The Wolf(man) At Our Door

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I've been wanting to write all week, some analysis of the current situation, maybe something inspiring and helpful around organizing and orienting ourselves, but I've only really been able to do so on bluesky, thoughts in tiny bursts, with immediate feedback loops of endorphins and positivity. (I think i've done some good writing and thinking, and i've been doing an ok job at not just staying on there doomscrolling and refreshing until I feel used-up, compulsive, empty, i've mostly walked away while I'm still feeling good). But writing just feels hard right now, not because there isn't so much to say, but because I just don't want to get started, I'm tired of thinking politically, I'm tired of thinking through writing, I'm tired of thinking about fascism, it's so boring, it's so unrewarding an object of contemplation.

So I decided to go to the movies, because sometimes having an object to bounce off of is helpful for me, although recently I haven't wanted to go to the movies much at all, I've been feeling deeply ambivalent about thinking with movies, which happens sometimes. But when they're working for me, one of the things that's so nice about movies is as an object to reflect my thoughts and feelings off-of, a space that makes me feel things in ways both unconscious and intellectual, giving me feelings and thoughts in ways that I can usually understand with enough reflection about how and why the movie facilitated me feeling them.

And Wolf Man turned out to be a really good movie for that. Wolf Man is really really tense, really intense, but it's also simple, straightforward, it gives you a lot of space to just be in your feelings of dread.

And as I was sitting there watching Wolf Man, written and directed by Leigh Whannell, I realized that Whannell's previous film, The Invisible Man, was the last film I saw in movie theaters before the pandemic began in earnest. And that movie is a really scary, taut thriller about domestic partner violence and abuse, the villain a tech mogul like Elon Musk, and now five years later, as we return to similar social levels of anxiety, horror, and brutal patriarchal domination and control in the white house, with that film's very villain co-president, here Whannell is with Wolf Man, and here I am watching another movie about gender and gendered violence and the possibility of healing by the guy who wrote the first three Saw movies and the Insidious franchise and like how did this fucking guy get so thoughtful? And just like The Invisible Man people aren't really very interested in Wolf Man because it's about gender and when movies are about gender people tend to think they're about nothing.

And as I sat there in the theater with my sweater up around my chin because I kept getting scared and grossed out and so was made to pleasurably cover my eyes in gross out and fear I also got to think about my sort of bullshit but also earnest claim that vampire stories are about trans-femininity and werewolf stories are about trans-mascs. This claim works a bit cleaner if you just say "femininity" and "masculinity", vampires are seductive, beautiful, subtle languid objects of dangerous desire, werewolves pure muscular hairy violent explosions of uncontrollable want. The gender theory of vampires also explains why vampire vs. werewolves is an enduring genre trope but you don't have multiple hit franchises of zombies vs. ghosts or witches vs. creatures from the black lagoons.

For a moment Wolf Man looks like it's gonna be a real ode to toxic masculinity. It opens with the main character, Blake, as a child, maybe 12, being raised by a rage-filled single-dad, a traumatized off-the-grid marine corps vet in the deep back woods of Oregon in the 90s - a nod that he's actually a white supremacist, if not a neo-nazi definitely a militia movement guy - although the movie lacks the conviction to just give him direct political signifiers.

After a scary encounter when they're out hunting with a werewolf (we get a little text crawl during the opening credits about how there is a local indigenous legend about werewolves in these woods, which, please, im begging you, why) we cut to the present day and we see the same boy but now Blake's all grown up, he's Christopher Abbott, he's an adult on a city street holding shopping bags in one hand and a giant teddy bear with fairy wings in the other - he's shopping with his daughter.

He shouts at her briefly when she does something dangerous, then he apologizes, takes responsibility, describes to her what happened for him. He has clearly done a lot of healing work, has become sensitive, vulnerable, open: putting that violent abusive dad in his past. And furthermore there's a moment of trans panic, sort of - she puts lipstick on him in a playful moment while he's cooking but then says he looks creepy - and his butch wife (Julia Garner) is a journalist who is bringing home the bacon while he stay-at-home-dads. The movie seems to be setting him up as "emasculated", as cucked.

The main plot is kicked into motion when he gets notified that his father has died and he has to go back to Oregon to deal with his deceased papa's affairs, and he proposes the whole family go up to spend the summer because his wife and his romantic relationship has been on the rocks and she's feeling alienated and he's feeling lonely and unloved, and it's really beautiful up there, but if they go up there he's gonna have to deal with the werewolf, so it seems like it's setting him up to have to rediscover the survivalist fascist masculinity his dad taught him to protect his family.

Delightfully, however, the movie refuses that easy gesture. Though becoming-wolf remains a metaphor for embracing fully unconscious masculinity, it is tragic, violent, terrifying...and the power it grants is ugly and strange, while it can be used to protect people, in the end, as he puts it to his daughter in an earlier scene, talking about the protective pose of fatherhood "you become the thing that does the scarring".

I know I'm being vague about the story, and partly its because there's not a whole lot of plot to this movie, and so leaving it open ended is best, it's a tight and small cast thriller with incredible sound design and some extremely neat visual effects (the money shot of every werewolf movie since American Werewolf in London has been the transformation sequence, but this movie figures out a really cool way of changing it up, keeping it unexpected, violent and bizarre, and wow, it's so gross).

It's less good than Invisible Man, and I think partially that's because Whannell's limitations as a director of actors and writer of dialogue is less obvious when he was working with the generationally talented Elisabeth Moss, the star of that film, but also because this movie is more directly just a bourgeois family drama (it's giving Stephen King). Still, they make for a nice thoughtful diptych about gender, gendered violence, and patriarchy, and his universal monster updates are the only currently existing "franchise reboot" movies I would be excited to see more of.

But as I was sitting there I realized that these movies also make for a pair of bookends on a sort of historical interregnum, an interregnum in which I worked on my own shit and I fantasized maybe it wouldn't just be one large spiraling combat with patriarchy forever, in which we wouldn't have to destroy fascist masculinity at the level of total insurrection, in which I hoped against hope I might be wrong, that maybe things wouldn't be as bad as they so clearly were, a hope that I experienced but never really expressed or admitted to myself, not until it was smashed to pieces in Gaza, then finally buried in the election. I grieve it, it buoyed me sometimes: believing I wouldn't have to do it myself felt like rest.

This belief, that maybe someone else will come to take care of all my needs without my asking, that someone will swoop in without me naming my want or admitting my vulnerability, is a helpful fantasy for surviving in a world of constant cognitive dissonance, in which we are forced to spend the great majority of our time, will power and conscious effort doing tasks we couldn't care less about to pay people we hate for the privilege of living inside and eating. And we have to smile while we do it. Surely someone else will free me from this! They must!

But that fantasy is also the shaping fantasy of patriarchy, that a man in all his wisdom and power will protect a woman/child like me, all I need do is agree to be his object, to care for his emotional needs and I needn't worry for anything. And of course as in all ideology this is an exact reversal, the opposite of the truth: in the cishet structure it is the man who is babied, who has all his emotional cares taken away so he can go out every day and do cognitive dissonance for the economy, he must use his body yes but he need never trouble his heart. It is the wife who is required to have all the wisdom and power, to know and understand and soothe and fix the problems so the husband never confronts his own powerlessness and stupidity, the child who must love and adore and grow and be grateful and cute and happy so that the father need never feel his own withering emptiness.

This is why Tucker Carlson (or whichever of these useless shits) gets up on stage and says "Daddy's back". For the fascist, the nation-state is daddy, and your daddy is the model for the nation: vengeful, independent, powerful, violent, he takes away all choices, all thoughts, you need only give yourself over to him and his rule(s) completely. Fascism offers a new daddy, you can return to your childhood, you can become a child again in political affairs while still being the man of the house, it is a double satisfaction, no responsibility beyond fealty, you are the king of your castle as long as you sacrifice all desire for more to the one big daddy, become his object and you will become the only subject, which is to say full person, in your own fief.

America will be great again by making your faggot son cut his hair and join the army, by making your bitch ex-wife drop demand for alimony payments, by making that uppity boy behind the counter think twice about talking back to you, by making your paperless house cleaner quiver in fear and accept when you cut her wages in half, you will be a master of your domain once again, just as the leader is the master of his domain, which he gives back to you in synechdoche.

Your fealty to him means you need never think about anyone else again, just think about him, do what he tells you, and he will let you know exactly what you're allowed to do (anything) to anyone who threatens your castle.

We all need rest, and care, we all want to have responsibilities taken away, to have less on our shoulders, less weight to carry. That desire is fundamental, it is a demand for justice, for wellbeing, it is one of the sources of our resistance. Similarly, the child, who does not know how to ask, needs this care to be provided without being asked for. And so often she is failed, especially in the nuclear family household, with only one or maybe two motherers. Almost all of us carry that disappointed child in us, that child unable to ask but needing everything, and not getting what she needs, we remember her disappointment, her fear, and we might carry on her coping mechanisms or her insufficient methods of self-soothing or her compensations and confusions.

Fascism is to deny that child was legitimate in its hurt, to deny that the child deserved anything beyond what it got, to deny that we carry her with us still, to deny that we were ever her.

For the fascist, it frankly and simply was your mother's duty to fulfill those needs, she had to and if you didn't get everything you needed it is her fault, the bitch, but luckily your father taught you how to take it like a man, how to toughen up and not worry about all that shit, and now as adults when you feel a lingering emptiness a terrifying void an unfillable need it isn't because the child still hurts, it's because the women and servants and employees and Blacks in this world don't know their place, aren't working hard enough, aren't giving you your birthright, those lazy ungrateful swine. Fascism means you never have to admit that you need support, or love, or care, or anything at all, and simultaneously, the fact that you're not getting what you want is the fault of everyone else not doing their duty.

And because they're not doing their duty, because of that anger, that lack, that hurt you feel, well, you never have to recognize that anyone below you on social hierarchies is deserving of anything that you don't feel like giving them, a protection you can dole out as you see fit but revoke whenever and however you want. If the person below you on the hierarchy is not your property, is not yours (and here the subject/owner/"you" is both the individual patriarch and the nation/state), if they are illegitimate, or illegal, or ungrateful, then you owe them nothing and can do anything to them. And if they are yours, but they don't give you what you want, you can force them to give it to you. Fascism means you never need to ask for anything. Taking is ultimately the only real truth; ownership and property the only real relation.

Fascism is the refusal to take accountability for the harm you do- see all the rapists in Trump's cabinet - but it is also a refusal to take responsibility for the help you need, the help you want, and the help you have already had (hence their hatred of history). You reject the subjecthood of the people who might help you or who have helped you in order to maintain the fantasy that you are responsible to nothing and no one, not even-perhaps especially not-to yourself. Your only responsibility is to the leader. To daddy. To give him your love and respect and admiration and fill his lack, and thereby receive permission to take what you need to fill yours.

To be a fascist is to act like a baby among men while dreaming you are a wolf among sheep.

If these fascists refuse to change, if they continue to hurt everything and everyone around them in the name of not accepting their own responsibility, they will need to be put down. It will be a kindness to them: no escape from responsibility is so total, so final. One final gift to these wolfish baby men.

Three and a half stars.