Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s collection of stories, takes women for a subject, or it comes as close as a male author can come. (Which is not very, we learn.) Men are the literal subjects of the movie. Each scene is an encounter with one of the hideous men of the title, either in an interview room or out in the world. The interviewer is Sara, played by Julianne Nicholson, who looks just like a young Rebecca De Mornay with a pixie haircut. Events in her personal life have left her baffled by men; she uses her post-graduate research to get answers. So she asks men about women, and this is the sense that women are the movie’s subject – they are the subject of the subjects, which we can more briefly refer to as objects.The Bechdel test is a simple way to measure the objectification of women in a movie. It has three criteria:
- Are there at least two women in it?
- Do they talk to each other?
- Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?
In movies that fail the Bechdel test (and most do), women are the objects of desire. That’s why they show up so infrequently, with existences contingent on men: they’ve been isolated from the herd, targeted for a soft-focus happy ending. Brief Interviews fails the conventional Bechdel test. Rashida Jones is seen laughing on a couch in a few scenes, and at one moment Sara is seen talking with her friends, but the conversation is unmiked and happens only so John Krasinski can catch her eye at a dreamily lit party.
It passes the inverted Bechdel with flying colors, though. The whole movie is men talking to, theorizing about, and addressing women, without ever waiting for a response. We know the monologue as the perfect format for confession, the revelation of sensitivity. When they are not meant to rally the troops or pleading the jurors to search their hearts for justice, most monologues are to be performed verklempt. The movie maintains a deep suspicion of kind of damp-eyed sensitivity and its vehicle. Wallace imagines the dramatic monologue as a tool of patriarchy: fundamentally arrogant, founded on the belief that the speaker is the only one with something interesting to say. These monologues are interesting, featuring performances from a well-chosen cast.
There’s Ben Shenkmen, doing Goldblum, doing a joke from Annie Hall: “I wouldn’t want to be a companion to any woman that would have me.” There’s Ben Gibbard, from Deathcab for Cutie, bearing a jowly resemblance to DFW himself and channeling that writer’s more literary sensibility. (He describes the character of light just before dusk, and floridly resents the female orgasm as some inner voyage into a void he cannot reach.) The always charismatic Bobby Canavale, here one-armed, brags about his disfigurement’s charming effect on women. There’s even two monologues by veterans of The Wire, Clarke Peters (Freamon) and Frankie Faison (Commissioner Burrell).
Most interesting are the Nice Guy monologues. There are many places online where you can find backlash against nice guys, essays which describe how they are not very nice at all, and more troublingly, that they’re unaware of their hypocrisy. Randall Munroe of XKCD frequently panders to his readership, but satire of the Nice Guy indicts a number of them (whether or not they realize it). In the movie, the Nice Guy wears three faces: there’s Will Forte (Subject #72), Tim Hutton (#30), and John Krasinski (#20).
Forte is the oblivious nice guy who professes a sincere love for women without seeming to know much about them. He says repeatedly, “I looove women,” like it’s an alibi, and Forte uses that malfunctioning smile he does whenever he’s playing a character that’s lying poorly. Subject #20 can only enumerate the most stereotypically charming aspects of women: how they giggle, look in high heels, or bat their eyes. Spend a little time in a sociology or gender studies course and you’ll come across the male gaze. It is patriarchy’s eye of Sauron, the ubiquitous objectifying glance which sees women as sex objects rather than subjects. At its most basic, male gaze is bad description emerging from inaccurate perception. As performed by Forte’s character, it downsamples the object, giving you a low-resolution version of the original. The women Forte describes sound like women only in the most general, theoretical sense, and you suspect he’s imagined them entirely.
Timothy Hutton, playing Sara’s faculty advisor, sees women more clearly. That is not much better, in some cases. Subject #30 tells her about meeting his wife. He married her because of her durable beautiful. When he met her, she’d already had a kid, and he appreciated the fact that the worst had already happened to her and she’d retained her looks. Subject #30 interrupts himself to comment on how awful he sounds, how petty his motivations are – but in the end he shrugs and suggest maybe everyone’s motivations are petty when you get down to it. Forte’s character has no self-awareness. He is insists, he loves women; how could that be misogynistic? Hutton, in acknowledging some of his baser motives, is a Nice Guy one degree away self-recognition. It is Krasinski’s character, Ryan, who confronts his hypocrisy.
In doing so, he exposes and dismantles the Nice Guy. Which is ironic when you consider he got famous playing the quintessential Nice Guy, Jim Halpert. In that light, it reads like a willful repudiation of his meal ticket, self-iconoclasm. But I guess it’s doubly ironic, because Krasinski wasn’t even supposed to be in the movie. Apparently the actor they had lined up had to drop out just two weeks before production. Considering his familiarity with the source material and acting chops, Krasinski was the only possible pinch hitter. If that sounds kind of suspicious to you, you’re not the only one: in these same interviews, Krasinski swears it’s true and that he wasn’t casting himself out of vanity.
It would be more interesting if he had. Ryan obviously looks like Halpert – his hair and clothes are even a little better – and his sensitive, halting performance recalls Jim at his most romantic. But the similarities stop there. Before his monologue, Ryan tells Sara that he must be completely candid with her. In normal circumstances that’s a good thing, and in stereotypical relationship drama, the woman is always pushing her man for more emotional openness. Not so in the world of Brief Interviews. Ryan unmasks the Nice Guy, revealing toxic insecurity. Krasinski, I think, is bound for a career playing the first or second male lead in romantic comedies, but his performance here indicates a potential for bigger things. The monologue is as shocking as watching Jim Halpert beat up Pam in the break room.
So many movies are about men. There’s almost always a love interest running around, but most of the story’s energy and attention is invested in male relationships.* Brief Interviews belongs to this category – ostensibly about men’s relationship to women, it’s actually about their relationship with themselves. But in having women for a topic, and with Sara’s constant, maddening silence, a male viewer’s own theories about women seem a little pathetic. It inspires a question and a desire for dialogue, not more monologues. I want this movie’s companion piece, Brief Interviews with Hideous Women. (Wait, is that The Vagina Monologues?)
*Wedding Crashers is a great example. The male leads spend all their time trying to sleep with women, and the movie’s back half is about Owen Wilson’s pursuit of one in particular, but the movie’s emotional core lies in the friendship between the two men. The final scene at the altar isn’t about getting the girl, it’s about Vince Vaughn’s character embracing his best friend.
