What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything

Cultural critic Crispin (My Three Dads) offers an uneven examination of American masculinity by way of Michael Douglas’s filmography. Just as the figure of the institutionalized “hysterical” woman became emblematic of the late 19th century, Douglas’s frequent “performance of injury, oppression, and confusion” in the 1980s and 1990s “takes the stage to represent the state of an entire generation,” according to Crispin. “Tremendous social and economic shifts” emerge from her close viewing of Douglas’s films: the financial deregulation and antiunion efforts that led to a “competitive corporate masculinity” as symbolized by Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko; the “new American archetype” of the mass shooter foreshadowed in Falling Down; and the “moribund... masculine imagination” of the post–women’s liberation era depicted in Basic Instinct, in which Douglas’s character “can’t think of any other way to structure his relationship” with women than the failed ones of the past. Crispin’s expansive cultural analysis is astute and well researched, showing how men, rather than redefining gender dynamics alongside women, saw the ’80s and ’90s as “a time of disempowerment” and turned instead to a winner takes all individualism. But the focus on Douglas begins to feel more limiting than amusing, and the book also frustrates with vague assertions about the present that could use more airing out (“Patriarchy is over. What we have now is worse”). This has some insights but it’s hit or miss. (June)