The Year of Pathetic Men
Dispatches from loserdom: are stories about bad men meant to indict or inoculate them?
Stand with Minnesota is organizing various fundraisers for the continued ICE occupation of Minneapolis, and they update daily with a different GoFundMe for people who need direct support. I’m also supporting Maremoto’s Latino Business Directory for the Super Bowl, encouraging people to buy directly from Latino businesses impacted by ICE raids on Sunday!
Plot descriptions and very minor spoilers for The Disappear and Half His Age.
A few weeks ago, one family’s (semi) private dysfunction entered the public discourse. Brooklyn Beckham, son of Lady Posh (Former Spice Girl Victoria) and soccer star David Beckham, released a series of Instagram stories condemning his family, accusing them of harassment via the press, terrorizing his bride (Nicola Peltz, daughter of Republican donor, Trump crony, and billionaire Nelson Peltz) and various other imaginary injuries.
Online, the divide seems to be generational: Millennials, forever in league with the memory of the Spice Girls, stand with Victoria, declaring Brooklyn to be a spoiled brat with nothing else to do but rage against his family for… wanting to spend time with him sans his wife. Gen Z, on the other hand, are much more familiar with the language of cutting people off, protecting one’s peace, and assuming hurt feelings are tantamount to declarations of war and should be treated as such. (I’m being a tad hyperbolic here going off of TikTok comments, as the data shows Millennials are much more likely to be estranged from their families, but this could also be an age thing— if the oldest members of Gen Z are 29, how many of them realistically have reached their breaking point?)
Discourse around familial estrangement aside— my view is that the American obsession with the nuclear family and the odd way people have been culturally taught to prioritize their spouses above everyone else definitely influenced this crack in the Beckham foundation + you can see a dozen comments of people proudly declaring their spouses are more important than their children here— I was intrigued by Brooklyn coming forward with his furiously typed Instagram screed.
For those unfamiliar with celebrity gossip, Brooklyn is widely regarded as a loser: when he was 15, he attempted to be a model. When he was 16, he was hired by Burberry to shoot a campaign— no training, no experience, no art school, no photography classes. Just a kid, a camera, and a multimillion dollar photoshoot! People were furious, and Brooklyn attempted to earn his stripes by attending Parsons. He immediately dropped out and was given a book deal for a photography book (the pictures still haunt Twitter almost a decade later).
Yes, he was 17 years old, and people are allowed to try things, but the lack of follow through spoke to a greater inability to commit, in my opinion. When he was 21, he pivoted to cooking with a series of cooking videos that each reportedly cost $100,000 to film. The series was also abandoned.
I’m not a nepotism hater, per se. I love Allison Williams. I love Kate Hudson, I love Tracee Ellis Ross. There is a difference between someone who is good and passionate at their craft and someone who is given ample opportunity to flop, and Brooklyn, unfortunately, is a flop. His job is currently ??? and he spends more time stewing over slights than pursuing anything outside of attending parties and being photographed looking sullen.
For the empathetic, there is a different lens to view this from: people are saying that for children of celebrities, the psychological damage should be evaluated at the same level as that of influencer children, children thrust into the spotlight against their will. I can definitely see that tack, but I will also raise the point that individuals are individuals: some celebrity children flock to the spotlight, and some do not. Brooklyn and Nicola met at Leonardo DiCaprio’s Halloween party. While claiming to crave privacy, their sole mission in life seems to be haunting red carpets and fighting proxy wars in the press. In the words of one Victoria Gunvalson: do you work?
A few weeks ago, I declared 2026 the Year of the Pathetic Man. Stories across film and TV have begun to focus on the various profound shortcomings of the male characters, and the reaction to them was fascinating to me— would people see them as objects of derision, or objects of desire?
I wrote about Industry at length a few weeks ago, so I’ll keep it brief. When the show premiered in 2020, we were introduced to Rob Spearing, a working class Oxford graduate meant to illustrate the ossified nature of the British class system at Pierpoint, the investment bank where the show takes place. Rob’s positioning is interesting: he is perpetually downtrodden, bad at his job, sexually coveted but romantically passed over. He’s (and I say this with love) a loser. And yet— the fandom loves him for the very reasons listed above. The show defanged a white man by making him an ineffectual hangdog.
The current pathetic man on Industry is Henry Muck, played by the former Jon Snow, Kit Harington. In my recap of episode 402, “The Commander and the Grey Lady”, I was very careful to say that Henry is pathetic for a variety of reasons, but not the ones presented to us. He’s a failure many times over, but due to his class positioning— a lord, landed, nephew of a publishing magnate ala Rupert Murdoch— he continues to fail upwards. He’s allowed to found companies and become a CEO despite being bad at everything, being handed everything and still squandering it, similar to one Brooklyn Beckham.
On Hulu’s Tell Me Lies (a genuinely insane depiction of an abusive relationship among a college friend group in 2007), the character of Wrigley is depicted as a lovable oaf. A sweet giant, it becomes clear that Wrigley’s emotional landscape is more children’s watercolor than Monet. The fandom’s attachment to his initial presentation inoculated the character from criticism after he made a series of horrific mistakes (avoiding spoilers here). I will admit, I fell for it a bit— after a discussion about the show, I realized I was making excuses for Wrigley because he was tall, nice, and dumb. Ah, I thought. This is how they get you. Similar to Rob on Industry, the writers were able to wield our own expectations against us to give characters the benefit of the doubt, a kindness female characters would never, ever receive. (On Tell Me Lies, each of the four female protagonists has received hate disproportionate to any of their sins.)
Previous examples include Art Donaldson from Challengers (keening, whiny, presented as too in love with Tashi when it’s clear she sees his emotionality as weakness) and Josh from Companion (too much of a loser to get a real girlfriend, had to terrorize a robot to get laid). An example it’d be interesting to analyze further would be Bradley from Send Help, but as the movie came out a few days ago, I’ll refrain.
The final two examples come from the world of theater and a splashy new book. In Erica Schmidt’s The Disappear, a novelist and a director’s marriage careens off the rails when Benjamin (an excellent Hamish Linklater) decides a poorly adjusted ingenue (Madeline Brewer) is his new muse. On its face, it feels like a play about marriage and cheating, but the real meat is revealed in its very first act: the story is the story of an egomaniac consuming everything around him. At one point, Mira (a refreshing Miriam Silverman) confronts her husband, saying she’d be more successful if she didn’t have to handle 100% of the childcare, cooking, cleaning, laundry, grocery, and home maintenance, and he— shockingly— says she chooses to do those things. The only thing he needs is love. I could almost feel every person in the audience leap at the stage when he said that, and then thought, that tracks. A certain type of man will allow you to give up everything for him, say it’s not enough, and ask for more.
Jennette McCurdy’s buzzy new novel Half His Age takes us to Alaska, where seventeen-year-old Waldo harbors a crush on her English teacher. The book is an interesting look at emptiness and want, with Waldo trying to fill the hole within her (subtly indicated as a self-esteem holdover from being raised by a flighty Sex and Love Addict mother in a trailer park) by doing SHEIN hauls and hooking up with boys who will never know her. The real meat of the novel is her relationship with the teacher, who is quickly revealed to be a very specific type of pathetic. Living off of his wife’s money, obsessing over a novel he never completed, he’s a hipster version of a man who tells you he could have gone pro if it weren’t for a knee injury senior year. He loves Akira and Goodfellas and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to get the girl he’s abusing to watch Fellini films. The worst part? Waldo is seventeen, and quickly clocks exactly the type of man he is. The horror of the situation is magnified when the reader understands on top of being an abuser and a pervert, he’s also unbearable.
Bravo viewers are intimately familiar with the way men are coddled and uplifted for their failures— Tom Schwartz and his spinelessness, Tom Sandoval’s carelessness and cruelty. On Summer House, a show I’ve written about before, Kyle Cooke and Amanda Batula announced their separation on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Kyle, a 42 year old with a nascent DJ career, spent ten years calling his wife a “fucking bitch” to her face (on camera), and is still being coddled by the fans because Amanda chose him.
When I wrote this, I thought I could see through the trap. On Sunday, February 1, HBO aired the fourth episode of Industry season 4, where one of my favorite characters was written off the show. When I learned of his fate, my thought was “not my baby…” None of us are immune. When we’re raised in a society obsessed with venerating men, protecting them, and coddling them, even the most debased are given grace, empathy, and understanding.
NOTE: This was meaner than normal! I’m going to blame it on the weird mood, but I genuinely do think we’re in for a year of interrogating the particular ways men fail. Is this a way to continue telling stories about men by making their loserdom the focus? Or a way of honestly staring at the great project of American Masculinity and finding it faulty? We’ll see at the end of the year.
Not sure about the optics of kicking someone when they’re down when they’re also an agent of evil, but the multiple Bari Weiss profiles over the last few weeks are each so good, and so cutting in specific ways:
LA Woman (Intelligencer)
Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News (The New Yorker)
Bari Weiss Urges CBS News to Think Like a ‘Start-Up’ (The NYTimes)
Also, speaking of pathetic men, Vulture did a deep dive on the men of the Noah Baumbach canon:
Did Success Spoil Noah Baumbach? (Vulture)
Grok, Musk, and X continue to face fallout from the horrific AI scandal, but the human side of the story is so much sadder:
These Women Were Undressed By Elon Musk’s AI Image Generator (The Cut)
My picture was used in child abuse images. AI is putting others through my nightmare (by Mara Wilson, whose book I loved) (The Guardian)
Ashley St. Clair Sues Elon Musk’s xAI, Alleging His Company Uses “AI to Undress, Humiliate, and Sexually Exploit Victims” (Vanity Fair)
Sophie Gilbert continues to smash it. This is an empathetic and troubling look at the To Catch a Predator phenomenon, speaking to a moment in culture that craved excess, violence, and vengeance. I’ve always been able to moralize or intellectualize this, but the rise of homegrown vigilantism due to the show is something that’s been festering for years.
Why Did We Ever Watch To Catch a Predator? (The Atlantic)
Also, I’m watching Mad Men for the first time (I get it, I truly do!) and I loved this piece about women in advertising in the sixties and seventies by Jolene Handy here on Substack. I love reading about historical New York and I worked at an agency for a while, so this is a perfect collision of my interests.
My Former Life As Peggy Olson (Time Travel Kitchen, Substack)
Makes me thinking of Jason Bateman’s character in Juno…was that prophetic or has it always been this way.
Really enjoyed this. Wish I didn’t relate so hard, but it’s excellently thought through and so well written.