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by Anne Moore
If you went to the movies much in
the 1980s and early 90s, then you're probably familiar with the stock
Michael Douglas character – the Embattled White Guy. In movies like
Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Falling Down,
he carries the banner for privileged white guys everywhere as he fights
the forces of chaos as personified by women and people of color. He carries
the burden fairly well, all things considered – his privilege doesn't
come across as a burden, but just as the expected order of things, and
the removal of threats to that privilege creates the resolution of the
narrative.
In the last ten years or so, however, the
Michael Douglas oeuvre has taken something of a beating –
he's still playing essentially the same character, but has become more
famous for those icky spreads in People where he's mooning with
his child-bride Catherine Zeta-Jones over their new baby, and even his
characters have become less powerful (like his ineffective drug czar in
Traffic). This looks like good news – the figure of the
Embattled White Guy has become less sympathetic, it would seem. However,
like the interchangeable villainesses of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct
and Disclosure, the Embattled White Guy has risen again, with
a more benign face this time, but up to the same old tricks.
Right now, the mantle of privileged white
guys everywhere seems to have been passed to Dennis Quaid, who is in my
opinion a scarier representation of privilege than Michael Douglas ever
was. Quaid's repertoire of roles looks pretty different from Douglas's
– he emerges from narratives usually triumphant, but begins them
from a much more vulnerable place than a Michael Douglas character.
In The Rookie, he plays an
over-the-hill baseball player who makes his first stab at major-league
play in his forties, after having long abandoned hope of a career in sports.
In The Day After Tomorrow, he plays an absentee father who redeems
himself by going on a cross-country trek across the frozen tundra of New
England (don't ask) to save his son. In all these movies, the patriarchal
power he holds is surrounded by the textual equivalent of a candy coating
of seeming vulnerability. Progressive viewers like me are less likely
to question the power he gains because he acquires it from a disempowered
position – a position that looks pretty familiar to the female/queer/non-white
audience member, but is in fact profoundly different.
His newest film, In Good Company,
cements for me his position as the Embattled White Guy for the new millennium.
He plays a sales executive for a Sports Illustrated-type magazine who
loses his job to a young upstart from a global multinational (Topher Grace)
who, adding insult to injury, promptly begins sleeping with his daughter
(Scarlett Johannson). True to formula, Quaid regains his job by the end
of the movie, and the ethics of old-school corporate America triumph over
globalization. More than in any of his other movies, Quaid is presented
here as the paragon of American masculinity, presiding over his family
as a firm but loving patriarch who truly cares about shilling ads for
Sports Illustrated.
Because of his relatively vulnerable position
throughout the movie, and since it's made very clear that he only wants
whatever power he might gain in order to help his family, it’s easy
to miss the misogynist tone of much of the movie. The moral of In
Good Company seems to be that if things could just go back to the
way they were a generation ago when, according to the movie, corporate
America was somehow nobler, then people would be able to find meaning
in their lives more easily.
In itself, this kind of message isn't so
bad – after all, globalization pretty much sucks, right? However,
the message is linked to the idea that it must by definition be men who
hold this power, and that the right kind of corporate power is linked
to the right kind of familial power – a kind that looks a lot like
Ozzie and Harriet.
In a moment as blatantly misogynist
as any tidy disposal of a villainess in a Michael Douglas movie, the final
scene of In Good Company features Morty, a previously browbeaten
ad exec, crowing to Topher Grace's character about how his wife (whom
he has previously described as – I'm not kidding – wearing
"the pants in the family") lost her corporate job just as he
was rehired at Sports Illustrated. The balance of power, it seems, has
been "restored."
I didn't walk out of In Good Company
with the same bad taste in my mouth that lingers after a Michael Douglas
movie, though, and this is why I think Dennis Quaid is ultimately a more
effective (and maybe more dangerous) conservative spokesman than Douglas.
Instead of wanting to tear down the patriarchy, I just wanted to call
my dad.
Michael Douglas movies begin with the assumption that the viewer endorses
his position of power, while the object of a Dennis Quaid movie looks
a lot more like conversion or recruitment. While the Michael Douglas movie
seems aimed at other rich white men in positions of power, Dennis Quaid
movies feels like they're aimed at me – the vaguely alienated kid
of a corporate hotshot – with the goal of showing me how rough it
is at the top.
According to the Culture Vulture herself, if Anne Moore had an
oeuvre, it would be Rocknroll Superstar.