CHAPTER 23

Dudes and Subdudes

I’d like to propose that American pop culture had a prototypical ’90s man.

It came down, in many ways, to mojo—a term repopularized that decade by Mike Myers, playing the mock-macho secret agent Austin Powers. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones had mojo in the ’90s. So did Denzel Washington, a sort of fin de siècle Gary Cooper: the aspirational, heroic, and sexually confident protagonist. Kevin Costner had it, as did Mel Gibson and the two Toms (Hanks and Cruise). The same with George Clooney, who was making the move from TV to movies. And all eyes were being drawn to Clooney’s homie, Brad Pitt, who would soon become a mega sex symbol. (We got to know Pitt in ’90s movies like Thelma & Louise, Se7en, Twelve Monkeys, and, rather notably, Fight Club, in which he and other flat-bellied hunks—while critiquing consumer culture—got out their aggression in clandestine sparring matches.) So, too, Laurence Fishburne and Samuel L. Jackson, and Sean Penn and Johnny Depp.

But if there was one actor who was attuned to the times, especially when it came to the subject of men’s counterreaction to female empowerment, it was the son of a Hollywood legend.

“What about Basic Instinct?” Michael Douglas asks, insistent and smiling. “There’s your sex in the ’90s.”

We are at a cocktail party and I’m explaining the subject of this book. I’ve always found Douglas to be a genial and generous conversationalist whenever we’ve crossed paths at such events, as we have in New York, L.A., and D.C. But something sounds a little off. Isn’t he getting his dates wrong? “Basic Instinct was ’87, right?” I ask. “Glenn Close, and the stalking?”

“No, no.” Douglas shakes his head, smiling wider now. “You’re talking about Fatal Attraction. Basic Instinct was ’92. Sharon Stone. Paul Verhoeven directing.”

What an omission, of course. “Yes, and Joe Eszterhas—a wild script,” I say, recovering quickly. “We’ve got to talk.”

Right he is. Not only is Basic Instinct smack in the Naughty Nineties wheelhouse, but I soon realize that the cut and thrust of Douglas’s films during this span makes him the cinematic archetype of the decade’s Angry Beleaguered Male. He agrees to an interview.

In his late-’80s films and throughout the ’90s, Michael Douglas would become the icon of the rattled renegade who was forever being tripped up by his urges. Douglas’s offscreen CV fit some of that script too. His father, Kirk, epitomized movie-colony royalty in films like Paths of Glory, Spartacus, and Lust for Life; his mother was actress Diana Dill. Young Michael would inherit his parents’ captivating looks, his father’s famous cleft chin. At fourteen, he was such a “lothario” at his junior high in Westport, Connecticut—as his mother would describe him in her 1999 memoir, In the Wings—that he was sent off to boarding school. “He was being subjected, according to the guidance counselor, to a lot of aggressive female attention,” she writes. “She said he was like catnip to the girls, and she thought he would do better in an all-male atmosphere.” At sixteen, Michael was reportedly seduced by two of his mother’s friends, Mrs. Robinson–style.

He went through his tough-punk stage, his hippie stage. Then, early in his career, he cut an enviable Hollywood figure: bachelor, actor, gutsy producer (who won his first Oscar at age thirty when One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was named 1975’s Best Picture). He would marry Diandra Luker, then Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Over the years, Douglas’s frankness in sexual matters would famously make the gossip columns. He was that rare A-list star who spoke about Viagra. To be clear: during an interview with AARP magazine, of all places, Douglas sang the praises of the drug—from a theoretical user’s point of view. “God bless [Catherine] that she likes older guys,” the magazine quoted him as saying. “Some wonderful enhancements have happened in the last few years—Viagra, Cialis—that can make us all feel younger.”

He also spoke out, starting in 2010, about his ordeal with oral cancer. After successfully beating the disease, Douglas three years later would tell the Guardian that his test results suggested his particular cancer may have been “caused by HPV, which actually comes about from cunnilingus.” That one broke the buzz meter. Was the actor really implying that he’d been put at risk not by alcohol or tobacco but by eating too much pussy? Douglas swiftly and publicly backtracked on the quote. And yet during the height of the press storm that followed, he was unflinching as he told the crowd at an American Cancer Society gala, “I never expected to become a poster boy for head and neck cancer, but if what started out as trying to answer a couple of questions about the suspected sources of this disease results in opening up discussion and furthering public awareness, then I’ll stand by that.” (Douglas, as of this writing, is in remission. He has elsewhere identified his ailment as tongue cancer.)

If there was one albatross, though, that the actor had acquired in the 1990s, it had to do with unfounded rumors about his sexual habits. Early in the decade, he went in for substance abuse counseling at an Arizona treatment center. Press coverage, however, suggested he was battling sex addiction. The assertion, which he has often denied—and denies again when I raise it—made him one of the first prominent actors whose name would surface in such a context.

How, I ask, does a public person shake a false rumor like that?

“Well, you don’t,” he says, with a sense of resignation. “It hit a zeitgeist [moment]. It was a very smart play by one of those London tabloid editors to turn an alcohol-drug rehab story around. It timed out pretty well, as I remember. I can’t remember the exact order of events—from after Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, and there was Disclosure in there. So I was known for that trilogy of [sexually charged] pictures, and was in the last gasps of a marriage [to Diandra] that wasn’t working out.

“So you don’t [escape the rumor],” he says, bristling. “That got a lot of mileage. It’s been kept alive. You’re mentioning it now.”

But how do public personalities get their narratives back, I wonder—especially in an era when we have the ability to widely disseminate stories full of sexual innuendo?

“They don’t. [You think] time will take care of it, but it will pop its head up.… My heart goes out to a lot of people who are recognized today because it’s impossible [to suppress,] with the video cameras and i-cams. It’s immediately shot and passed down, sent on, and there it is. It’s part of your legacy.”

We return to the subject at hand: men’s roles in the 1990s—and, in Douglas’s case, movie roles.

To a large degree, the era’s male-female divide was about power. As women were amassing more, men saw theirs eroding. In the teeth of it, Douglas recognized that for big-screen audiences what the Battle of the Sexes needed was a new twist: more sex. He began playing flawed characters who, in a moment of weakness, or as a result of a toxic relationship, end up living a nightmare in which Eros is inextricably entwined with Thanatos. Five of his films in this genre amounted to libido noir, sexual cage matches that played up the more forbidden passions of the gender wars.

Douglas is under no illusions as to why he chose roles and scripts that pushed the envelope about men confronting willful women—and sexual temptation. “I like the gray area,” he says, “the idea that you could do things—you could make mistakes, you could sin—and then try to redeem yourself. I’ve put myself in movies in very, very difficult situations. And audiences enjoyed watching how you’re going to get yourself out of them—and combining that with several situations involving women who were proactive.… So to be able to portray a man vulnerable enough or weak enough that he is controlled by a woman, I guess, was kind of unique.”

And it was pitch-perfect for the time. Male audiences, having had their fill of ’80s action heroes, were open to watching an elevated version of themselves on the screen: a ruggedly handsome, fifty-something man who had trouble keeping up with advances in women’s rights, keeping his own commitments, and keeping it in his pants.

Douglas’s formative dramatic roles were distinctly his own: Richard Adams in The China Syndrome; Gordon Gekko in Wall Street; and D-Fens in Falling Down. But so too were those of his female costars in a quintet of films. His counterparts were, respectively: a homicidal mystery date gone bonkers (Fatal Attraction); a conniving, money-grubbing shrew gone homicidal (The War of the Roses); a cerebral, homicidal seductress (Basic Instinct); a conniving, power-mad seductress (Disclosure); and a conniving, duplicitous cheat (A Perfect Murder). Critics began to see a pattern, not only in Douglas’s choice of parts but in the femmes fatales who were trying to ensnare his characters. Women, these films seemed to be saying, were the true root of men’s ills. Women, as in fables from antiquity, were being portrayed as sirens: controlling and sex-obsessed, calculating and untamable. Inevitably, cries of misogyny followed. “Douglas was now the National Dick,” Vanity Fair’s Evgenia Peretz would suggest, describing how the actor appeared in a sequence of movies “in which he got poisoned, stabbed, stalked, tortured, and virtually raped by beautiful women.”

But Douglas wasn’t buying it. His focus, he has insisted, was on the silent cost of the women’s movement—from the point of view of men who felt that their stature and social options had been greatly diminished. When his blockbuster Wall Street was about to open, and Fatal Attraction was still very much on the public mind, Douglas would remark in an interview with Val Hennessy for You, an Australian publication:

If you want to know, I’m really tired of feminists, sick of them. They’ve really dug themselves into their own grave. Any man would be a fool who didn’t agree with equal rights and pay but some women, now, juggling with career, lover, children, wifehood, have spread themselves too thin and are very unhappy. It’s time they looked at themselves and stopped attacking men. Guys are going through a terrible crisis right now because of women’s unreasonable demands. In my case I made Fatal Attraction, and the next thing is the feminists are ripping me apart and have interpreted it as a metaphor for all single women. My mind boggles at their arrogance.

Let’s go to the highlight reel.

Film 1 was Fatal Attraction (1987). It featured a gorgon-tressed Glenn Close as an unmarried career woman who shares a passionate weekend with the married Douglas. When the mist clears, he rebuffs her, choosing his role as a husband over their roll in the hay. Feeling discarded, Glenn Close’s character slits her wrists—and survives. She claims she’s bearing his baby. As the movie unfolds, she becomes a full-tilt stalker. She pours acid on his car. She cooks the family pet. She absconds with his daughter. When she finally shows up at the family’s home, kitchen knife in tow, it falls to the faithful wife—played by Anne Archer—to take her down. (Murder by her own hand, or at the hands of the male protagonist, would have been too much for the audience; best to leave the job to the morally grounded character, the Good Wife.)

Many women went ballistic. Though the film had been coproduced by Hollywood’s most formidable female power player, Sherry Lansing, and had attracted a large female audience, it ended up sensationalizing a new type: the contemporary careerist cum predator. Susan Faludi, in her book Backlash, would bemoan how the press used the movie as a way to play up a false “phenomenon,” as if the American heartland had been infested with closet Glenn Closes. “Seven-page cover stories [ran] in both Time and People,” Faludi would note. “A headline in one supermarket tabloid even dubbed the film’s single-woman character the MOST HATED WOMAN IN AMERICA. Magazine articles applauded the movie for starting a monogamy trend; the film was supposedly reinvigorating marriages, slowing the adultery rate.”

Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and Guggenheim fellow, opens a chapter of her book by describing filmgoers at an evening showing of Fatal Attraction in a theater in San Jose. During the last twenty minutes of the picture, as Close closes in, males in the audience begin to scream at the screen: “Punch the bitch’s face in.… Do it, Michael.… Kill the bitch.” All the while, the females in the crowd sit by silently. Faludi (who singles out Douglas and the film’s director, Adrian Lyne, for special scorn) contends that because Hollywood has a longer turnaround time than most media outlets, it took the studios more time “to absorb the ‘trends’ the ’80s media flashed at independent women—and [then] reflect them back at American moviegoers at twice their size.”1

Douglas today has a different take. “Fatal Attraction was a perfect ‘what-if’ situation,” he says. “What if a married man has an affair, and the worst-possible-situation case happens?… It hit a moment [in the culture].” He mentions the ’70s for perspective, recalling the dearth of darker roles for actresses during the era of women’s liberation. “When we were trying to cast One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we couldn’t get any woman to play [Ken Kesey’s classic character] Nurse Ratched. Because she was a villain. And that was a politically correct time. Women did not politically perceive themselves as being correct to play a villain. Whereas most men—that’s made their careers, playing a good villain.” By the late ’80s, in his view, Hollywood’s top actresses, like their contemporaries on the stage, felt comfortable with parts that extended their range through an exploration of the depths of a damaged psyche. “Glenn Close certainly was [comfortable] playing a good villain. Fatal Attraction stands out as one of her great roles.” Douglas says that as Close’s costar, he was embodying a sexy but vulnerable man who was making mistakes and yet “hoping for redemption—a man who was attracted on a sexual level to women, but might pay the price. There was a responsibility. A lot of this all comes out of all the [fear of disease, connected with] AIDS that was going on too. The cautionary tales.”

The underlying lesson of the film? Every affair has the potential to drive the straying lover to ruin. The karmic subtext: ultimately, we will be punished for our transgressions.

Film 2 was The War of the Roses (1989), a black comedy. It cast Kathleen Turner as Barbara Rose, a woman who harbors a death wish for Douglas, her moneybags husband. When she decides to engage in a scorched-earth divorce—“I was sexually harassed,” says Douglas today, summing up his character’s predicament—their lives are drawn into a black hole that consumes every last shred of material gain and moral decorum. Its lesson: a soured relationship, given human nature, can turn positively cataclysmic. The karmic subtext: absolute vengeance destroys both parties absolutely.

In Film 3, Basic Instinct (1992), Douglas plays a detective in recovery from coke and alcohol who begins to fight an addiction of a different sort. He becomes fixated on a crime novelist and murder suspect, played by Sharon Stone as a bisexual succubus.

The movie presents two of the most talked-about sex scenes of the decade. In its opening sequence, a naked man, his wrists bound with an Hermès scarf, is ridden furiously by a naked woman (possibly Stone, possibly not). At the point of climax, she whips out an ice pick and repeatedly plunges it into him—a chilling gender-bent symbol of phallic just deserts. Next, in the film’s signature scene, Stone’s character, in a skimpy white dress sans panties, drives an interrogation room full of cops (and the audience) to distraction as she crosses and uncrosses her milky gams. Director Paul Verhoeven has stated that it is Stone, not the detectives, who holds the reins; she is a woman who is “brilliant, powerful, in complete control, not a victim.” (And by the way, she may also be a serial killer.)

Douglas’s character is moth flambé. He finds thrill in sexual peril and is devoured by his attraction to a partner so bedeviling. Again, according to Douglas, an actress is cast as “a good villain. Sharon Stone—I would certainly say that made her career. Basic Instinct was a real sexual-reactionary thing. We really wanted to do a slam dance, to try to just break the boundaries, do something outrageous.… Basic Instinct was just more raw, more carnal. We were doing things in movies that were more in-your-face.… And I think we succeeded.”

As the New York Times’ Bernard Weinraub would note the week of the film’s release, “If Fatal Attraction served as a metaphor for the 1980’s, with its theme of the dangers of extramarital sex and one-night stands, then Basic Instinct, to be released Friday, is a movie of the 1990’s. Its underlying theme seems to be the dangers of sex, period.” The film was incendiary even before it hit theaters. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas was pilloried for his on-set blowups—and his sexist scripts. To avoid the censor’s wrath, a minute’s worth of violence and explicit sex had to be snipped. During filming, demonstrators railed against what they considered to be the movie’s homophobic depiction of lesbians. (Indeed, in her review in the Times, Janet Maslin would point out that the picture “incorporates four apparently homicidal women, at least three of whom are bisexual.”)2 Says Douglas, “We were severely attacked by the gay-lesbian community for having a lesbian be a murderer.… We had to shoot scenes in San Francisco with forty riot police in full gear standing around us. It was an easy target. It was a way to bring attention to their cause. It ultimately kind of fizzled out once the movie came out because the movie worked.”

Basic Instinct’s primary lesson (arguably borderline misogynistic): in sexual conquest, the woman has the ultimate power. Lesson No. 2: one’s obsession with a love object may easily drift past the point of no return. The karmic subtext: there is a thin filament between sexual ecstasy and violence.

Film 4 was Disclosure (1994). Douglas plays an underling at a tech firm called DigiCom (DigiCom?) who refuses the overtures of a newly promoted exec, portrayed by Demi Moore. Enraged at his insubordination, she lashes out and tries to sabotage his career. It is a role-reversal parable (based on the Michael Crichton novel) with its own beguiling revenge-fantasy kicker in which Douglas’s middle manager seeks to take down his boss. The slogan on the movie poster: “Sex is power.”

Terrence Rafferty, reviewing the film for the New Yorker, seems to castigate the actor and the whole enterprise: “[Douglas is] the beleaguered object of desire—the poster boy for male fear of aggressive female sexuality.” In Rafferty’s view, Douglas, over time, has perfected this part, portraying “the masculine equivalent of… maidenly modesty. His flushed face and strained sinews tell us that [his character] Tom is spurning [Demi Moore’s character] Meredith not because he doesn’t want her but because he wants her so bad it hurts. He enjoys the thrill of moral victory only after suffering the agony of tumescence.”

In Basic Instinct, temptation had hurt so good that Douglas’s protagonist was willing to risk everything for a demon romp. His character in Disclosure, by contrast, chooses the high road over the dirty lowdown—and suffers the same consequences. In both instances, as in all of these films, the cause of man’s downfall is enchanting female guile as much as male dickheadedness. In fact, what Douglas says about Basic Instinct sounds even more to the point regarding Disclosure: “Overall, in these two decades, there’s a very uncomfortable relationship between men and women. The women’s movement had sprung up. We were much more conscious about being politically correct. There were people having to make their adjustments in the workplace in how they conducted themselves to women.… There had been harassment going on. [But] then there were other areas where it could be abused by women in a controlling manner. So everybody was becoming cautious.”

The result, he says, was that “things calmed down. The libidos crawled away. There was a price to be paid for acting on your sexuality, on letting your libido run wild. I mean, there was a legal [framework], lawsuits. And [the cautionary tale of retribution] was pretty common in the [news]papers. We certainly saw it—to what many of us thought was an absurd extent—with the president.” In terms of workplace misconduct, Douglas insists, a lot of attitudes, both male and female, were changed by the sexual harassment discussion spurred by the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. “There were a lot of abuses,” Douglas says, “[and] I think that turned the tide, and certainly has enhanced the ability for women to rise in a work environment, and in the military, and in a number of places, with more success now. But it might be a little less fun.”

Disclosure’s lesson and karmic subtext: the dynamics of sexual harassment can favor a female so asymmetrically that the imbalance has made a mockery of how men and women interact in the workplace.

A Perfect Murder (1998) is Film 5. Douglas, radioactive with wealth, plots to murder his wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) and blackmail her lover (Viggo Mortensen) to get back at her philandering. The film’s lesson is the karma of deceit. The picture’s vision—“late-90’s Manhattan as a luxurious shark tank filled with chic cold fish,” according to New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden—reveals a dastardly moral: “There really is no contest between love and money. The movie is right in tune with the icy Darwinian mood fostered by the booming late-90s economy. In a climate like this, the hottest sex in the world doesn’t stand a chance against the possibility of raking in a quick half-million.”

All of these films, like Hollywood itself, were high on glamour, copulation, and paranoia. All swerved toward noir, even parody. But the central character in each movie made one or two clear statements through all the fogged-up windows. First: unchecked libido, greed, and hubris have always been a male’s undoing. Second: men were losing their grip on power and on their understanding of the rules governing the male-female dynamic because women in many ways now dictated the social narrative.3

Douglas hadn’t set out, with his choice of films, to call into question the goals of the women’s movement. Nor did he systematically choose roles that he hoped might help him embody the male ethos of the era. It just turned out that way.

“None of this is self-conscious,” he says. “You pick your parts kind of viscerally, because you think they have a really good story.”

The male psyche was portrayed in ’90s psychodramas and thrillers and romantic comedies. But it surfaced most plainly in the “buddy movie” and its trusty subgenres.4

There was the moron comedy (Dumb and Dumber, Wayne’s World); the quip-and-kill sci-fi (Men in Black); the unlikely-pairing picture (White Men Can’t Jump, Rush Hour); the intense weekend encounter session (City Slickers, Swingers, The Best Man); and lest we forget, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. There were influential black urban dramas such as Menace II Society, New Jack City, and John Singleton’s landmark Boyz n the Hood. There were takes on the suddenly ubiquitous slacker, from Clerks to Reality Bites to Mallrats.

But there was one buddy movie that stood stoop-shouldered above the rest in tapping into the fears and dreams of men who were looking to recover their cojones. The Coen brothers’ cult classic The Big Lebowski, from 1998, would build upon the gravitas of two earlier après-buddy films—The Fisher King (1991) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994)—and would end up practically deifying the American slacker.

Jeff Bridges, as the Dude,5 self-identifies as “deadbeat.” He is unemployed and apostolically idle. He partakes of substances with a monastic devotion: weed, White Russians, Miller draft, more weed. When we meet the Dude, he is shuffling through the local grocery in full beard, unkempt mane, open robe, and sandals: savior regalia.

It is the Dude’s misfortune, we soon learn, to possess the same name as a rich con artist named Lebowski. And the stage is darkly set. In a case of mistaken identity, the Dude is forced to undergo the twelve sado-stations of the cross. He is pummeled by gangs of thugs; accused of stealing a million dollars; drugged by a smut-film kingpin; set upon by a Malibu sheriff; ensnared in a bloody fracas in a parking lot; bemused as his home is trashed with clubs and cricket mallets; upended when he stumbles on a plank embedded with nails (the Gospels, anyone?). And all of this transpires as he strives to salvage his car—a beat-up Ford Gran Torino, an extension of his pummeled body—which is stolen, vandalized, smashed with a crowbar, crashed several times, and set aflame. Jeff Bridges’s character is a satiric stand-in for the downgraded male.

Lebowski is peopled by marginalized men who, as my friend Donald Liebenson, the critic, notes, “have either rejected the American dream or watched as it passed them by.” The Dude’s favorite bowling partner is a tripwired Vietnam vet, played by John Goodman as henpecked ad absurdum.⁶ Bowler No. 2 is Steve Buscemi’s docile über-cipher. The ultimate shlimazel, he responds to a sword-and-knife fight by collapsing and dying of cardiac arrest. Then, when Bridges and Goodman scatter his ashes over the Pacific, the shifting winds blow his remains back onto them.

Even the Dude himself is wussified. Julianne Moore, who appears as the avant-garde artist Maude, dupes him into being her unwitting and expendable sperm donor. In Maude’s mind, he’s the perfect post-male foil: no slacker of his caliber would ever want a hand in the upbringing of the spawn she considers hers alone.

The film depicts its men as part of a larger Castration Nation. Almost every ten minutes a new scene hints at pending dismemberment, some involving threats or fantasies of male rape. A live marmot is tossed into a bathtub and goes straight for a groin. A kidnap victim’s toe is severed. An ear is chewed off. Several dream sequences feature bowling pins as gleaming penises, mowed down by humongoid balls.

On balance, the Dude and his bowling buddies embody the man-cave ethos: I grunt, therefore I am. Of cavemen, not much is required. In the end, however, the Dude is revered by almost everyone he encounters. He is admired for his stoner equanimity and his Zen-koan counsel. An antiwar activist in his youth, he is now the ultimate pacifist, gliding blithely through a gauntlet of assaults as men with brickbats routinely have at him.7 As the rest of the Dude’s friends rail or sweat or cower, he is the One among men who transcends his misfortune through his shambling calm. “The Dude abides,” says the neo-cowpoke narrator, in the film’s finale. “It’s good knowin’ he’s out there, the Dude. Takin’ ’er easy for all us sinners.”

The Lebowski boys embody a Boomer gloom. They feel entitled but shortchanged. They feel noble but battered. They feel downsized by women and circumstance. They are Little Big Men.

There is a larger theme that supersedes all of these. In the ’90s, there emerged a relatively new ethical code for the age of infidelity, brutish cruelty, greed, and corporate conflict of interest: postmoral cinema.

American film had always maintained an ethical grounding. Even in the darkest days of noir—in the pre-production-code 1930s that reveled in the subversive—it was the good guy who triumphed by the final reel. A lesson would surface. The center held.

All of that began to change in the 1980s. During the Reagan-Rocky-Rambo ’80s (a period when the American president referred to the U.S.S.R. as the Evil Empire—a phrase borrowed from 1977’s Star Wars), the studios were producing big-budget films distinguished for their violence and pyrotechnics, and sometimes featuring superheroes squaring off against a daunting menace.8 Then, around 1989, cinema really took a turn. America—into the third term of Reagan-Bush—was rocked by a series of morality battles over abortion, the AIDS crisis, the frayed socioeconomic “safety net,” the surge in sex and violence in society at large—and of their graphic portrayals in the arts, especially in Hollywood. Lines were drawn in Washington, in far-flung communities, and in houses of worship (as mentioned elsewhere in these pages) between those who believed that humanity should live by a common set of ethical standards and those who adopted, often by default, what came to be called moral relativism.

Amid this standoff arose a new kind of movie, sometimes produced through the studio system but more often an “indie” picture. The postmoral movie tacked toward gristle, gangster, or narco noir—GoodFellas (1990), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Bad Lieutenant (1992), Fargo (1996), and Trainspotting (1996) stand out. But there were scores of others.9 These were neutered morality tales, often with a freak-show element. These were films that let the guilty go largely unpunished even as the body count, the drug deals, and the depravity mounted.¹⁰

The whole genre might just as well have been pared down to two scenes that appeared in the quintessential indie megahit, Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 Pulp Fiction.¹¹ When a couple of thugs in a car (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson) hit a bump in the road, Travolta’s gun discharges and accidentally decapitates the passenger in the backseat (Phil LaMarr), spattering the car’s interior with blood and skull and offal. The startling randomness of the slaying, while bone-chilling, is also overpoweringly comic. The audience is unnerved, not only by the cartoonish depiction of sudden death, but by this new kind of delight they feel in their own fright and shock.¹²

In a follow-up sequence, Harvey Keitel’s “fixer” character, a sort of wiseguy concierge, saunters in to clean up the mess. “I’m Winston Wolf—I solve problems,” he declares. “Now, you got a corpse in a car, minus a head, in a garage. Take me to it.” Another house call, another homicide.

Pulp Fiction and its ilk were using the desensitizing effects of ultra-violence (to borrow the Anthony Burgess term), frosty detachment, and decadence as a way of commenting on a society that was swiftly losing its ethical center. Most indie films in this mix were sardonic, antiestablishment (sometimes anarchic), and morally tube-tied.13 These pictures were largely male-dominated, rich in black humor, and at times malevolent. There was an element of camp to it all: as if the characters were playing out a drag reality that flaunted the vulgar, the morbid, the sordid—along with the destructive impulses and motivations that can haunt the underside of every soul alive.¹⁴

Politicians, clergymen, and parents’ groups began to fulminate against the heads of the studios, accusing them of the culture-war equivalent of appeasement. Every morally bankrupt film that came out of Hollywood, these critics charged, weakened society’s ethical firewalls. There were examples by the score.

In Martin Scorsese’s Mob classic GoodFellas (1990), for instance, the F-bomb is dropped three hundred times and rigor mortis becomes de rigueur, shorn of any emotional valence. In Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), two fugitives, played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, execute unsuspecting strangers in cold blood, often for the benefit of nearby security cameras. The grisly videos of the crimes turn them into folk heroes. And in the final scene, after they shoot Robert Downey Jr.’s journalist character and leave him bleeding at the side of the road, his own camera videotapes him bullet-ridden and howling as the murderers depart, scot-free. Director Stone and Tarantino, who wrote the story, seem to be giving the sociopaths a bye and laying much of the blame for the culture’s cruelty at the feet of a bloodthirsty media. (Bloodthirsty indeed. “Copycat killers” in Texas, Utah, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi—and Paris, France—all claimed to have been influenced in part by having seen the movie.)

The narratives weren’t confined to film. Earlier in the decade, director David Lynch’s groundbreaking TV serial Twin Peaks (1990–91) would suggest that beneath the veneer of every American community is a violent, eroticized underworld. In Lynch’s universe (cue the haunting soundtrack), we all have our eerily stolid public persona… and our eerily secret self, a rivulet coursing sub rosa. Jim Windolf, editor of the New York Times’ Men’s Style section, maintains that Twin Peaks ushered in the entire cavalcade of queasy neo-noir. From the show’s very first scene, Windolf says, the tone and message disturb the viewer in a new way: “The Laura Palmer character, who is the all-American girl—her naked body is discovered, wrapped in a plastic sheet. Then you realize that this kind of iconic cheerleader type was involved with drug dealers and other stuff and had a secret life that was really dark. As in [Lynch’s 1986 feature] Blue Velvet, you discover that in every all-American town there’s this dark thing happening beneath the surface.

“Twin Peaks really created an aesthetic that got ripped off all decade long. You see it in Tarantino, in the Coen brothers. In Fargo, Bill Macy’s character couldn’t be more of an average guy—a car salesman—who hires guys to kidnap his wife, and it all goes horribly wrong. They end up killing her. They’re putting a body into a wood-chipper. In many of these films [the takeaway is]: in wholesome-seeming small-town America, something evil lurks.15

“What we learned about Clinton,” Windolf adds, “kind of mirrored what was going on in these stories that were popular narratives at the time. We were learning more than we wanted to know about people who, on the surface, appeared to be perfect Americans.” In this regard, Thrill Bill made for an ideal post-Peaks prez—and a fitting leader to preside during the rise of sin-soaked cinema, tabloid TV, and the Internet.

Something fundamental was at work here. Morality, in these movies, had become dependent on one’s perspective, not on fundamental human values. Society’s pang of conscience had been fitted with a dimmer switch so that the good and the bad began to merge, and a variety of crimes and misdemeanors (especially four of the Big Ten: adultery and murder, coveting and blaspheming) appeared to level little punitive consequence.

This disquieting construct may have all begun in 1989. That’s the year Woody Allen released Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which a man orders the contract murder of his lover and then walks free, and prospers. In Allen’s view, the idea of a just universe (that metes out punishment on unrepentant sinners and rewards the faithful with paradise) has either been cosmically annulled or, from day one, had been an invalid premise. The message of the film, Allen conveys in a conversation in his private Manhattan screening room: “There’s no question that there’s nobody out there to punish you… if you commit an immoral act like murder. If nobody catches you, you know, then you’re fine, if you’re fine with yourself. If it doesn’t bother you—such a horrible act—there are no consequences from any karmic spirit.… That’s just the ugly way life is.”

Late-’90s cinema was another animal altogether.

Circa 1997, the creative class was chiefly a Boomer’s game, and a marketing game at that. And young-at-heart Boomers greenlighting Hollywood pictures were trying to devise entertainment that would appeal to the prized eighteen-to-thirty-four male demo (not the most acquisitive nor reliably predictable consumers).

Kay S. Hymowitz, an expert on American families and cultural change, has examined this hot pursuit of SYMs (single young males) on the part of studio and ad executives. In her probing book Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, she recalls that “the word ‘elusive’ seemed permanently affixed to the phrase ‘men between 18 and 34’ among advertisers. But by the mid-1990s, two things occurred that helped change that: first, cable television and the Internet fragmented the media audience, and second, with increasing media competition, the last vestiges of bourgeois reticence in entertainment began to give way.”

Hymowitz ticks off some of the media convulsions. The lad mag Maxim ventured west from the U.K. in 1997 and celebrated the sophomoric, the lewd, the crude. Its pages created a frat-boy paradise in which it was cool to covet or fetishize games, gadgets, and “girls.” (Maxim would be famously denigrated by Art Cooper, GQ’s editor in chief, as a magazine for “men who not only move their lips but drool when they read.”) Animated cable shows with a man-child sensibility—including the comic masterpiece The Simpsons (1989) as well as Beavis and Butt-head (1993)—had already tilled some of this ground. “But it was in 1997,” recalls Hymowitz, that Comedy Central “struck gold after it launched a cartoon series starring a group of foul-mouthed eight-year-old boys. With its relentlessly foul subversion of politesse, South Park,16 as the series was called, was like a dog whistle that only SYMs could hear.”¹⁷

Then, too, the gross-out movie arrived, featuring characters (mainly male, white, and weird) living in a state of arrested development. Critic Dave Itzkoff believes the genre started with “a single movie released in 1998 [which introduced] the refined art of tastelessness.” That film: the Farrelly brothers’ classic There’s Something About Mary, starring Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz.18

Mary was seminal, quite literally. In its most memorable scene, Stiller’s Ted has jerked off in the bathroom and cannot determine where his gob of shplooey flew. Diaz, playing Mary, pops in and asks innocently, “What is that? On your ear?… Is that hair gel?… I just ran out.” She borrows a dab and improvises a spit curl—and the audience winces and cackles.

The film—part rom com,¹⁹ part stalker flick—is filled with such cringe-worthy gems. Mary’s terrier goes for Ted’s crotch. Ted, fearing he’ll be caught mid-masturbation, quickly zips up his fly and almost castrates himself. Echoing The Big Lebowski, Ted’s ever-imperiled member—bloodied but unbowed—is the Farrellys’ metaphor for the state of American manhood.

What Mary and similar films did was to ridicule and yet ultimately romanticize the clueless ’90s male and his “dumbstick” (the nickname favored by Lucy Liu’s character on Ally McBeal). In a swarm, comedians and filmmakers would serpentine onto the screen, out-grossing one another. Their ranks included Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller but also Adam Sandler and Mike Myers, with a supporting cast that featured Woody Harrelson, Jeff Daniels, Owen Wilson, Chris Kattan, Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, Drew Barrymore, and the early Will Ferrell. In these films, diversity was sorely lacking, verging on invisibility. And the movies’ depictions of women, while not incidental, were largely secondary and often romanticized, clichéd, or objectified. As for the doofus protagonists, moviegoers were meant to laugh at them, not with them—though many a character, by the closing credits, would end up revealing his inner teddy bear.

At the crux of many such films was the need to assert one’s manhood by parading or inflating the little man. Nineteen ninety-nine alone saw the release of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (the title told the tale), Mike Myers’s Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,20 and American Pie (in which Jason Biggs’s character, in the ultimate Freudian defilement of MILF and country, violates a warm apple pie). It didn’t take a focus group to foresee: movies like these couldn’t help but resonate in a year when so much ink was being spilled about the president’s privates.

Producers and filmmakers had hit a nerve. Their audience of Gen-X and millennial males had been untethered from reliable role models at home, in their communities, and in popular culture. Many felt socially disoriented, personally alienated, and sexually befuddled. Large segments of this cohort, virtually nursed on media, found simpatico, release, and succor in narratives that used humor to acknowledge their insecurities. These films—salacious, immature, and liberating—gave them a common language with which to bond with buddies. These films gave young men sanction to shame others and thereby deflect their own shortcomings. These films provided a sense of belonging in a world divested of grown-ups, a world that encouraged misbehavior, debauchery, and borderline misanthropy.

Critic David Ansen, looking back at the gross-out canon from the perspective of the Apatow era, would come up with a pat formula for the genre: “scrotums + swear words + third-act saccharin = success.” And over time, the gross-out genre, odd as it sounds, became mainstream, feel-good, and, most surprising of all, safe.²¹

No American movie, however, would tackle more ’90s themes more perceptively than American Beauty.

Here was voyeurism, materialism, homophobia, antigay violence, sexual craving, contrived ideals of beauty, the pitiable Boomer, and a preoccupation with one’s own virility and appearance. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how a movie that opens with its protagonist masturbating in the shower—then quitting his job, blackmailing his boss, and virtually stalking his teenage daughter’s schoolmate—could be awarded the Oscar for Best Picture. But Sam Mendes’s American Beauty, in 1999, did this, and much more, distinguishing itself as the decade’s most trenchant film about the male psyche in midlife meltdown.

Lester, played by Kevin Spacey, is so fixated on teenager Angela (Mena Suvari) that he eavesdrops on her while she’s chatting with his daughter. When he hears her say, “Your dad’s actually kinda cute, he is. If he just worked out, he’d be hot.… I would totally fuck him,” he begins lifting weights that very night, hoping to impress her—and to boost his deflated ego. Lester has a career that has been vaporized, with much of the damage self-inflicted. His Realtor wife (played by Annette Bening) is hot and heavy with the local “real estate king.” His next-door neighbor is a homophobic and potentially homicidal Marine Corps kook named Fitts (played by Chris Cooper), who turns out to have fixations of his own. And Fitts’s son, Ricky, the local drug dealer, becomes a sort of slacker role model in Lester’s eyes. Loner Ricky, meanwhile, compulsively videotapes his surroundings, including Lester’s daughter, Jane. Ricky appears to be so out of sync with reality that he relies on real-life scenes captured on camera to help him get in touch with the powers that animate the real world and to validate the deeper forces that give life its beauty and meaning.

The movie (spoiler alert) concludes in a series of twists. Jane and Ricky end up expressing the one bona fide loving relationship in the film. Lester, when he finally gets together with young Angela, comes to his senses—and backs off. And yet Lester, despite this confounding act of sanity, has been doomed from the film’s opening voice-over, destined to be murdered by the raging Fitts, who imagines Lester has sexually spurned him.

American Beauty, premiering the year of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, overlapped thematically with events in Washington. The film touched on the blurring of public and private life, clandestine taping, a clash of community values, and an aging Boomer’s obsession with an underage love object—and his own lost youth. There were L.A.-D.C. parallels as well. At the end of Clinton’s second term, there had been persistent, unfounded rumors that the president might move out west to work in some capacity with his pals Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose then-fledgling studio, DreamWorks SKG, happened to have released American Beauty.22 Kevin Spacey, moreover, was a friend of the Clinton family. (Spacey would later portray the fictional commander in chief Frank Underwood in the Netflix series House of Cards—which Hillary Clinton has confessed to having “totally binge-watched” with her husband.)

But none of these back stories mattered. It was the bleak comedy on the screen that captivated the nation as well as Academy voters, who honored the film with five Oscars. American Beauty chillingly illustrated two of the darkest real-life pantomimes being performed by too many American males. “In order to be successful,” says sleazy real estate mogul Buddy Kane—played by Peter Gallagher—“one must project an image of success at all times.” (Back story? Gallagher in 2016 would tweet that he had modeled his portrayal of Kane on none other than… Donald Trump, whose favorite film, it so happens, is Citizen Kane.)

Buddy Kane’s mantra was the flip side of Lester’s equally pathetic and repellent motto: “My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge and at least once a day retiring to the men’s room so I can jerk off while I fantasize about a life that doesn’t so closely resemble hell.”