From the Harvey Weinstein-tackling She Said to The Reckoning of Jimmy Savile, mainstream media isn’t afraid of taking the worst of humanity and shoving it onto our screens. Whether you deem it crass opportunism or key cultural commentary, Hollywood’s interest in abusive, dangerous men is so often successful — both critically and commercially (see the Dahmer miniseries on Netflix) — that it’s sure to remain commonplace in that culture. What’s more, recent films like Mandrome and The Beast suggest that the next awful thing to get the Hollywood treatment is, unsurprisingly, a new genre of awful man: incels. And as a subculture that provokes so much discussion — namely, how do you depict them on screen without risking glamourising their behaviour? — this recent spike of “incel cinema” is bound to prove controversial.
As a term, incel — short for involuntary celibacy — has harmless origins. First used on a mid-90s website made by a young queer woman from Toronto as a place to discuss her sexual inactivity, in the 2010s, pockets of people adopted it, using it to define their misogynistic online community based around male supremacy, which bred a slew of horrific real-world attacks. Incel is, to put it lightly, a charged term, but one that’s recently entered the cultural conversation as a form of entertainment too, with varying intent: New York Magazine used it as a provocative way to describe the film Bottoms, dubbing it a “lesbian incel comedy”. Jesse Eisenberg’s recent decision to play one, in John Trengove’s Manodrome, feels like bait for a second Oscar nomination.
Early reviews of Manodrome – which follows Jesse’s character Ralphie as he gets sucked into a cult of male separatists — have called the film “hollow” and “reductive”. When it’s released, it’s likely to fuel extensive discourse about whether we’re giving incels too much of a platform. There’s also the issue of whether films like Manodrome act as a tempting invitation for copycat crimes. Todd Phillip’s Joker, for example — a film about a loner infatuated by his female neighbour, driven to violence — was met with a barrage of alarmist reactions upon release in 2019: described as “dangerous in the wrong hands”, the U.S. military even warned the public of the potential for mass shootings at screenings of the film. For some experts on incels, these are valid concerns. “Representations that publicly affirm feelings of victimhood among men not only undermine the political action on gender-based violence, but encourage those who feel persecuted towards violence,” Dr Lisa Sugiura, a professor in cybercrime and author of Incel Rebellion says.
It’s not just ethical implications that makes putting violent incels on the big screen so difficult. With cinema’s easy-to-follow narratives often coming at the expense of nuance, the public are also presented with unhelpful stereotypes. “These representations of socially-isolated virgins are not going to improve public awareness of incels,” Lisa says. “We need nuanced and accurate details about what drives misogynistic incels and makes the connection with broader societal misogyny”. What would that look like? For Lisa, it’s Don’t Worry Darling, in which Harry Styles depicts Jack’s “indoctrination into a type of incel community through mainstream podcasts and online forums”. For her, this does the important work of pushing against the “assumption that incels are contained to clandestine online spaces”. It is, however, a very fine line. In Don’t Worry Darling, the shoehorning in of an incel narrative — the reveal that it is, in fact, a scary, balding version of Harry Styles controlling everything — effectively does away with the film’s feminist sensibility. All of this makes the importance of “female pleasure” touted by director Olivia Wilde throughout the film’s chaotic press tour feel like a bit of a sham.
Though they predate the incel subculture making its way into the mainstream, films like Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant manage to harness the qualities Dr Lisa Sugiura promotes as necessary parts of the conversation. Polytechnique — based on the 1989 Montreal Massacre — emphasises that the motivation for the attack was misogyny, with Denis highlighting the lengths gone to by the perpetrator to make sure his victims are solely women. In Elephant — inspired by the 1999 Columbine High School massacre — Gus highlights the full matrix of hate that has guided the perpetrators, calling to our attention their interest in Nazism. This, of course, mirrors the real world of violent incel communities, who more often than not are motivated by values of white supremacism as well as misogyny.
Despite their subject matter, Polytechnique and Elephant aren’t overwrought, which is of vital importance when it comes to accurately depicting these subjects. As much as they’re abhorrent, it needs to be acknowledged that, as Zack Beauchamp points out in his article for Vox, “incel communities are steeped in irony and trolling”. It’s this that’s at the core of Bertrand Bonello’s upcoming Léa Seydoux-starring film, The Beast. In it, George Mackay’s rendition of an incel killer — which, at points, borrows verbatim from “incel hero” Elliot Rodger’s video manifesto — is practically comedy. When the character’s self-filmed, delusional tirades are given the big screen, his words aren’t legitimised, but often made to look silly. It’s by not shying away from confronting violent incels head on that the film manages to simultaneously remove their power. The key triumph of The Beast, though, is how it does that without diluting their deeply harmful potential.
The Beast will invariably attract the same concerns as all films tackling these hard to address themes. And though it is by no means perfect, it’s a step in the right direction when it comes to depicting violent incels in that it does so with no frills. As Laura Bates notes in Men Who Hate Women, “we cannot confront the real threat these groups pose unless we are prepared to look at it directly in the eye”. It doesn’t benefit to “euphemise, allude and dance around its edges”.
By undermining the hateful values that drive the most extreme fringes of the violent incel movement in this way, we might be able to make cinema that can’t later be wielded by incels as something that reaffirms their warped ideologies. After all, what is crudely referred to as “incel cinema” (or “incelcore”) are films that never intended for that to be their fate. Films like Taxi Driver, American Psycho and Fight Club (which Edward Norton recently called “proto-incel”) have been appropriated by the subculture. In a recent interview with The Guardian, David Fincher — who directed Fight Club — said he’s “not responsible for how people interpret things”. That’s true, but it’s not all that helpful.
Another film about violent incels is inevitable, and while that might seem like Hollywood cashing in on a deeply harmful subculture, what if it could be a good thing? By making films with nuanced depictions of these individuals that fully grapple with our culture of misogyny, we might just have a shot at neutralising their hate from the inside. More than that, with cinema’s longstanding history of exploiting the suffering of women, it might be time to put the onus on those responsible, and to further explore the conditions that make their behaviour possible.