Who You Calling Boy? Theorizing Masculinities: Nocturnal Animals

Trigger Warning: This post contains mentions or discussions of rape, violence, and crude language.

Spoiler Warning: The post contains spoilers for the film “Nocturnal Animals” by Tom Ford.

The film Nocturnal Animals, only the second from fashion designer and director Tom Ford, is a dark and twisted expression of betrayal and grief. The film balances two narratives, one which depicts the novel and the other of the real-world. In the real-world narrative, Susan (Amy Adams) is struggling with the dissatisfaction of her life choices, including brutally ending her relationship with Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), a sensitive artist, to marry Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer), a handsome and wealthy man’s man. Years later, she receives Edward’s first published novel, sharing the same namesake as the film. The novel is a crime-thriller that focuses on protagonist Tony, whose wife and daughter are kidnapped, raped, and murdered by antagonist Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), as Edward stands helplessly by. Tony buries himself in shame and regret, obsessively working to find justice for what’s happened to his family, along with the help of Detective Andes (Michael Shannon), an officer on his last limb.

The film is dark and complicated, infuriating and haunting, but most notably, it’s beautiful. Ford meshes his eye for detail and fashion with the nit and grit of a story about the line between justice and vengeance, but all of it is dressed in high-fashion. This aesthetic is a distracting element, but purposefully so. Ford coats the mud of reality in materialistic things, noting his own efforts to “balance… the material world and the spiritual, or personal, world” (Variety 7:07), ultimately discussing the time-old notion of “having it all.” In this way, he relates to the character of Susan, whose comfort lies within the materialistic, but she struggles to fill the void of something equivalent to spiritual balance. However, Ford feels a kinship with Edward, as well, as “the kid growing up in Texas who was not great at football and not great with a gun, [and] was the sensitive one” (Variety).

Although the film isn’t presented to focus on the issues of masculinity, they are prevalent in the theme of the film, including the mention of Edward’s sensitivity, Ray’s sexual aggression and violence, and Detective Andes’ notions of violent heroics. The struggle of choice is focused on Susan as it’s her actions we see the consequences of. Ford captures Susan in her idealism with Edward and when its ripped away by her mother, who influences Susan’s decisions and encourages her to strategize her marriage for wealth and stability. Susan’s mother refers to Edward as weak, but Susan argues that he’s sensitive, not weak. This perspective seems to weigh on character’s like Edward and Tony as if their sensitivity was the dark cloud brought upon them. For Edward, Susan follows in her mother’s footsteps and leaves him for a man that would be approved by her. In the same instance, Susan also decides to get an abortion unbeknownst to Edward until much later. It’s this experience that Edward translates into the novel. Through Tony’s experience of losing his family due to inaction, Edward tells his story of grief, loss, betrayal, and the loneliness of having to piece it all together for himself.

The characters of Hutton Morrow and Ray, although seemingly different, are juxtapositions of the power men hold and potentially abuse. In contrast to Jake Gyllenhaal’s dual characters Edward and Tony, Hutton and Ray are from sensitive and exhibit the expected behavior of what makes a man, a man. Hutton is handsome and wealthy, but that’s all the audience is told, apart from his infidelities. The shallow depiction of his character is a representation of the shallow perspective he possesses. Hutton does what he wants because he has the money to. Ray, the villain of Edward’s novel, shares one difference with Hutton, and that is wealth. Ray is poor, living in a mobile home off a dirt road, and is depicted defecating in an outside toilet on his porch. The actor chosen to play him is purposefully handsome, not just to match the theme of Ford’s beautiful tragedy, but to make clear the slight differences between his character and Hutton. Both are good-looking men who do what they want to women.

Finally, Detective Andes’ character, who is sought out by Tony to help bring his family’s killers to justice, is a stereotypical heroic cop. On his last leg dying from cancer, Detective Andes’ convinces Tony to go outside the law in order to find justice. Andes becomes the trope that men are expected to mold to, but he’s a man plagued by the things he’s seen and the injustices he’s seen other endure. He chooses violence as a means to an end, dragging Tony with him. In the end, they both die in violence.

In summation, Ford tackles an internal and personal struggle to process emotions, inadvertently tackling the issues that ideals of masculinity create. In the pressures to be something else, Edward nearly loses himself, depicting that emotional struggle in the novel he writes and dedicates to Susan. He writes himself as Tony, who is driven to violence created by violence, and dies by his own weapon of justice – an obvious metaphor for the roundabout way in which vengeance overtakes us and kills us. Ford’s film is arguably a metaphor for the intertwining issues of the world today, but it comes down to a single core concept, controlling the way in which we treat each other.

Who You Calling Boy? Theorizing Masculinities

Sunday, November 19, 2017

Nocturnal Animals

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