| Jackson Stern |
Natural Enemies plays at the Trylon Cinema on Monday, June 9th, as part of Bleak Week. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Of all the corruption, illnesses, and injustices affecting the world today (you could count them on fifteen hands), few are as elusive as what many refer to as the “male loneliness epidemic.” We seem to discuss this very real sickness as if it’s a new thing but long before the age of incels and red pills, signs of this affliction were already seeping into the fabric of our contemporary culture. You could say that there are traces of things to come in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Camus’s The Stranger, or, perhaps most popular of all, in Martin Scorsese’s classic film, Taxi Driver. But if you follow that pipeline just a little bit farther, you’ll find perhaps the most damning forecaster of the toxic male ideology and its dangers: a little-known and even less appreciated film from the director of Revenge of the Nerds (uh-oh), Natural Enemies (1979). To experience a taste of what kind of concentrated despair you’re in store for is as simple as reading a logline: Paul Steward (a masterfully commanding Hal Holbrook), the editor of a scientific publication, plans to kill his wife, Miriam (Louise Fletcher in perhaps her most powerful performance on this side of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and children at the end of the day. I wish I could tell you that the whole picture isn’t as fatalistic as that synopsis makes it sound but it’s just that type of movie… a blisteringly frank and oppressively dour portrait of a man under the influence’s final day on Earth.
The film begins with a Schrader-esque voiceover narration from our main character as he muses on the state of his life and his homicidal-cum-suicidal aspirations. He stares out his bedroom window before methodically loading a rifle in real time and fantasizing about his nefarious plans. What follows is a diurnal odyssey of Paul going about his day leading up to the tragedy: a day which includes going to work, having a lunchtime orgy with five sex workers, grabbing a drink with a colleague, and riding the train home before his emotionally strung wife picks him up at the train station. All these activities are littered with existential conversations with whoever will listen; conversations about his “theoretical” plans, the emptiness of his life, and the meaninglessness of existence. This doesn’t exactly sound like the filmic equivalent of painting the town red (in the sense of the idiom… in the literal sense, I guess it isn’t too far off) but this isn’t some empty, edgy exercise in misery. There’s stuff in this forty-six-year-old film that wouldn’t at all be out of place in a conversation about our modern zeitgeist.
To begin with, the portrait of married life is perhaps as unnerving as it’s ever been on the screen. I remember feeling alarmed during key scenes of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (the film which inspired writer/director/editor Jeff Kanew to draft a film treatment of Julius Horwitz’s controversial 1975 novel of the same name) but I don’t remember Erland Josephson groping Liv Ullman while she sleeps during the opening movement, nor do I remember him later admitting to marital rape as Paul later does in this film. It’s very clear from the opening scenes that he doesn’t see his wife as a human person with feelings but rather, a commodity which he can do whatever he pleases with because in his version of masculinity (and the version of so, so many insecure males throughout history), domination is the mark of man.
If you weren’t already repulsed by Paul’s abhorrent fantasies, this is the moment where Kanew drills it into your head that what we’re dealing with here is the last step on the ladder of toxic masculinity. This is further exemplified by the style of the film, or rather, lack thereof. While similar portraits of suburban misery typically employ some sort of stylistic flourishes in order to offset or ease the viewer into the domestic horrors to come, this is one hundred purified minutes of staring down the barrel of the abyss and Kanew’s not going to let you forget that for a second. The camera is very static for the most part, with the only cinematic mechanisms employed being a few meaningful 70s slow-zooms and the occasional use of shallow focus. It’s often documentary-like, akin to Friedkin’s film, though strictly without the propulsive energy that makes his films so watchable despite how dark they are.
This stylistic purgatory is at its most effective in the scenes between Paul and Miriam where the coldness of their marriage has no place to make sparks. They often play out less like a conversation between a husband and a wife and more like a police interrogation: Paul is silent and clinical (perhaps emulating the type of “stoic” man he believes he is supposed to be, as a husband and father) while Miriam is probing and wounded. You wonder how these two catastrophically different souls became cosmically entwined, but the film isn’t much interested in an answer. There are brief glimpses into their shared past through harsh, sudden flashbacks where it seems that their courtship was always this misshapen and estranged. “We communicate silently like cockroaches have for fifty million years,” Paul says at one point in his consistently inhospitable monologue. There are small moments where you get the sense that he does, in some distorted way, care for his wife (or at least did) but that feeling gets lost in the cavernous black hole that is his heart. A pit of self-loathing so deep and profound that it’s led him to selfishly believe that there is nothing in the world but desperate pain just waiting to be snuffed out. It’s this disposition where the true depth of Paul’s character rears its ugly head.
One of the most infuriating traits of sociopaths (a diagnosis which I’m not qualified enough to discern whether Paul is in fact a case of) is their self-certainty, a trait which Paul serves up in spades. Throughout the film, Paul is confronted with many different figures who offer some sort of advice or express some sort of concern, whether it be a colleague or a random woman he meets on the train. Maybe he needs to be analyzed or undergo therapy, maybe he needs a new illuminating sexual experience, or maybe he needs to write to his wife to express the things he couldn’t unburden through the means of physical speech. But every single one of these interactions ends with Paul’s frustration and his vocal (either to his scene partner or to the audience) condemnation of whatever advice they serve him. He makes excuses that he’s too far gone, that the world is just a hopeless place and one less cockroach in it can’t be anything but a good thing. He hates himself yet he’s paradoxically unable to think about or express anything besides his misery and his inability to identify with anyone else’s suffering. The most provoking (yet illuminating) example of these interactions is when he cannot see the difference of gravity between his suffering and the past suffering of one of his colleagues, a Holocaust victim whose parents were slaughtered in the camps. It’s this point where any pity for Paul is abandoned and replaced with abject fear.
Another prime example of Paul’s dissonance is when an astronaut visits his office in hopes of writing an article for his publication about his experiences on the moon and the immense, cosmic loneliness that struck him when he was momentarily separated from his crew. The astronaut describes, quite poetically, how his body was “ice-cold” with fear and how he perceived this crippling moment of loneliness not as loneliness of the self but of the collective: the isolation that every person on Earth feels at some point in their lives. He asks Paul if this is a “valid basis for an article” and Paul, of course, shuts him down by saying “No one has ever captured on paper the feeling of being alive. Two people have to feel it, together, at the same time. And that hasn’t happened since the beginning of the world.” This scene is a perfect microcosm of Paul’s fractured ideology and his inability to comprehend even the idea of seeking ways to change it. He’s so far down a well of self-deprecation and despair that there’s no way for him to fathom the unhappiness of others. He can’t entertain the power of beauty because to him, the world is a black hole that has no chance of being filled, no matter the amount of determination or resources you pump into it. So, what’s the use of trying? This is the inherent selfishness of Paul. A selfishness which pervades throughout the world, and which has only grown more prevalent and grotesque in the years following Natural Enemies’s unceremonious release. Our young men mold their failures into hatred, our billionaires preach the rejection of empathy, and our leaders are paragons of bigotry and indifference. And throughout it all, they pillage, they dominate, and they colonize because to them, that’s the way men are and always will be. This is the selfishness and the inability to change for the better that leads to the ruin of men like Paul Steward and so many others. So, the only thing left to ask is this: are these portraits of bleakness, these ghosts of men really doomed to drift along the surface of the moon until some absolute tragedy finishes them off (much like the fate of our Paul Steward) or is it not too late for some golden vessel to come along and bring them back down to Earth?
Edited by Finn Odum