more men I am officially tired of being asked to sympathize with in movies

UPDATED!

Another year, another slate of films dominated by all the things that men do. While there were some great stories about women at the cinema in 2015 (though stay tuned: I noticed something suspicious about many of them, which I will write about soon), The Movies as a cultural monolith were dominated by men. So it felt like time to update my list of men I am tired of being asked to sympathize with. As the new additions — as well as the original list further below — demonstrate, there is almost nothing that men can do, think, or be that The Movies will not deem worthy of telling a story about.

Note: I didn’t necessarily hate all the films referenced here, and I quite liked a lot of them. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem that movies are overwhelmingly about men’s stories.

men walking up a mountain

men walking in the woods

men walking on Mars

men walking on tight ropes

men walking across bridges

men walking on battlefields

men buying other people’s mortgages

men betting against people’s mortgages

men selling computers

men who build superadvanced AIs in their own images

men who build superadvanced AIs so they can fuck them

men defying Hollywood

men defying the Church

men defying the NFL

men defying their own nations for the greater good, dammit

men surviving on the frontier

men surviving in the ’hood

men surviving as they are basically held prisoner in their own apartment

men surviving the Holocaust

men surviving on the ocean

men surviving their own brilliant minds

men talking about themselves

men talking about journalism

men talking about murder

men talking about the banality of evil

men debating other men

men hitting other men

men photographing other men

men making a name for themselves

men just trying to make music, dammit

men chasing manic pixie dream girls

men talking to dinosaurs

men building monsters

men fighting monsters

men hunting monsters

men who are monsters

men who are just there for another dude, man

men who kill women and think they should get away with it

PREVIOUS: 10.21.14

A motif that I noticed recurring during the just-wrapped London Film Festival has inspired me to add two more kinds of men whom I am tired of being asked to sympathize with:

men suffering for their art

men making other people suffer for their art

(Please note that my tiredness with how often these types of men appear in stories that ask us to feel for them does not automatically mean that I cannot feel for them, or that I didn’t end up enjoying their stories. It means only that I wish we would see as many stories about women doing these things whom male moviegoers would be expected to sympathize with.)

PREVIOUS: 03.02.14

I was already on edge before last night’s Oscars, when a recent viewing of The Great Beauty, nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, infuriated me with its pretentious bullshit. Pretentious bullshit is always bad enough, but this pretentious bullshit presumes that the viewer will be able to identify with — even if it’s to ultimately reject him — an old rich white man who’s jaded and bored with his decadent lifestyle, including nonstop partying (after which he goes home to his female housekeeper, who feeds him and makes sure he wakes up in time to get to his next party), attending strip clubs and discussing a performing woman like she’s livestock, and sleeping with more than one much younger woman.

And then The Great Beauty won that Oscar.

And then the Oscar producers figured it would be awesome to give us multiple montages celebrating “heroes” in movies: Superman, Indiana Jones, Frodo Baggins, T.E. Lawrence, Chief Martin fucking Brody, for Christ’s sake. And so on and so on and so on. Basically any man who’s done anything vaguely interesting in a movie. Which is all of them. (I loved the cut to a scowling Emma Watson in the audience after Harry Potter showed up in one of the montages; I could hear her thinking, Hey, Hermione Granger did some heroic stuff, too! But it’s not a great thing that women who are pissed off at not being adequately represented in Hollywood films is a punchline.)

Look. I know how to identify with and empathize with male protagonists in movies. I had to learn how to do that if I wanted to enjoy movies. But I’m so damn tired of this being a requirement for almost every movie I see.

I am tired of being asked to sympathize with men, and being offered the courtesy of the opposite — a movie with a female protagonist that men are expected to sympathize with — on only vanishingly rare occasions.

I am tired of how, every time I mention the lack of “strong” female protagonists, someone interrupts with “But Ripley!” Alien is 35 years old. Having to reach back across a third of a century for an example of a strong female protagonist is an indictment, not a defense.

I am already tired anticipating how “But Sandra Bullock in Gravity!” is going to replace “But Ripley!” and that a single movie will be, in the eyes of some, deemed sufficient representation of women starring in their own stories for the next third of a century.

These are all the sorts of men I am tired of being asked to sympathize with*:

old men

young men

rich men

poor men

sad men

happy men

men in love

lonely men

sadsack men

ugly and ignored men

handsome men

men who are a mess

men who are drunks and don’t want to change that

men who are drunks and struggle to overcome it

men who are sick and dying

men who are sick and getting well

men who have everything together

men who fuck younger women

men who fuck older women

men who fuck men and are conflicted about it

men who fuck men and are content with it

horny teenaged boys

men who are feuding with their brothers

men who are feuding with their fathers

men who are tight with their brothers

men who are tight with their fathers

men who are criminals

men who have been unjustly accused of crimes they did not commit

men who have been unjustly convicted of crimes they did not commit

men who have avoided a life of crime through sheer determination

men who are forced into a life of crime by desperate circumstance

men who are cops

men who are tight with their brother cops

men in the military

men who are tight with their brother soldiers

men whose careers are in a tailspin

men whose careers are going great

men just doing a job, dammit

men who go to strip clubs

men who patronize prostitutes

men who are lazy

men who are ambitious

men fighting the system

men perpetuating the system

men who are sensitive

men who are sensitive but unable to express themselves

men who are insensitive and have no problem expressing themselves

men who are married and miserable

men who are married and happy

men who are single and miserable

men who are single and happy

men who beat up women

men who rescue women

men who are just trying to do what’s right for their families, dammit

men who are pushing back against cultural conventions

men who have given in to cultural conventions

men fighting monsters

men fighting aliens

men who think they should police their daughters’ sexuality

men who think they should police their sisters’ sexuality

men who build great things

men who destroy great things

men with guns

men who wish they had guns

men who are deeply committed to martial arts

men who are deeply committed to religion

men who are deeply committed to their art

men just trying to survive in a harsh world

men having adventures

men who want to have adventures

men stuck in adventures they’d rather not be having

men just trying to get home

men in capes

men in robot suits

men in capes fighting men in capes

men in robot suits fighting men in robot suits

men in masks

men in masks fighting men in masks

men in masks fighting men in capes

men in robot suits fighting men in masks

men in capes fighting men in robot suits

men who sacrifice everything for the people they love

men who sacrifice everything for the places they love

men who sacrifice everything for the ideals they cherish

In her acceptance speech for her Best Actress win for Blue Jasmine last night, Cate Blanchett said this about movies about women: “People want to see them, and in fact, they make money. The world is round, people.” Exactly. It’s time to come out of the Dark Ages, Hollywood, when it comes to movies about women.

*not an exhaustive list — feel free to add your own in comments!