Dark Narratives: March Issue

Featuring a deep dive into that one horror movie men can't seem to stop making

Spring is, at last, slowly beginning to peek its head through around the chilly corner, and though the world continues to be a troubled and chaotic mess, I cannot help but feel a little glimmer of hope. Spring is just like that for me: New beginnings, fresh starts, nature bursting into bloom, a brand new crop of nightmares waiting to unleash upon the world…

…wait, what was that last one?

This month’s writing guide: How to Write Better Descriptions!

Pick it up on Gumroad, pay-what-you want!

Some community updates:

• Scares that Care Authorcon is just a few short weeks away! If you haven’t gotten tickets yet, you can snag some now: https://scaresthatcare.org/authorcon

• Voices from the Mausoleum is a great podcast that you should be checking out, and I’m not just saying that because one of my stories is featured in Episode 4 :D https://anchor.fm/voices-from-the-mausoleum/episodes/Spooky-Saturday-Stories-Episode-4-e1ea4a8

• One sad announcement: Fireside Magazine is shutting its doors. It’ll continue to release all work under contract, but otherwise it won’t be accepting further submissions :(

Let me tell you a story about a man.

He has a tough time fitting in. He’s well past the age when he should have made something of himself, but instead he is stagnating in a job he hates, disrespected by those around him, living alone or perhaps dependent on his family for housing. Something sinister or strange is going on in his life, some inexplicable destructive force that he struggles to contain — and struggle he must, because there is a glimmer of hope that something in his life circumstances might change just around the corner. There’s a girl, you see, and unlike every other girl he’s ever met, this one actually seems to like him. But nothing can happen in this relationship until he gains control over that destructive force wreaking havoc on his life, that friendly influence that now threatens to destroy things just when they’re starting to get good…

Pop Quiz: Which movie or TV show did I just describe?

Just kidding, there’s no way to answer that, because it’s a storyline so common that it’s practically a sub-genre unto itself.

So what’s the deal with this tale? Who is this man, and where did he come from? What does his existence mean for the state of modern masculinity in fiction? And why do guys keep telling this story over and over, anyway?

The Secret Lives of Men

Willard (1971), based on a 1968 novel titled Ratman’s Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert, lays down an early template for this story. The film was later remade in 2003, and follows the broad strokes of the tale quite closely. In all versions, Willard is a shy, socially awkward man who lives with his mother and works at his father’s company under the demeaning management of a man who won’t even give him a raise despite his long, thankless hours. Things change for Willard when he befriends some wild rats at his home and finds that he can train or command them to do his bidding. With the help of the rats, he succeeds at last in achieving a better life, gaining wealth, status, and a girl to call his own — but it doesn’t last. One of the rats, furious that Willard has abandoned him to pursue a more normal life, returns leading the pack and, ultimately bringing about his demise.

In Roman (2006), the titular Roman lives an unsatisfying life as a factory worker. He lives alone but obsesses over his attractive neighbor, a woman he cannot quite get the courage to approach. When he finally does make a connection, it ends in tragedy — a misunderstanding leading to her accidental death — and now Roman has a body on ice in his bathtub and a dark secret to cover up. Worse, he’s now attracted the attention of a different woman, one who seems genuinely interested in him. But how can he possibly enter a relationship while another woman festers in his bathtub? This, too, is doomed for tragedy.

The 2019 film Benny Loves You introduces us to Jack, a toy designer who has long struggled to be taken seriously in his field. He lives at home with his parents well into adulthood, but once they die and he inherits the house, he decides it’s time to grow up and move on, tossing out his childish things. Unfortunately for him, one of those childhood toys has a mind of its own — and the stuffed Benny toy is more than happy to murder anything that comes between it and Jack. As Jack tries to navigate the romantic attention of a female coworker, he also has to cover for Benny’s increasingly outlandish acts of violence.

These are all horror movies, but the framework of this storyline is not limited to the horror genre. Consider, for example, Joss Whedon’s web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2008), which recasts the superhero/villain dynamic as jocks-vs-nerds bullying. Dr. Horrible wants both to attain greatness in the hall of villains but also to capture the interest of Penny, the girl he’s crushing on. He manages in the end to become a proper villain, but only after he’s caused Penny’s death and lost all his reasons for achieving the goal in the first place.

Or consider Wilfred, either the original 2007 Australian series or the 2011 American remake. Here, our protagonist Ryan is a depressed ex-lawyer who befriends his neighbor’s dog — who appears to him (and him only) as a man in a dog suit. Wilfred the dog is a bad influence on Ryan, getting him into mischief with his bawdy, vulgar, impulsive pursuits, and he’s consistently verbally abusive toward Ryan as well. But in an odd way, Wilfred’s influence is helpful as well, causing Ryan to think about his life in a new way and improve himself.

Failure to Adhere to the Script of Manliness

Here’s what all of these men — and countless others in films and TV — have in common: They fundamentally fail to conform to expectations of masculinity, and suffer because of it.

Western notions of heteronormative patriarchy provide some clear guidelines for manliness. Men should be ambitious, aggressive, protective. They should be willing and able to defend themselves, their loved ones, their community. They should earn (and deserve!) respect from others, and their well-paying respectable jobs should support a loving, attractive wife and a few kids.

Of course, this script describes an ideal, not any material reality. Failure to achieve these characteristics should not strip anyone of their manhood, and people other than men can have these traits as well — but that’s not what the cultural narrative says. The cultural narrative suggests that men who fail at achieving correct levels of masculinity are in fact not men at all.

What I find interesting about the stories I mention above, these tales of sadsack men, is they describe individuals trapped in this construct of masculinity, struggling to succeed within its framework, but unwilling or unable to rebel against it. The men in these stories are quite frequently sensitive, intelligent, creative, hard-working or dedicated — but these traits are not viewed as strengths. We do not see these stories as narratives about men who, in failing to adhere to the prescripted path, find an alternative route that plays to their strengths. We see instead men who are either held back from success by their own failures, or else men who try to succeed through other means only to fail — men who do not belong in the roles they’re trying to claim, who are ousted as usurpers for daring to enter those hallowed halls of masculinity.

I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that male storytellers would be drawn to crafting narratives about sensitive, intelligent, creative men who suffer under the patriarchy. What I find fascinating and tragic is that these storytellers seem to exude an immense self-loathing. The sadsack man with his dark secret is a figure relatable only by way of pity, and he must never rise above his station. His only acceptable end is tragedy. What does that say about male creators, then?

Fortunate Sons of Fortunate Sons

In a now-famous essay, SFF author John Scalzi once described being a straight white male as playing life on its easiest setting. The essay provides a clever analogy for privilege. The problem with privilege, though (like so many of our modern social justice concepts) is that it is systemic, not individual. Straight cisgender white men in America undoubtedly enjoy privilege as a group. But that privilege does not erase other difficulties in a person’s life. Factors such as mental health and neurodivergence, socioeconomic status, family stability, access to education, economic opportunities, and so forth all affect an individual’s ability to succeed.

But if young men are playing the game on easy mode and still repeatedly fail at its objectives, aren’t they forced to conclude that they’re not any good at the game?

And if the “game” in question is “real life,” doesn’t being bad at life make you…well…pathetic?

Against the background radiation of social justice messaging about the evils of white men, it must be hard to be a white dude without absorbing some of that self-loathing. This is the wrong choice, of course. The correct response to privilege is to acknowledge it and use it to the benefit of yourself and your community — to stand up for the rights of others, to protect those who are threatened, to use your platform to give voices to others, and so forth. But if you are in a dark place, where you cannot access those things your privilege is supposed to have given you, it might be easy indeed to hate yourself for your inadequacy.

It might also be easy to get angry.

I think this conflict is at the heart of the stories I’ve been talking about. I think, in some ways, the dark secrets carried by these sadsack men are a reflection of their own dual natures: They want so much to succeed, but they are weighed down by a secret violence. They don’t want it — it’s causing trouble in their lives — but it’s also the thing that makes them special or even gives them an opportunity to change their lives.

Insidious Incel Logic

Incel is a portmanteau meaning “involuntary celibacy.” Incels are, essentially, people (almost always white hetero cis men) who want very much to experience love and intimacy and relationships but who cannot seem to get them. As a subculture, they rose to prominence online in the 2000s, gathering in places like r/incels on Reddit, and their culture began to shift away from “shy lonely people who want to commiserate” to “angry bitter people who blame society for their problems.”

Incels (and their sleazy cousins, pick-up artists) imagine a world of strict social hierarchy, where men are divided into “alphas” and “betas” and “cucks,” where women repeatedly fall for the wrong guys, and where the very notion of masculinity is under attack. It’s not shocking, all things considered, that there would be an overlap between incels and white supremacists: both are reactionary conservative responses to a rapidly changing world that threatens to render their status quo as obsolete. When threatened, people lash out. And, boy, did they.

Self-described incels have been responsible for at least sixty deaths in eight acts of mass violence since 2014. They are viewed as a terrorist threat. And the foundations of their dangerous rhetoric are baked in to our understanding of gender, patriarchy, and masculinity.

What I find most concerning about the “sadsack men” stories I’ve been talking about is not actually the male characters and their troubled relationship to the world. It’s the way the female love interests are portrayed.

The women in these movies share striking similarities. They’re hot, frequently accomplished (often in the man’s same field - they’re often coworkers!) and have quirky personalities and interests. They are also immediately, deeply, and inexplicably attracted to the male heroes.

We never really see why these women are so interested in these men. Sometimes, as in Willard, the motive seems to be one of kindness bordering on pity — the woman is nice, and he perceives this niceness as an invitation. But, crucially, in this type of movie, that niceness is attraction. These women may have initiated contact due to pity, but they pursue romantic attachments anyway. This despite the erratic, volatile and bizarre behavior of these new men in their lives. This despite the men having no real redeeming qualities or anything interesting about them that might attract a partner.

Occasionally this is investigated or toyed with — in Roman, the woman who dies did so after becoming threatened by his advances, and the second woman who appears in Roman’s life is herself deeply troubled and a force of chaos. But just as often, the women are relegated to the position of “prize to be won” at the end of a struggle with the man’s inner demons. If only he could get past that angry little secret, he could be happy! Never mind what she wants or what he has to offer her in a partnership; she’s here to show him what is rightfully his if only he weren’t too pathetic to take it.

Against our current cultural backdrop, this feels intensely disturbing. Women-as-prizes are nothing new in storytelling, of course, and the manic-pixie-dreamer-girl archetype is a well-worn concept. But for stories like these, which seem to speak directly to the experiences of disenfranchised lonely men, couching relationships in these terms feels especially irresponsible.

A New Path Forward

So where do we go from here? Stories exploring the boundaries and definitions of masculinity feel important in our current culture. Unless (until?) we reach a point where gender is completely deconstructed, we will need to continue defining and redefining masculinity in a way that reflects the reality of our times. So I wouldn’t advocate throwing these stories out. But I do wonder whether it’s time to modify the formula.

I think we’re seeing some whispers of that already, or at least a growing self-awareness among these tropes. In Iain Reid’s novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2016), and even moreso Charlie Kaufman’s 2020 film adaptation, we’re introduced to Jake, a character who fits in well with the tropes we’ve described. But the story is told not through Jake’s eyes but the eyes of the love interest — a love interest who, we discover, is actually a figment of his imagination, a fantasy he constructed to ease his loneliness. Despite being a fictitious construct, the girlfriend has more agency and depth than most love interests in these stories — and in the film version especially, she walks away from the destructive behavior of the man who created her.

Even more on-point to our discussion is Guns Akimbo (2019), a film that stars Daniel Radcliffe as a dissatisfied computer programmer who finds himself unwillingly conscripted into a real-life murder game. He is quite literally turned into a weapon, his hands bolted to guns, rendering him into a tool good for violence but incapable of anything else. Brilliantly, he finds a way to both overcome this violence and turn it toward the systemic influences that put him in that position to begin with — and the film quite rightly lampshades the “ride-or-die girlfriend” trope in a hilarious inversion. I just watched this one recently and heartily recommend it.

One source of inspiration that might prove useful to creators looking to explore these storylines in new ways: folklore.

Fairytales have long provided a template for stories about youngest sons. “Puss in Boots” and “The Brave Tailor” and “Hop o’ My Thumb” and many others tell stories about young men who have no recourse to success in their societies. As youngest sons, they have no access to generational wealth or status. They must forge their own paths — and in these stories, they frequently do so through cleverness, kindness, courage, or diligence. Our modern sadsack male has much to learn from these tales.

What if, rather than succumbing to self-loathing for a failure to adhere to the scripted path, these characters rejected the script entirely? What if they played to their strengths? What if they acknowledged, at least, that they are caught up in a system that is stupid and arbitrary and deserves to be torn down?

That, to me, sounds like a story worth telling.

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