boy problems (who's got 'em)?
two films about men not going to therapy: tim robinson catastrophizes in friendship // nic cage bottles trauma in the surfer
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, along with some seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got a review of Friendship (out in some places today! and others later this month) plus Lorcan Finnegan’s new Nic Cage vehicle The Surfer. This newsletter comes out every Wednesday, which this week means Friday.
Andrew DeYoung’s debut film Friendship presents my worst fear: what if someone who didn’t go to high school with me tried to be my friend? Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd) is a normal guy with a nice house and a successful career. He regularly hangs out with his lifelong friends; together they make music, pursue interesting hobbies, and workshop strategies to raise their beautiful children. Then, one night, a neighbor comes over to initiate a new friendship, and everything comes crashing down.
Of course, DeYoung tells the story the other way around. Like What About Bob?, Friendship is a horror story from the viewpoint of a maniac intent on destroying the life of a normal person. This time the maniac is Craig, played by Tim Robinson, an unholy cross between an everyman and a psychopath. He can’t keep up with Marvel movies, he orders all his clothes from a catering company, he doesn’t realize that his wife’s inability to orgasm might have something to do with him, and - most importantly - he has no idea how to form or maintain male friendships.
Are you aware of this crisis of male friendship? I guess it’s a whole thing. I’ve always liked my friends, but I’ve recently come to realize, like many people between the ages of 20 and 40 who sometimes go on the internet, that nearly all of them have some variation of an anxiety disorder that makes them deeply unsure about the solidity of their relationships. As a completely relaxed person who is frequently compared in looks and disposition to Paul Rudd, this comes as a surprise. I’ve always thought the upshot of avoiding new people meant that I could live a normal and relatively unguarded life around the people I grew up with. Instead, I guess, I’m surrounded by Trojan horses filled with stranger danger.
As I watched Friendship, accompanied by one of my nervous-wreck friends, I had to realize that DeYoung centers on the freak because freaks appear to be the norm. Not that Robinson plays Craig like a Woody Allen-style, self-aware anxious person. To the contrary, Craig has no self-awareness whatsoever: uninhibited, he’s capable of manifesting the fever dreams of anxious people, an audience surrogate for every catastrophizer’s worst version of themselves. If you've watched I Think You Should Leave, you’re familiar with Robinson’s capacity for this sort of torment.1 To watch is to bear witness to an escalating series of ruinous social decisions, all brought into being through desperate grasps at social acceptance.
When Austin embraces Craig as a friend, things seem OK. Craig imagines rolling around the city together in a yellow Corvette. He buys a drum kit in hopes of forming a band. He makes plans to finally see the new Marvel movie. But just as we start to get comfortable, Friendship becomes a lying-in-bed-thinking-about-the-apocalypse spiral, escalating the smallest social hiccups to their most agonizing possibilities. What if my son not giving me a bite of his nachos is actually an indication that he and my wife are going to move out on me? What if my wife watching the morning news is actually the intimation of an affair with the weatherman? What if exploring that sewer tunnel leads to my eventual indictment on terrorism charges? Every imaginable disaster plays out onscreen, Meet the Parents dialed past ten, Craig transformed from a lovable loser to the uninhibited disaster that maybe exists in all of us. Where horror escalates anxieties into atrocities and drama structures them into plot, Friendship exposes them as what they are: absurdist mental set pieces that deserve to be laughed at.
This is the crux of the movie that I’m not doing a good job getting at: Friendship is funny. It isn’t funny in the way that you might expect an A24 movie to be a funny. It has occasional touches of art cinema (ominous shots of falling snow against street lights, non-chronological flashes, Kate Mara) but it's actually funny. It isn’t elevated, it isn’t artful, it doesn’t hang on its script. It's a comedy, an opportunity for actors who are funny to be funny. It’s funny in a way that I don’t think a movie has been funny since - Superbad? Tropic Thunder? Bridesmaids? I didn’t see or hear half of this movie because my face and mouth were contorted in the ways that laughter tends to contort them. It’s - I don’t know how you’re supposed to say this - gut-busting? pee-your-pants? aneurysm-inducing? - it’s really funny.
Because I struggle to just sit still and enjoy things, I’m inclined to find a movie like Friendship disturbing - a bleak statement about the impossibility of finding human connection, or something. But to demand a thesis from a comedy is depraved, and I have to check my impulse to intellectualize. I think this film, in it’s own perverse way, asks us to engage in something beautiful. We spend so much time worrying about what our friends think of us, whether or not we've offended someone, whether a text without an exclamation point means the beginning of a downward trajectory toward a restraining order and deportation and summons for tax fraud. I am going to hazard a guess that actually, for the most part, our friends love us. I know I love mine, despite them being the anxiety-ridden freaks that they are. The act of being alive is lonely enough that pretty much everyone is willing to forgive if it means holding someone in their life just a little bit closer. Like horror, comedy is a release-valve for the worst parts of ourselves, and I think the only lesson Friendship wants to teach us is that we can acknowledge what’s been released and laugh at it.
Another take on social anxiety, in a very different but no less unhinged style. Lorcan Finnegan's The Surfer asks a question that cuts even deeper into my heart: what if you returned to the town where you grew up only to discover that everyone has decided that they no longer want to hang out with you?
In many ways a love letter to the toxic horrors of Australian New Wave, The Surfer shifts the Christmas-in-the-outback nightmare of Wake in Fright to the South West coast, Nic Cage shipped in as a fish out of literal water: an American who desperately wants to be native (he claims, at least, that he grew up in a house on the cliff) who is denied his right to surf at a public beach that's been claimed by the resident surf gang as "locals only." His efforts to catch the break are thwarted by an escalating series of abuses that leave him isolated in the blazing sun of the car park, his humanity gradually chipped away as the local surfers and animals take away his possessions, his dreams, and his sanity.
If I'm Paul Rudd in Friendship then I'm definitely one of these blond douchebags in The Surfer. I’ve spent most of my life striving to be as unwelcoming as possible to anyone who moves to the Twin Cities in hopes that they’ll vet themselves back to New Jersey. Nevertheless, I found Nic Cage’s plight sympathetic. Especially as a St. Paul native who’s lived the past six years in exile in Minneapolis. What happens when I someday move back across the river, only to discover that my references to the St. Paul of my childhood mean nothing? What if my stance on trash pick-up has become so Minneapolis-addled that it sticks out like an American accent in Yallingup? What if someone finds out that I was actually born in Wisconsin?
I only indulge in this soul searching because what works best about The Surfer is the crushing anxieties it evokes with regard to personal authenticity. Nic Cage fully believes himself to be a local, just as he believes himself to be a competent surfer, and a decent father - and maybe even a loving husband. He very well may be all of these things. But the men around him, the people whose approval he doesn't ask for but nevertheless requires, refuse to give it to him. This is a film about man-on-man gaslighting, which isn't to make a men's rights argument about how men, not women, are the real victims of emotional manipulation, but rather to say that men are just as good at gaslighting each other as they are anyone else. Cage transforms from an unsympathetic American on a cellphone to a sun-stroked shell of a human being, questioning his ownership of his surfboard, his car, his father's watch, his wedding ring. And as the haze of unreality takes over the film, the viewer shares in the questioning. Are the Bay Boys bullies or protectors? Is the kookaburra laughter real or egoistic paranoia? Does my growing up here still count if I left?
The film gets increasingly punishing as it progresses: sun and shit and broken glass, all brought to us via classic Nic Cage derangement. It seems like a downward spiral film until a third-act turn when it becomes something else entirely, less an anxiety thriller and more a commentary on Andrew-Tate-style masculinity. The shimmery haze of heat-exhaustion shots and the George Miller crash zooms are replaced by a relatively conventional movie, the first time we feel confident that what what’s playing out in front of us is real. It doesn't last, and the haze ascends again into an impressionistic finale. If you want something bad enough you’ll accept any truth so long as the vagueness of reality doesn’t seep in to bust it.
Like Friendship, The Surfer is a film about the anxiety of not belonging. To be from somewhere is a fragile accord, and if you move away for even a minute you might find that you’ve lost your place. Finnegan seems to suggest that this feeling, so baked into my heart and soul, is in fact toxic - that acceptance into a place shouldn't come with means testing or real IDs2 of authentic manhood. At the heart of the film is a central trauma, it’s tendrils tied together in the final shots by flashing montages and washed over by crashing waves. I've never been anywhere near catching a wave on a surfboard, but I've felt the sensation of being caught up in a tide, and I can only imagine the escape one must feel standing on top of that. It's notable that we spend the entire film waiting for Nic Cage to experience the top of the world but never once see it happen. Does he finally catch it in the end? To be a man in this world is to drown in the undertow in hope of standing on top of a wave that isn't anywhere near as solid as we were promised it would be. Should I be depressed by that? Maybe not.
Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, pledging me money (thanks!), or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. Before we go: I’d like to use this space to acknowledge that my papal predictions last week were WRONG.3 Oh well, thrilled to see a Midwesterner ruling the world, even if he is a White Sox fan. We are getting into the real dogshit season, so who knows what I’ll be back with next week.
Friendship has been getting described as an extended I Think You Should Leave sketch, which is an easy comparison but not particularly accurate. Other than Robinson and a small appearance by Conner O'Malley, this is a different cast with a completely different production team. Andrew DeYoung is responsible for directing and writing, and though he's obviously working with Robinson's predilection for unbearable social situations, the vibe is different, and some of his directorial decisions (especially his framing) strike me to be just as promising as his writing.
We held out for so long in Minnesota against Real ID. I’m so ashamed that we finally caved.
