving the baby, and hightailing it out of there.
Mere minute later, when Ralphie, his abandoned baby in one hand and a loaded gun in the other, returns to Manodrome, killing Brody’s character and wounding one of the police officers descending on his location, the comedy fully took me over.
How can a film purported to be about the dangers of masculinity imply so heavily that Sal’s leaving pushes Ralphie farther into hell? She becomes a sort of villain of the piece, in one action doing more work integrating the father of her child into this cult than the cult ever did on their own. Manodrome is a film about idiots who hate themselves and the one woman who is often disconnected from the rest of the film’s events featuring herself as the primary catalyst for the destructive power of the idle man. I swear this makes me think of another movie!
Riley Stearns’ The Art of Self-Defense is a 2019 film starring Jesse Eisenberg as a man who, after being mugged and brutalized, joins a small martial arts studio led by a charismatic weirdo who pushes the group to become brutal, self-sufficient, and isolated, all in the name of achieving a peak idea of masculinity. There’s even a woman who’s directly responsible for the main character’s descent! What The Art of Self-Defense understands about the topic of masculinity that the eerily similar Manodrome does not is that women are also compelled by societal standards of masculinity, and that saying hyper-masculinity as a character trait only affects women as victims or accidental enablers misses the mark entirely. “It seems that being a woman has kept her from becoming a man” is one of the central lines in the film, it’s not subtle.
It’s clear that Eisenberg has a penchant for these sorts of stories, and good on him for doing so. These are topics that have a place in cinema, and when they’re explored well, like in The Art of Self-Defense, they’re a thoughtful blast. But at the end of Ralphie’s journey, when he’s in a walk-in freezer of a random restaurant, and he puts a gun to his own head, I chortled. This man doesn’t deserve anything, he’s a jackass by trade, and the film has never given me a reason to care about him except as proxy for a theme too large for the film to ever hold in its palms. When the gun doesn’t go off because he wasted the bullets earlier, I chortled a second time. This man doesn’t deserve anything, let him go to jail, he doesn’t get the easy way out. Eisenberg’s acting his ass off here, showing the audience a broken man just now realizing the destructive power of the group he’s dismantled almost by accident, and it feels like nothing but a punchline. Is it supposed to be funny? Or should these movies do a little more work to make us feel empathy for the young men caught in these cycles of violence instead of building another story onto the ivory tower we can look down on them from and say “well aren’t they stupid”?
Also Fight Club, the movie’s just doing Fight Club. To be fair, The Art of Self-Defense is also doing Fight Club, but that movie rules so it gets a pass.
Davey Peppers 