Three Men, and a Baby In The White House: Onur Tukel's The Misogynists
The day is November 8th, the year is 2016. Trump has just been elected president and sleaze ball business man Cameron (Dylan Baker) could not be more thrilled. He’s been living it up in a swanky hotel room since his contentious divorce, and has invited a small group of friends and coworkers to come celebrate with alcohol and cocaine. Several drinks in, sad sack Baxter (Lou Jay Taylor) could be doing better–he can’t seem to get off the phone with his wife Alice (Christine M. Campbell), who is picking a fight with him in an attempt to work out her bitter disappointment with the country. Thus begins Onur Tukel’s The Misogynists (2020), a movie that was written back in 2016 and now begins its theatrical release just in time for Valentine’s Day and President’s Day weekend.
I know what you’re thinking: “Why would I go see a movie about modern political anxiety when that’s precisely the one thing I’m trying to escape when I go to a movie theater?” The good news is that The Misogynists isn’t trying to stress you out as much as it’s a movie about grappling with stress. The film exists somewhere in-between a political satire and a farce, tackling how much the left inadvertently reveals about themselves when shoved into anxiety inducing situations. It also tickles an intellectually vouyeristic itch by attempting to peer into the minds of those who were actually happy after the 2016 election. Whether or not that’s your definition of a good time, there is something cathartic about the film’s fly-on-the-wall approach to analyzing people through their political convictions.
The Misogynists earns its name by painting a triptych of men who are scattered throughout the political compass. Cameron is the Trump supporting woman hater. He thinks a dose of chaos is always good for society and does not believe in God or a benevolent universe. Then there’s his friend Baxter, who has a secret drinking problem and voted for Bernie. While he believes people are inherently good, and doesn’t approve of Cameron’s racist or sexist views, he still finds himself peculiarly attracted to his friend’s brutal honesty despite himself. Lastly there’s Cameron’s coworker Grant (Matt Walton), who initially comes across as a slick ladies man. He arrives at the hotel room ready to party despite the election results, but ends up eventually leaving after arguing with Cameron over whether or not women deserve respect.
From there, the film spins off into female side characters who stand in for various archetypes of left wing views. There’s the black woman in the next hotel room over, who reasonably confronts Cameron about the noise from his room. She ends up getting into an argument with her white South African husband after she privately insults the loud neighbors as typical white jerks. Baxter’s wife Alice calls continually throughout the film, acting as a voice of reason (or perhaps Big Brother) to Baxter when he gets caught leaning too far into his vices and Cameron’s nonsense. There’s also an extensive back story to the two call girls Cameron summons, from their own disagreements about how empowering sex work is or isn’t, to an argument with their Muslim cab driver over feminism. Then to top it all off, there’s the hotel room’s television–which pops on randomly throughout the night, serving to disrupt dialogue as it shows inexplicable backwards stock footage set to the sound of pulsating noise.
The dialogue in The Misogynists varies from stilted blogger talking points to some of the more heinous Reddit threads. Whether a movie is self aware or not, it’s can be a chore listening to two assholes in a hotel room rank the ‘worst races,’ while doing lines of coke and taking shots of whiskey. These moments occasionally pile up like a bad traffic accident, leaving you sometimes wondering who actually acts like this. While I enjoyed Dylan Baker’s performance, Cameron feels too much like a left-wing interpretation of what Trump voters are like. He’s too broadly hateful, speaking relentlessly in racial slurs and bigotry. At one point he praises genocide as a way to restore balance in universe, justifying it with the line: “nature destroys itself in order to rebuild itself.” Tukel also sidesteps the religious right by making Cameron an atheist, which felt like a bizarre over simplification of Trump’s constituency.
Cameron’s reasons for being so hateful seem to stem solely from his failed marriage, which is the primary thing he focuses on in his life–even when he’s drunk and drugged up out of his mind. While not to say there aren’t people like this out there, I think Tukel went for far too narrow of a type by portraying the only right winger in the film as a total psychopath. By presuming that the only people who voted for Trump are people who are exactly like Trump, he missed exploring what people actually find inspirational about the man. The majority of voters aren’t consciously voting for somebody because of what they hate, they’re voting because of a genuine belief in the aspirational aspects of Trump’s messaging. I’m not advocating for giving equal time to “both sides” as much as I think it’s a dangerous oversimplification to dismiss Trump voters are mere “crazy” people.
That said, this movie is surprisingly insightful in its rather damning critique of the left. It’s clear from the level of nuance attributed to his other characters that Tukel is himself coming from a left wing point of view–only somebody who experienced loss in 2016 would be this grimly critical of their own team. Baxter Is the type of wishy-washy liberal you see more often than not; he talks a big game about equality but still enjoys laughing at Cameron’s overtly sexist jokes when he thinks he can get away with it. His wife Alice is another liberal caricature that could be a stand in for your typical Twitter social justice warriors. She paces in her room, lashing out over the phone but never doing anything proactive. She’s content to yell from the comfort of her own bedroom, feeling righteous in her own kingdom. Then there’s the millennial latino bellboy who’s more interested in free cocaine than immigration policies, and the ironic scene of the two call girls shouting down their Muslim cab driver for the intolerance of following a religion that dictates how women should dress. While I won’t give away the specifics of the ending, it’s certainly bleak–culminating in a congregation of liberal handwringing in place of immediate decisive action. Tukel is clearly bitterly disappointed with the left, to the point that he seems unsure if perhaps the right has a couple of good nuggets of wisdom buried under its hateful messaging.
I won’t get on my soapbox about how much I disagree with that pessimistic view, but I will say that Tukel offers some of his truest human insight through this hypercritical skewering of the left. If there’s one lesson to be taken away from The Misogynists it’s that the left isn’t necessarily diametrically opposed to the extreme right. Cameron’s ability to not be bogged down by anything, including a general sense of decency, immediately becomes attractive to Baxter in a way that echos many voter’s attitudes towards Trump. Baxter is ruled by a sense of guilt and obligation–to his controlling wife, to his children, and to the lofty ideal of the greater good–which causes him to mentally check out from the perceived pressure of it all. Baxter’s willingness to coexist with Cameron’s suffocating world views, at the cost of his own moral code and his marriage, goes to show just how powerful the temptation to stop caring is. But if everybody opts-out of their social responsibility then the more sinister players decide that now’s their time. I’ll take the pressure over national suicidal collapse myself.
The Misogynists is in theaters today in New York City. Find more dates in your city here.
