The male in crisis

The movies of the past several years seem filled with images of hysterical men lashing back against threats to white male power posited by women, minorities, and the general decline of patriarchal authority. This anxiety is palpable in the daily headlines, such as the 1997 case of the brutal, homophobic sexual assault by several New York policemen on a young Haitian man held in custody. This type of reprisal against an other seen as threatening to the privilege and security of white men is represented, sometimes very uncritically, in so much Hollywood fare as to provide evidence of a social and cultural predicament that at the moment looks like it will get much worse before it gets better.

"Falling Down" shows a nerdish, disaffected, middle-aged executive (Michael Douglas) turning a gun on a society for which he no longer has patience. The banner of the Angry White Male is picked up rather pedantically by Mel Gibson in his back-to-back films, "The Man Without a Face" and "Braveheart." The former is about returning the paternal authority of the man-boy relationship while supporting the canon of Western tradition against New Age decadence. "Braveheart" turns the cinematic clock back to the time before the anti-hero. Gibson's epic about the medieval Scottish rebel William Wallace constructs a hero who is an unproblematic martyr. It is not accidental that this indulgently homophobic picture ends with his castration and crucifixion by the effete English persecutors.

A few films, such as Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs," attempt to overturn conventions of the Hollywood action genre. Male professionalism and codes of honor are turned inside out, and the not-so-subliminal homoerotic underpinnings of the male group and the violence it produces are showcased.

No recent film has questioned the postmodern male in as devastating a fashion, though, as Neil LaBute's debut work, "In the Company of Men." While at times amateurish (the sound recording occasionally is weak and boom microphones are visible in some scenes), there seldom has been as unrelenting and uncompromising a vision of the contemporary male as in this movie. Two young, vaguely unwholesome executives, Chad and Howard, hatch a scheme over cocktails to return the slings and arrows they have suffered from the female sex by humiliating a woman. Chad, clearly the brains and good looks of the duo, suggests that they pick out a particularly vulnerable woman, woo her intensely over several months, and then laugh in her face as they reveal their plot and real intentions.

The person they select for their torment is vulnerable indeed -- a young deaf woman in the secretarial pool. Chad and Howard gloat over the woman's gullibility, even scoffing at her handicap. in some of the most chilling scenes in recent cinema. They are chilling not only because of the director's cool, ethnographic eye, but because his vision looks so terribly familiar and accurate.

The violence flows not from bloodbaths -- although the instinct to impose hurt in all forms is always implicit -- but from the casual joy men take in the suffering of others. It is doubtful that there has been a film as forthright about male hatred and fear of women. The movie is just as incisive about the injuries men do to each other, and it is more deft than Tarantino's films in suggesting how men transform love and desire into violence.

LaBute stages one of his most crucial scenes in a lavatory, as Chad regales Howard with news of his conquests while rapping on the door to Howard's toilet stall, needling him and impinging on his privacy. In another, Chad demands that a young black junior employee drop his pants to prove that he "has balls." The homoerotic allusions never feel like forced Freudianisms, but are very much of a piece with the film's flat, banal landscapes.

The terrors come not just from the sadistic scheme of the two plotters, but from the world that they embrace. Chad's glib conversations with peers in perfectly ordinary offices and board-rooms suggest that the two men's perverse plan is no aberrant conspiracy. The denouement is of shocking, pathological proportions, but without a profane word or a drop of blood. There is a "twist" ending that makes most of Hitchcock seem sophomoric, since it is not superimposed for effect, but a logical extension of what the film believes about how men relate to each other.

A motion picture more familiar with compromise is James Mangold's "Cop Land." This film, about a gang of hyper-corrupt New York cops who form a robber's roost out of a small New Jersey town, pretends to undermine conventions about movie super-heroes while being primarily a star vehicle intended to make viewers take Sylvester Stallone seriously as an actor. He plays a slightly overweight, sheepish local sheriff under the thumb of the bully-boy NTPD. Stallone is surrounded by heavyweight talent (Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta) in supporting roles, none of which is outside the generic. The picture plays around with issues of pandemic corruption, a New York mayor who turns a blind eye, and the Mob with its fingers everywhere. Unlike the best works of Sidney Lumet, "Cop Land" never tries for a systemic understanding of its evils. The symptoms of the Angry White Male are simmering in the all-cop bar that is the Eugene O'Neill-style centerpiece of the film, but the movie prefers to wrap everything up in a watered-down Sam Peckinpah gun battle that turns Stallone back into Rambo.