I love it but its so fake tho. There like Muppets. Its Actors in cgi suits. Or Actresses even, which makes the most sense.
My sons are with God, not in some exploitive tv show. Whoever made this crap is sick.
1. how could they make it with actors? use your head. they had to know before the men left and make this whole freaking film with thousands of people. 2. and it can’t be women because how do they make the naked ones?
With deepfake now you could make that whole thing and have it all be naked Nic Cages lmao
WHAT ARE THOSE ANIMALS THO? And the flying things. If that’s all a fake? Like it’s a freaking entertainment product? WTF?
crazy right? It’s like the moon landings
I think it’s real. With all due respect to skeptics, it’s just too complex to be fake. I know it’s difficult to accept because it means we live in a very strange cosmos, but if that’s the only reason you doubt, ask yourself, how is that more unbelievable than the very fact the men disappeared?
I dont believe any of you realy watched the footage, realy watched it. Those are *women*. It’s just pads and binding and fake bears. My sister does costumes at a theater and they make stuff like htat all the time. Look at their “naked” skin in this thing and you can tell its fabric or plastic.
It’s fake bears folks
Fake BEARDS. I’m talking about the “Men’s” beards. It’s a typo for Christ sake!!
fabric and plastic don’t even look alike pippi
i saw my dad. i know it’s him. he’s even wearing the same clothes.
What The Men meant to Alma at first was her sobriety. She watched and fell asleep with the phone in her hand, and when she woke, she had the power to empty all the bottles down the sink because she could watch. After that, she watched all day, every day. She showered with the curtain half open and Patrick’s laptop up on the sink where she could watch. She rationed the food in the kitchen, putting off the day she would have to stop watching to go to a grocery store. To save time on laundry, she wore the doctors’ clothes. She listened to the news on the radio while watching. She was watching while her mother was buried without her—of course planes were grounded and gas stations closed, so it was hard to say how she could have gotten to Duluth—but she didn’t even try. She watched The Men. She called Evangelyne while watching and never got an answer but left voicemails in which she tried to sound mentally stable and cool, never mentioning The Men, never mentioning her mother. She never called work to find out if her job still existed. She never went home.
The footage was all alike: men marching or standing in groups, mouths opening and closing in unison. When they walked, their feet moved with an odd chugging motion and landed wrong, so it looked as if they should just fall over. Weird animals appeared: enormous panthers, pumpkin-headed elephants, beakless birds with human torsos. After every fourth clip, there were credits, a list of names in various alphabets, several of them new to Alma. The men were infinitely varied but their movements all the same. Once in a while, a trans woman appeared among them, and Alma was always outraged. Here was a person unjustly condemned, was the feeling. She would think of her old coworker Toya, who’d gone out drinking with her once, and Alma ended up puking in Toya’s car, but Toya just stroked her back and said, “Don’t worry! I throw up in this car all the time!” Then there were Pia and Haley, the girls Alma had lived with on the beach her first summer in L.A., when they were teen runaways together. They’d guarded each other’s stuff, shared food, sat around a little campfire and told each other they were the hottest, the prettiest, the bravest. Now this: those trans girls gone like men. Just another way God fucked you.
She also spent a lot of time googling, trying to find out what The Men was. Right away there were people freaking out on Facebook and a rapidly evolving Wikipedia page. There was a YouTube channel where someone was archiving all the old Men clips. A fan site called FindThem.com began as a searchable list of all the names in The Men’s credits, but grew to include a classified section with ads for meet-ups, watch groups, house shares. Alma also found a Reddit thread where a woman said she’d notified the FBI, but the FBI claimed it couldn’t find The Men’s makers and then abruptly stopped responding. Other people in the thread had tried approaching other agencies, from the FCC to NASA. The only response they got was that The Men seemed like a very cynical hoax, but it was covered by the First Amendment as long as it didn’t solicit money by fraud.
Alma herself didn’t always think The Men was real. There were times she was sure it was all CGI, and everybody watching was a giant idiot. Still, she couldn’t stop watching. She couldn’t stop imagining she would spot some clue everybody else had missed. She couldn’t stop thinking she would see Billy. In her fantasies, she’d see him in a favorite haunt that only she would recognize, and then she would drive there at top speed and find him and save him, crisis over. Dumbest of all was her irrational certainty that if she gave up watching, he would come to grief, that only then would he be lost.
In early October, she finished the last food in the house, a potato she smothered in ketchup for the vitamin C. Her car had been running on empty even before the gas stations closed, so she rode one of the doctors’ bikes to the supermarket, wearing a massive framed backpack she had found in a hallway closet. After days of watching The Men, the world outside felt absurdly spacious and green. It was dizzying to be riding with the wind in her hair down an eerily quiet Santa Monica Boulevard, with the lines of palm trees tall overhead; Alma was from Minnesota and had never stopped finding them glamorous. Some apartment windows had signs: NEVER FORGET, 3.9 BILLION, THANK YOU EMERGENCY WORKERS! A few parked cars had been turned into shrines for people who’d presumably disappeared there and were covered with dusty candles, wilted flowers, paper hearts with photographs stapled in the center.
Still The Men kept niggling in the back of her mind. Every minute she wanted to stop and watch. What if she was missing Billy? But of course she could check the lists on FindThem. She could find the archived clips. The feeling was suspiciously like wanting a drink, and in fact it kept blurring into wanting a drink, into imagining watching with a bottle in her hand. She decided she wouldn’t watch until she got back to the mansion, though the idea of that time without The Men was vertiginous. It was like letting go of Billy.
When she got to the supermarket, it was closed, but its parking lot was full of people and market tents. Many tents were swathed in banners saying COMMENSALIST PARTY OF WEST LOS ANGELES, and Alma saw some posters of Evangelyne smiling broadly, looking prettier than in real life. Alma had heard about the rise of the ComPAs, but somehow never thought she would encounter it personally. Now it felt like a weird dream in which her ex-girlfriend ruled the world. She got some vegan stew from a soup kitchen tent that was covered in ComPA iconography and was pettily relieved when it was tasteless; the Commensalists weren’t all that. While she ate, she wandered past other tents—FAST-TRACK TRAINING, REPAIRS, EMERGENCY VOLUNTEERING—and stopped at a Prop 10 stand, where they were registering people to claim abandoned homes. The girl there earnestly explained to Alma that Prop 10 wasn’t a property grab but actually a safety measure; it was necessary to prevent fires and decay in empty housing stock. Alma nodded, thinking only of the mansion, feeling crazy with hope. Like, of course it was a fucking property grab, but Alma was totally down with that. She even thought she should have done more with the ComPAs when she was with Evangelyne, though Evangelyne had discouraged it. That should have tipped Alma off that their relationship was doomed. She scanned the QR code to get the Prop 10 application, then wandered on with a feeling of unreality. All around were the improbably beautiful women of West L.A., and Alma couldn’t help thinking that these girls were mostly single now. She’d been huddling in a dark room, and all this—but even as she thought it, the urge to watch The Men came back full force. She had to make herself think about something else. Free mansions. Hot girls. Food.
She found a food bank tent and was given a silver pouch of all-purpose egg mix, a cardboard tube of government spaghetti, a loaf of unsliced bread, and a comically huge paper bag of brussels sprouts. Alma flirted with the food bank girl, smiling into her eyes, complimenting her bracelet. On the ride home, she felt unbalanced in a good way, like she might fall in love again and have a new life. She didn’t even really want to watch The Men.
Back at the mansion, Alma made herself shower before anything else. Then she rinsed some brussels sprouts and put them on to boil, and was telling herself she might give up The Men. Even if it was real, there were four billion people missing; she could watch her whole life without seeing her brother. And why did she want to see a one-minute clip of Billy marching by like a fucked-up zombie?
As she thought this, she realized her phone was already in her hand. She laughed and looked around, imagining the food bank girl was here to share the joke. Then, instead of opening The Men, she made herself go to the Prop 10 website and start the application process. When she filled in the address, it took her to the mansion’s Zillow page and asked if this was the house she wanted to register. Alma got a little rush. She clicked Confirm.
A window popped up. ERROR: This five-bedroom dwelling must be claimed by three or more tenants. Do you want to amend your tenant information?
Alma stood fuming for a minute, wanting to throw the phone at the wall, to call Evangelyne, to watch The Men. Of course the ComPAs would be too moralistic to let one person take over a mansion. She thought of the liquor cabinet, hating herself for having poured out all the booze.
Then she had an idea and laughed. She opened FindThem.com, went to the classifieds, and clicked Create a Posting. She typed in a brief house-share ad, titling it: Amazing Mansion: Rooms for People Who Aren’t Home That Much. She already had some photos of the mansion: Billy on the front porch, Billy at poolside, Billy cleaning out the flue of the huge stone fireplace. She added these to the ad and posted it.
Then she went and got the laptop from the library with the feeling of reaping a well-earned reward. On The Men, a line of pink-faced white adolescents were jogging through a swamp, the lemon-yellow water around their feet splashing languidly. Alma smiled—she could not have said why—and settled down with it on the kitchen floor. Without looking away from the screen she reached to get the sprouts off the stove and fished a fork from the cutlery drawer. Some minutes later, she remembered to turn off the flame. She ate sprouts and bread, taking bites from the uncut loaf. She watched. She was still there on the floor two hours later when the doorbell rang.
At first, Alma tried to ignore it. In her experience as an alcoholic, people at the door eventually gave up and went away. But it rang again. The bell was a deep ding-dong that came from speakers distributed through the house. It gonged in the walls and hummed faintly in the floor. It rang again, and now went on monotonously; somebody was leaning on the bell. Then, with a jolt, Alma remembered she was still trespassing here. This could be cops.
When the doorbell stopped, it felt like a miracle. Alma breathed and listened through a minute of nothing. Then her body was flooded with peace endorphins. She felt how her shoulders had clenched. She stretched her arms. She noticed the pan in her lap with its now-cold water, the gnawed loaf resting on her knee. The laptop was on the floor in front of her, showing two men and a toddler crossing a grassy expanse, surrounded by immense pachydermous legs. The great legs moved lightly and gracefully, prancing, while the human feet trudged. The child had a toddler’s high-stepping gait but ground forward methodically, never stumbling, as if moving along a track. Then the credits came up, and Alma stretched again, gratefully tired.
The doorbell rang. Alma froze. The ringing paused as if gathering breath, then boomed out, seeming louder, ding-dong, ding-dong. The person—the cop, it had to be a cop—was leaning on the doorbell again.
Alma leaped up and started ineffectually hiding things: the pan and bread in the oven, a bag of trash in a cupboard, an armful of dirty laundry in the refrigerator. She scooped the laptop up and dropped it off in the library, where she’d first found it. She was sweating as she ran to the door, running all her self-justifying stories in her head, and was there before she was ready, breathless, weak-strong with adrenaline. She had time to think, Be fucking polite, before she opened the door too hard.
On the doorstep was a child.
It was a Latina girl who looked about twelve, wearing a black bikini with silver sandals. She was visibly angry, releasing the doorbell with a gesture that said, About time. Her hair was in two braids that had been tied awkwardly on top of her head, with two white feathers piercing the knot. But the most striking thing about her was that she had figures drawn all over her bare skin—pentagrams and stars and triangles—in what looked like Magic Marker.
Behind her, the world was still sunlit and peaceful, the neat gravel path between hedges just the same. Through the gate, Alma saw a sprinkler in front of the mock Tudor mansion across the street, flinging white water in the air. No cops.
The kid said, “Hello, I’m your neighbor? Blanca Suarez, from 2110?”
When Alma didn’t answer, the girl repeated it in Spanish: “Soy su vecina, Blanca—”
Alma said, “Hi, I’m just the caretaker here. I’m here to look after the house. So I’m not—”
“I just—I need to borrow a phone or computer? It’s just to look something up. For like fifteen minutes?”
Alma was already closing the door when the girl added, “Please. It’s for a ritual.”
Alma balked. In her mind, she was closing the door. She didn’t. The sprinkler across the street had moved on to the other side of the lawn, where it was visible only as a hazy rainbow.
“A ritual,” she said. “What kind of ritual?”
The kid made a stupid-question shrug. “A ritual to find the men. And I know you don’t believe in it, okay? I’m not stupid. But I just need to look up a thing online. It’s not like you have to believe in it.”
“And you don’t have a phone?”
“Okay, I have a phone. I don’t have it right now.”
Alma gripped the door. “I’m sorry. If your mom took away your phone, I can’t—”
“I don’t have a mom,” the kid said. “She died when I was three. I don’t even have a mom.”
There was a long bad pause then, in which the kid’s eyes welled up and she looked ferocious. And now, among the drawings on the kid’s skin, Alma suddenly noticed scars, fresh puckered scars on her torso like bullet holes that couldn’t be bullet holes, could they? In this neighborhood? They must be some kind of surgery scars, but was that necessarily better? And if the kid’s mom was dead, and there couldn’t be a father, did that mean the kid was living here alone?
“Please,” the kid said. “Fifteen minutes.”
Alma had intended to leave her in the foyer and go fetch the laptop, but Blanca trailed after her, peering at everything and talking animatedly about her ritual. It turned out to be based on the Burning Girls, an internet conspiracy theory Alma had read about but never found especially compelling, about a cluster of self-immolations that took place on August 26.
“I’m basically researching their Tumblrs and Instagrams,” the kid said. “These are actual writings and videos from girls who died? There’s a few online, and one has these symbols, like a hexagon with a star in it. So I’ve been trying to use it in a ritual, but I’m not totally sure which way the star goes. And I know what you’re thinking, but I was just doing this ritual and it felt like it was working. And it’s obvious the Burning Girls knew something. If you see the stuff they left, it is. Also, just so you know, I’m not about to hurt myself. That’s what freaked out my aunt. She thought I was going to set myself on fire.”
Alma stopped on the threshold of the library. “Your aunt?”
“Okay, my aunt’s the one who took away my phone? I live with my aunt now. But she isn’t even my real aunt, she’s just the third wife of my uncle Carlos. So it’s not like your mom taking away your phone. I don’t think she even has the right to take it.”
“Yeah, the First Amendment,” Alma said. “You should be out here researching lawyers.”
The kid laughed then and looked completely different. There was the shock of her perfect teeth, a good indication that she came from money. A rich kid living with her aunt: all cool. Alma thought of ushering her right back out, but the kid now spotted the laptop and went on into the room. Alma followed as Blanca perched seriously, curiously, on a leather Chesterfield, frowning at the screen, where a procession of men in the tattered remains of clothes moved languidly across a lemon-yellow prairie, walking swimmingly, flattening the tall grass.
“Wait,” said Blanca. “What is this?”
“I don’t know,” Alma said, caught off guard. “It’s The Men?”
“The men? Wait, it’s the men now?”
“I guess.”
Blanca leaned in closer to the screen. “No, you’re saying this is real? This is actually them?”
“I don’t know. A lot of people think that. But no one even knows who’s posting it.”
“They don’t? Couldn’t someone trace it?”
Alma tried to explain why that hadn’t happened but soon got tied in knots. Of course, she knew fuck-all about computers. Instead, she ended up telling the story of receiving ten emails from her mother saying, Baby crees que e verdad, and how she’d thought it was a spambot, but finally decided to call her mother. A neighbor answered. They’d just found Alma’s mother and cut her down. When Alma had called, this neighbor had been literally holding Alma’s mother’s phone, working up the nerve to call and tell her.
“So I was just … fuck. And of course I had to open the email and click on the link. Right? It’s my mother’s final message. But, come to find out, lots of people got that same message, and when they asked the person it supposedly came from, the person was like, ‘Nope, definitely spam.’ So it was spam. It’s just a sick coincidence my mother was … yeah.”
Blanca looked briefly at Alma, then back at the screen. She didn’t say anything, but she had those bright involved eyes.
Alma said, “She hanged herself right after the men went. My brother went, and my mom couldn’t handle it, I guess.”
“My mom killed herself too,” Blanca said, her eyes on the screen. “She had bipolar.”
“Sorry. That sucks.”
“It was a long time ago. Her family doesn’t talk to us now, so I don’t even think about her that much. They’re in Korea. I mean, that’s not the reason they don’t talk to us, but just so you know. I know I look totally Mexican, but I’m half Korean.”
“That’s cool.”
“So could I look at the Burning Girls site? I could tell you the URL, if you don’t like people touching your computer.”
Alma’s throat hurt. She wanted to launch into an explanation of why The Men was the important thing, not the Burning Girls. You couldn’t just look at The Men and move on. But before she could put it together in her head, the kid said, “Wait. You said this isn’t real?”
Alma said carefully, “No, I think it is real. I think.”
“Are they in Texas?”
“Texas?” Alma laughed uncomfortably. “Why? Is that what Texas looks like?”
“No, it’s just, I’m from Houston, and I know two of those kids?” Blanca pointed at the corner of the screen. “Those boys go to my school.”
There was a beat where Alma’s heart went batshit. Then she said in a different voice, “Okay. That’s good. Do you maybe know their names?”
“Michel and Cooper Williams. They’re brothers.”
“Cool. That’s really cool.”
The clip changed, and it was just one man, walking through a forest. Behind him was one of the cat-things, prancing the way they sometimes did.
The kid was still watching with the silly expression of trying not to smile. She said, “What kind of animal is that?”
“No one knows. It only exists in The Men.”
Then the credits came up, and Alma wanted to tell the kid to watch for her friends’ names, but there they were at the top of the first screen: Cooper Williams, Michel Williams. Alma pointed to them, and Blanca stiffened, amazed, as if Alma had made them appear by magic. She turned to Alma and laughed in pleasure, her eyes alight with what this meant.
She said, “Damn. My ritual worked.”
At that time, Ji-Won still hadn’t heard of The Men. She’d finished her highway clearance work, which had taken her by inching stages west to Kansas. There she was recruited to help plant the winter wheat crop on orphaned farms. In the clear cool nights, she lay drowsing in an army-issue sleeping bag, reading with a pocket flashlight, her body so tired it felt gigantic, an ache that radiated far beyond her skin and into the dirty fields.
The book was one she’d taken from Henry’s apartment, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. They’d read it together once when he was an undergrad at RISD, when Ji-Won was still the strong one, the one who had a job and paid bills. In Kansas, because she fell asleep very rapidly, for several nights running she read the same passage: “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at … The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object …”
None of this was true of Ji-Won. She had always been invisible to men and never had any particular awareness of being seen by other people. Henry, meanwhile, had been very visible. Ji-Won had often helped ornament Henry to make him more visually striking to men and women, curating his clothes, sometimes painting his face. This hadn’t stopped people from giving Ji-Won advice as if she were preoccupied with her appearance, which could be annoying but also nice. She sometimes saw other people as a kind of pixie: sweet, superficial creatures who adorned themselves and chattered in little sociable herds. Now the pixies were thrown into disarray while Ji-Won was much as she’d always been, a little freer perhaps, not so pestered to be “happy.”
Then she fell asleep and dreamed of Henry. She was woken several times in the night by the terrifying knowledge that he was gone.
Ruth boarded a flight to Los Angeles, light-headed after a month of crying, in which time the city outside her building had changed and changed again. When she’d come out at last with her two suitcases into a bright September day, there were women sitting out on all the stoops and in lawn chairs on the sidewalks, watching little girls play on 88th Street, which was littered with toys, bikes, paddle pools, and child-sized furniture. On the way to the subway, two people asked if Ruth wanted help, and when she got down to the train platform, for the first time ever it didn’t smell of urine. That undid her, and she was sobbing on the train, so furious at the men. Of course you couldn’t know their disappearance was punishment, but who didn’t think it was punishment? After all the wars, the pollution, the rapes? They even had to piss on the train platforms! They had to keep misbehaving until they got erased. So what if it ruined Ruth’s life?
When she got to the airport, it was almost deserted and, of course, all women. The TV screens throughout the terminal were showing an interview with the biotech lady Karen Xi, with the chyron: EMBRYOS FROM SPERM BANKS: 100% OF MALE FETUSES ABORT IN FIRST TRIMESTER. Ruth felt as if horrible news were pursuing her into every moment. Then, boarding the plane, she was irrationally frightened: How could lady pilots fly this enormous plane with their little hands? In the air, all the passengers talked to each other, so that was how she found out her daughter must have paid $10,000 for Ruth’s ticket. There were only two planes to L.A. this month, and that was where prices started. She shut her eyes and tried not to feel cornered. You had to keep going if you still had a kid, and if Candy wanted her mom that bad, what other point was there to Ruth’s life now?
Ruth slept. Then LAX, then the bus. That feeling California gave her, of being bugged by all that sun. The cars were mostly gone but the roads still there, a million miles of ugly, empty roads, and anyone could see what a blight it was now. She got off and wheeled her suitcase to Candy’s old adobe bungalow, painted powder blue when maybe Carter was president, with a U.S. flag and a basketball hoop left up by the previous owner. She used to see all this on the computer screen when Peter video chatted with her. She was going to be sleeping in Peter’s bed. She stood on the sidewalk, crying again. That sun. Those roads. All the nothing that it came to … until the door creaked open and there was her daughter.
Ruth said, “I’m sorry.”
1. An enormous procession of naked men moves gradually, rocking from foot to foot, through a jungle. They are visible only in glimpses through the dense foliage, and their passage doesn’t disturb the leaves. It’s as if there’s a tunnel cut into the foliage whose shape we can’t perceive from the vantage point of the camera. On branches above perch strange, broad-shouldered white birds. The birds crane down their necks and turn their heads 360 degrees like inverted periscopes, inspecting the rocking men. They are jarringly identical in size to the men. The behavior of these creatures is avian; they half unfold their wings in response to the men and step from one claw to the other in excitement. However, they have no beaks. When the men have passed and the birds retract their necks, they appear completely headless.
2. This is the last of many clips that are perfectly black with no image at all. In this “black” clip, at the very end, a tiny locus of blackness begins to disintegrate and give way to light and color. It flashes, appearing and disappearing, then abruptly grows and becomes a hole leading to the outside of some subterranean darkness. We see a man silhouetted as he is suddenly revealed by light. Then confused shapes: a cat-thing pulling itself out through the hole, two men, a jumble of extremities. Soon the mass of them blocks the light so it’s impossible to tell them apart. In the final frames, a spark of brighter light like a camera flash briefly exposes a man above, holding a baby. Both are nude and entirely begrimed with earth.
3. This is an early anomaly clip. It takes place in a moonlit grassland that will later be identified as the area immediately adjoining the riverbank. The men are in soiled clothing, proceeding at a faster pace than usual, heading diagonally past the camera. There are roughly a hundred, and in their midst is a single trans woman, one of the first recurring characters. She’s appeared in two previous clips and, by the time this clip was first posted, had been recognized by her wife. Her name is Giovanna Fini.
In previous clips, Fini exhibited the same automatic behaviors as the other characters. Here, as she enters the shot, she’s already hurrying ahead of the others, jigging erratically, both arms stretched stiffly forward. As she reaches the center of the shot, she stops. The impression given is that she senses the viewer and is shocked by the realization. She raises both arms in the air and rocks back and forth in apparent distress, though her face remains blank, her eyes unfocused. The flood of men parts around her as the clip ends.
This clip was often used to illustrate The Men in media coverage, perhaps because of its cinematic character, or because trans people were a popular preoccupation in those first months. The Men community reacted with fury, feeling this choice encouraged several misconceptions: that trans women in The Men behaved differently from men, that anomalous behavior was typical instead of being a rare exception, that people in The Men were aware of the camera’s presence like actors. The online abuse of journalists from some watchers was one reason for the sparse media coverage of The Men in the early months.
4. This is the first clip of the riverbank sequence. It begins with an aerial shot of the grassy bank of a broad, slow-flowing river, seen in moonlight. Eight men, emaciated and in tattered clothing, trot toward the water. A few yards short of the water, they stop all at once and fall abruptly still. They remain there unmoving. Something breaks the surface of the water, a creature too large and complex to be a fish. It undulates, flashing what looks like a silver elbow, and is gone.
After two minutes of stillness, a second group of men trots into the frame and halts at the same distance from the water. All the men stand unmoving as the clip ends.
As usual, after the fourth clip, there are credits: 182 male names. Here, for the first time, several of the names are followed by an asterisk.