Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for tuning into On the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last week was frankly nuts from a production perspective here, because so much news broke on Thursday night and Friday, which is when we spend the week's last few hours doing final cuts, last minute fixes, putting in the music, and then mixing the episode before sending it out by close of business. Then there was all this extra stuff we had to fit in, so we had to go at everything with a hatchet, especially the interview we did with Jessa Crispin on her new book, What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything. Anyway, we decided to give you a chance to hear the long version. Jessa, welcome to the show.

Jessa Crispin: I'm so happy to be here.

Brooke Gladstone: Before we get to the list of movies qua case studies that you dive into, you begin the book in a very different setting, France's Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in the twilight of the 19th century. It was known then as a neuropsychiatric teaching facility focusing on women with hysteria. Why did you start there?

Jessa Crispin: This was a moment we started to understand that women have a specific political, psychological, social reality that is based in their gender, both a combination of how society treats them and how they understand themselves and the clash they're in.

Brooke Gladstone: Because prior to that, it was merely seen as women's frailty and weakness. Hysteria, the word is related to the womb and the belief that it was moving around all the time. It ceases to become solely a problem of women and becomes a broader problem of women and their unhappiness with the limited role that they're asked to play.

Jessa Crispin: Yes. So much of the treatment for hysteria in the past was based on, "Well, we have to more firmly lock women into their roles. Get them married, get them pregnant, get them nailed into the domestic space." In this moment of the 19th century, you had this understanding that it wasn't just about women failing to fulfill these roles of mother, wife, caregiver, et cetera, that there was something else going on with them, and thus began 150 years or so of us trying to figure out, what do women want? That began not just the Freudian concept of the unconscious, but political organization around these issues, which is what gave us feminism.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, in the book, you argue that Michael Douglas, despite being a sexy protagonist, was cast in a series of films as essentially a male hysteric. You wrote, "After all, what did Michael Douglas present to the world in his string of blockbuster films through the '80s and early '90s, but a performance of being extremely unwell?"

Jessa Crispin: As I was trying to figure out why I was so drawn to this figure of Michael Douglas, I was reading a lot of film reviews and press from mid-'80s to late '90s when he was in his peak, and I often saw him being referred to as a symbol of a new masculinity. I thought that was very funny because when I watched his movies, he was always wide-eyed and waving his arms around and yelling about something or other. I just thought, "What if I take this seriously, the idea that Michael Douglas is a symbol of a new masculinity in order to look at what masculinity that was emerging in this time was really all about?"

Brooke Gladstone: In the '80s, we're seeing the rise of, frankly, fiercely right wing media that condemned feminism, people like the AM radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh: Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream society.

Brooke Gladstone: Michael Douglas' characters didn't hate feminism. He saw himself as a good guy, but we saw in his condescension and in his fragility, that wasn't quite true.

Jessa Crispin: A lot of the vitriolic rhetoric around feminism really gave cover to a large segment of men who just didn't think that this had anything to do with them. The Michael Douglas figure conceptualizes himself as the center. He doesn't have to adapt to a changing world, the world should adapt to him, and he's afraid of what's going on around him.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's get to some specifics, starting with his two biggest hits of the era, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. A warning, countless spoilers ahead, but come on, these movies are 40 years old. Fatal Attraction features Douglas as an attorney who has a steamy affair with an editor played by Glenn Close, but Close then simply will not go away.

Alex Forrest: I just want to be a part of your life.

Dan Gallagher: Oh, this is the way you do it, huh? Showing up at my apartment?

Alex Forrest: What am I supposed to do? You won't answer my calls. You change your number. I'm not going to be ignored, Dan.

Brooke Gladstone: Her character stalks him, threatens his family, boils that rabbit.

Jessa Crispin: It's a very vile little film if you really get into the sexual politics because there's always been the disposable woman for the man who is successful. There's the mistress, there's the sex worker, there's the courtesan. The reason why women who were mistresses were disposable is because they didn't have the right to own proper. They didn't have access to education or to their own income streams.

Brooke Gladstone: Women couldn't have their own credit cards until the '70s.

Jessa Crispin: If a politician or somebody who has a lot of resources or has the ability to threaten you, you have to do what they say, which is to shut your mouth, and if you don't, there's a threat of not just scandal, but also death.

Brooke Gladstone: In this case, the marauding mistress isn't taken out by the man, she's murdered by his wife.

Jessa Crispin: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: That's a kind of tension we often see set up, the raging feminist versus the trad wife. These wives, and the wife certainly in this movie isn't just protecting her home, she's also striking back at the feminist's seeming contempt. She's not entirely wrong about that, is she?

Jessa Crispin: No. there was definitely a backlash from women to the idea of feminist progress, things like the development of the no-fault divorce, which was a political demand that women had been making since the 19th century. What you saw was a backlash from women like, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant and so on, afraid that this would make women like them, upper middle class, vulnerable because then their husbands could leave them without warning. This is a legitimate fear, but no-fault divorce dropped women's suicide rates. It helped lower the rates of domestic violence that ended in homicide.

Brooke Gladstone: One point which really surprised me is that the notion of midlife crisis, the man buying the motorcycle and looking for a younger woman to have an affair with, was rewritten. The midlife crisis was experienced by the woman who was much more likely to leave the marriage than the man.

Jessa Crispin: Beginning in 1980, divorce rates skyrocket. No-fault divorce was being rolled out state by state. Approximately two thirds of these divorces were being instigated by women, even though they faced really serious consequences. Their income dropped, they mostly the custody responsibilities at the time. They would still rather suffer all of these things than to stay married to their husbands.

I think the midlife crisis fantasy was a sort of cover for men to protect their egos. It's like, "You can't fire me, I quit." Because so much of media was run by men, they reinforced it with these movies about the midlife crisis guy running off into the sunset with a 21-year-old secretary in a sports car.

Brooke Gladstone: Who coined the term?

Jessa Crispin: A woman journalist, Gail Sheehy, actually-

Brooke Gladstone: Passages?

Jessa Crispin: Yes. In the book, Passages, she was describing a change that women were going through once their children became less dependent on them. It would set off this search moment of, "Is this all that there is?"

Brooke Gladstone: This reminds me of Kramer vs. Kramer.

Jessa Crispin: Oh, sure.

Joanna Kramer: Ted, I'm leaving you.

Brooke Gladstone: Meryl Streep in that film leaves Dustin Hoffman.

Joanna Kramer: Here are my keys. Here's my American Express card. Here's my Bloomingdale's credit card. Here's my checkbook.

Ted Kramer: What's this? Some kind of joke?

Joanna Kramer: Here's the cleaning. Here's the laundry ticket. You can pick them both up on Saturday. You.

Ted Kramer: Well, I'm sorry that I was late, but I was busy making a living, all right?

Brooke Gladstone: She's treated as an object of contempt. Nevertheless, there it is. Where does that leave Michael Douglas, though, in Fatal Attraction?

Jessa Crispin: He's trying to recreate a kind of masculinity that no longer exists that says, "I can cheat on my wife and she can't really do anything about it. When I'm done with this woman, then she'll just disappear into the ether somehow."

Alex Forrest: Did you just hit me?

Dan Gallagher: You're so sad, you know that, Alex? Lonely and very sad.

Alex Forrest: Don't you ever pity me, smug bastard.

Dan Gallagher: I'll pity you. I'll pity you because you're sick.

Alex Forrest: Why? Because I won't allow you to treat me like some slut you can just bang a couple of times and throw in the garbage?

Brooke Gladstone: Now, let's move on to Basic Instinct. Here he plays a detective charged with bringing a crime novelist, played by Sharon Stone, to justice since she appears to be offing her lovers one by one. Basic Instinct, you've said, basically comes down to a sweater in a way.

Jessa Crispin: Yes. The sweater that started this whole book honestly. It was the pandemic, and so I was watching Basic Instinct a lot.

Brooke Gladstone: Why?

Jessa Crispin: It's such a good movie. I was texting with my friend about this sweater that Michael Douglas wears, maybe the most upsetting sweater in cinematic history. He's going to the club to meet Sharon Stone and all of her friends. He's investigating her, but they do weird flirtation in the interrogation scene right before the club.

Nick Curran: You never tied him up?

Catherine Tramell: No. Johnny liked to use his hands too much. I like hands and fingers.

Nick Curran: You describe a white silk scarf in your book.

Catherine Tramell: I've always had a fondness for white silk scarves. They're good for all occasions.

Nick Curran: You said you liked men to use their hands, didn't you?

Catherine Tramell: No, I said I like Johnny to use his hands. I don't make any rules, Nick. I go with the flow.

Jessa Crispin: He's going to seal the deal with Sharon Stone by wearing a sweater to the dance club. It's not just any sweater. It is a V neck, olive green, the V is just too deep, clearly made with synthetic fabric. You can just tell what it's going to smell like the next day, sweat and cigarette smoke and spilled beer, and he's like, "This woman's going to go home with me," despite the zero effort that he's put into his looks, the way that he talks to her, the way that he dances. He doesn't have to think about any of it.

Brooke Gladstone: Sharon Stone, the character she plays is very successful. She lives in a house that is sleek and beautiful. She wears beautiful clothes.

Jessa Crispin: It's not just that she looks amazing. She's always on the shoreline with the waves crashing against the cliffs. Every time you see Michael Douglas at home, he's falling asleep in a recliner with the TV still on. He goes to work and it's fluorescent lighting. They're drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups that you know tastes like cigarettes and somebody made four hours ago, and it's just been sitting there. They're all wearing the worst polyester ties.

Brooke Gladstone: Now you sound a little bit like a snob. Why do you focus on this cheap garbage that he lives in?

Jessa Crispin: There's such a suspicion within Basic Instinct that the men have toward anything that is beautiful, soft, pleasurable. I think that it's a kind of paranoia built into this moment where women had the power to create things on their own. It used to be, we had dandies in masculine culture, artists and poets, but now, as women take space in the public realm, there's this paranoia about, "Am I going to be mistaken for being a sissy, for being gay?"

Brooke Gladstone: This is a good place probably to talk about an observation you make several times in your book that during this period, women were creating support systems to enable them to talk to other people, to figure out their place in a changing world, and men did not allow themselves that.

Jessa Crispin: It's not enough to say, "Okay, divorce your-"

Brooke Gladstone: "I have a credit card now."

Jessa Crispin: Right, "I have a credit card now," or, "I have access to a divorce attorney," whatever. You have to create support systems so that women can access the things that they need. If you're in a violent marriage, divorce court isn't going to be enough. You have to create things like domestic violence shelters. It's not enough that you can now go to the university. You have to create scholarships, you have to create mentorships. When things started to shift away from a man-ruled society, it was women who were in a better position to take advantage. That's why men started to fall behind.

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings us to the second category of Michael Douglas films, the economic actor- and in a way, this is the heart of the argument you're making, the economic actor, starting with the movie Wall Street, where he plays the hugely successful, unabashedly amoral banker, Gordon Gekko.

Gordon Gekko: Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit, greed.

Brooke Gladstone: "The admirable qualities that once defined American manhood-" you wrote, "hard work, loyalty, ethics, they no longer had value. Only money matters. Like when Trump said during his first campaign, when challenged on paying hardly any taxes, 'That's because I'm smart,' or had smart lawyers anyway."

Jessa Crispin: Wall Street was released in 1987, what Susan Strange called the beginning of casino capitalism. In 1980, you have the first real financial reform in the banking industry in decades with the Monetary Control Act. What it does is incentivize speculation over long term investment.

Brooke Gladstone: It makes money by taking things apart?

Jessa Crispin: Yes, by basically stripping businesses of assets and selling it off for parts. This is why we don't have local newspapers anymore. No one faces any consequences for the bad decisions at the time. They continue the process of deregulation without creating any systems of oversight. This creates the foundation for the 2008 economic crash that affected the whole world, a much worse version of what Gordon Gekko became such a symbol of.

Gordon Gekko: If you're not inside, you are outside. I'm not talking about some $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff, flying first class and being comfortable. I'm talking about rich enough to have your own chair, rich enough not to waste time. $50 million, $100 million, buddy. A player.

Brooke Gladstone: Talk about how Wall Street commented on the impact of this change across generations.

Jessa Crispin: You have a couple different father figures in Wall Street, and then you have this young man who's basically trying to figure out which father he's going to become like. The young man's played by Charlie Sheen. The father who raised him is working class, but he's built a stable existence for himself and his family. He's a union man. The rug is being pulled out from under his feet by men like Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. He's a representative of this new financial system, and he does not play by the rules. He does insider trading, and he does all of these unethical, illegal acts in order to attain wealth, but it works.

Brooke Gladstone: You note in your book that the movie is actually less bleak than real life because the canniest perpetrators almost never go to jail, and Gekko did eventually for insider trading. Now there, Michael Douglas plays the winner, even though he goes to jail, ultimately. In Falling Down, he plays the ultimate victim.

Jessa Crispin: In Falling Down, he plays a man named D-Fens, and he had been laid off after years of loyalty to his employer. He's also been rejected by his family for being erratic and violent, and his wife has put out a restraining order on him. In this moment of stress, he's stuck in traffic, and he is fuming about the injustices done to him. He decides to, essentially, walk across the city to go home and reclaim his place in his family, but also in the world.

In this march across the city that he does, one of the first confrontations he has is at a convenience store. It's owned by a Korean gentleman, and he thinks that the prices of the goods he would like to buy, which include aspirin and a can of soda, are priced too high.

Mr. Lee: Drink 85 cents, you pay or go.

D-Fens: What's a "fi"? I don't understand a "fi". There's a V in the word. It's five. They don't got V's in China?

Mr. Lee: Not Chinese. I'm Korean.

D-Fens: Whatever. You come to my country, you take my money. You don't even have the grace to learn how to speak my language. You're Korean. You have any idea how much money my country has given your country?

Mr. Lee: How much?

D-Fens: I don't know. It's got to be a lot. You can bet on that.

Jessa Crispin: He gets a bat and he destroys the store while yelling at the owner.

Brooke Gladstone: You observe that even the reason why the prices are higher in the convenience store is because the owner is getting screwed by a system that enables the big chains to have cheaper prices.

Jessa Crispin: The reason why small, independent businesses have higher prices is because everything in corporate culture in the United States is set up against the mom and pop. The American dream is a setup. It's a lie. Michael Douglas is just outraged that the world isn't operating to his expectations.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that the reason why Falling Down still resonates with so many people is because it really gets to that frustration of contemporary life where everyone is seen as your competitor or an obstacle, and yet, as you wrote, "The Reagan and Bush presidencies romanticized the post-war boom times." I'm reading from your book. "If we could simply recreate the conditions of that era by jacking up the White birth rate, recreating the racial, gendered and sexual roles of the time, strengthen the powerful institutions of Christianity and the military, then America could recapture its glory, but that's not what caused the problem."

Your third section had perhaps the most self explanatory header, a white man in a brown world. Take it from there.

Jessa Crispin: I was really interested in the tendency in these Michael Douglas movies to treat the rest of the world outside of white upper middle class masculinity as irrational.

Brooke Gladstone: What happens in Falling Down? He goes on a rampage.

Jessa Crispin: He goes on a rampage and everyone that he meets is essentially a representative of every scapegoat that right wing politicians have been trying to use in order to explain why white men are having such a bad time. He meets with the immigrant from Korea, he meets with the homeless person, he meets with the homosexual. Each case it is them who is making Michael Douglas' life harder.

This is the changeover between the '80s and '90s. This is when white flight was creating these environments where downtowns of cities were in financial precarity because of the removal of the white tax base into the suburbs, and also where there were these fantasies of what life was like in these cities without the steadying force of the white man, that it was descending into chaos.

Brooke Gladstone: Falling Down seems to be a crossover between the economic actor category and the white man in a brown world category. The other movie in the latter category, The American President, was released in 1995, but you argue that it drew on the marketing politics of the '80s, courtesy of that Reagan and Bush nostalgia. Given America's current military operations, it seems relevant that this movie, you say, "lays bare the similarities in which men view themselves and how Americans view themselves, simultaneously, victims and victors, plagued by a glorious past they just can't seem to get back to."

Jessa Crispin: American President was 1995. I think that the Michael Douglas presidency is a continuation of this fantasy that men don't have to change, they are the deciders, they are the ones in charge, they are the stabilizing force. If women want to get involved, that's nice, but there's essentially just going to be the addition of women into a male run society. I think that this is also part of the American mindset, which is that our way of doing things is the only legitimate way of doing things, and that if other countries can't get on the American democracy train, that we feel free to bomb them into submission.

Brooke Gladstone: How does he do that in the movie?

Jessa Crispin: In the movie he bombs Libya, and this is treated as a terrible responsibility.

Leon Kodak: What you did tonight was very presidential.

Andrew Sheperd: Leon, somewhere in Libya right now, a janitor's working the night shift at the Libyan Intelligence headquarters. He's going about doing his job because he has no idea in about an hour he's going to die in a massive explosion. You just see me do the least presidential thing I do.

Jessa Crispin: It's treated as this really bizarrely heroic moment. It's treated as his tragedy and not the Libyans' tragedy.

Brooke Gladstone: We move forward one year. In 1996 comes the movie Disclosure, which I think can be distinguished as the one you find most reprehensible. Here we watch a man getting passed over for a promotion for a stereotypically undeserving woman. She is using her looks to get the job that he deserves.

Philip Blackburn: She said you sexually harassed her.

Tom Sanders: She harassed me.

Meredith Johnson: Get back here and you finish what you started or you're dead. Do you hear me? You are dead.

Philip Blackburn: We just have to hope that he's smart enough to see he doesn't have any options.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote, "It's a film not meant to entertain or to enlighten, but to rant loudly at you up close, the spittle misting your face as you try to turn away."

Jessa Crispin: It is the 1990s, and out of every story that they could possibly tell, they are making a movie where Michael Douglas is victimized by his female boss, and ultimately, he has to punish these women in order to put the world right. The world is only right when Michael Douglas is in charge.

Brooke Gladstone: Now that's your least favorite film in the Michael Douglas catalog, but your favorite character that he plays is in The Game. You say it's the only time that you felt real tenderness towards a Michael Douglas character. It's the only time that he plays vulnerability in a real way on screen.

Jessa Crispin: In The Game, Michael Douglas plays a finance guy again, but this time he is playing essentially the son of the last patriarch. His father dies by suicide and he, as the eldest son, is tasked with replacing his father within the family. He takes over his father's business, takes over his father's home, takes on his father's social responsibilities. He doesn't have a sense of self outside of his father's identity, and so his brother buys him this game that is an all-immersive experience to force Nicholas to figure out who he is by stripping his father out of his identity.

Conrad Van Orton: What do you get for the man who has everything?

Nicholas Van Orton: Consumer Recreation Services.

Conrad Van Orton: Call that number.

Nicholas Van Orton: Why?

Conrad Van Orton: They make your life fun.

Jessa Crispin: It leaves him in a state of having to admit that he doesn't know who he is, what he wants, what he has to contribute, and he's left in a really vulnerable place as a result. There are definitely times where Michael Douglas is put into a position of vulnerability in these films where he's being stalked, chased by the police, persecuted in some way, but The Game is the only movie that pushes him past hysteria or self defensiveness.

Brooke Gladstone: How does this speak to the current moment?

Jessa Crispin: Patriarchy used to tell men what the world wanted from them. It wants you to make money, it wants you to have a family, it wants you to get an education. It wants you to be respectable. This is how you're supposed to dress. This is how you're supposed to behave. This is where you're supposed to go to work, and all of these other things.

Now, that's no longer really true. Just because you fulfill old expectations for what a man's life is supposed to look like, that doesn't mean you're automatically rewarded. What you see are men struggling to figure out what other roles can they play? There's a nostalgia for the patriarchy, because at least then they were told what to do.

Brooke Gladstone: It's like the nostalgia for the Cold War. Things made sense.

Jessa Crispin: Things made sense. This was the bad guy. We were the good guys. Our flourishing was America's flourishing. Now, you can be other things, but men see that as threatening. The uncertainty creates anxiety rather than excitement.

Look at Jordan Peterson, for example. He's a man who has been telling men that their problems are essentially rooted in contemporary madness, feminism or Marxism or trans rights, that they don't have to adapt their understanding of themselves. It's everybody else who is wrong, and so you don't have to think about what masculinity is supposed to be for. We just have to keep being who we are, and it's everybody else who has to change.

Brooke Gladstone: Michael Douglas, we shouldn't confuse here the roles he played with the man himself, right?

Jessa Crispin: I'm not really interested in who Michael Douglas is as a person. If he's a bad person, a good person, it doesn't matter, because what matters is the work that he was doing. I think that he became, probably unintentionally, a kind of vessel for these very specific changes that Americans and men, specifically, were going through. It seems like maybe it was a bit of a burden to act out an entire nation's sickness, but I appreciate his contribution.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Jessa, thank you so much.

Jessa Crispin: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Jessa Crispin is a cultural critic and author of the new book, What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything. Thanks for checking out the midweek podcast. The big show posts on Friday a little before dinner time. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

 

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