If I May Return to In the Company of Men, for Just One Second

So, I already covered the misogyny present in Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men in an earlier post, but now might be a good time to discuss the misanthropy that’s in there as well. I was racking my brain trying to think of a great cinematic example of white privilege and for better or worse, one scene kept coming to mind.

Perhaps you will remember Chad, Aaron Eckhart’s character and all-around douchebag. It should not be surprising that the scene in question involves him as I think I’ve already detailed how sociopathic his character is. I think that what makes Eckhart’s portrayal so captivating is how he displays his cruelty so casually. It’s autonomous at this point for him, the way you or I would breathe. There’s something that strikes me as incredibly realistic about that. Now, Chad is ostensibly a psychopath. Not in that Alfred Hitchcock, kill-you-in-the-shower-and-dress-up-like-his-mother sort of way, but in the legitimate psychological sense where he seems to have no capacity for remorse and does whatever he has to to get what he wants, completely and utterly objectifying other people, despite what his charisma might suggest about his character. So I’m not saying that pyschopathy is realistic necessarily—it’s not really a pathology that affects a vast swath of the American population. But in reality cruelty is often casual. Most conscious, pointed maliciousness is the domain of comic book super-villains. Much as we discussed the concept of passive racism in this class, it seems to me that the majority of the evil acts that happen are the result of casual, tossed-off, hardly-contemplated-or-dwelled-upon-for-any-length-of-time cruelty.

But anyways, I have no way of proving that. It’s just a hunch. Back to my main point, the scene in In the Company of Men I’m talking about occurs about halfway through the film. In keeping with that tone of casual cruelty, it occurs apropos of nothing. It does not further the plot. I suppose it adds to the characterization of Chad as callous and predatory, but the film has ample proof of that already. Perhaps this is why it sticks in the mind so much, it’s incredibly uncomfortable to watch and it feels over the top in a movie that is, by nature, over the top.

Essentially the scene (which was recently removed from Youtube unfortunately, otherwise it would be linked to here) revolves around Eckhart intimidating a young, black intern, and of course, his character can’t just glower and shout. He has to berate the intern, and then sexually harass him. He literally makes the man prove that he has the balls to do the job. So it’s uncomfortable to watch someone in Chad’s position flex his power over somebody who does not have that power. Once again though, we know this already. The whole movie is steeped in that discomfort.

The racial undertones (and I hesitate to use the word undertone here because the scene is effusive with so much charged racial history that undertone doesn’t seem to do it justice. The feelings are omnipresent. Chad even lectures the man on the proper pronunciation of the word “ask”) are clear though. Chad is a stand in for white, corporate power over just about everybody in this movie and black Americans in this scene in particular. It’s a sad and disturbing fact that in real life if a black man wants to rise on the corporate ladder in America he is probably going to have to do so at the permission of a white man. White men are overwhelmingly the ones in power. Chad makes this dominance clear. If anybody wants to advance, they’re going to have to go through him.

Chad is also a great example of the reactionary fear that many people in power feel when they sense that their power or privilege is being questioned or challenged. His treatment of other people is predatory, much as the history of white men for the last few hundred years has been predatory, but there is also the sense that Chad is trying to cut something off at the pass as it were, that his predatory nature is now more preventative than anything. Much as his game is orchestrated under the pretenses that women have forgotten their place in the world, we can see this scene as Chad’s reaction to anyone other than white men trying to improve their station in the world.

So I promise I’ll stop writing about In the Company of Men. It’s not even a movie I particularly like (it makes a person way too uncomfortable to watch it more than once or twice) I just think it does a pretty good job of illustrating the fundamental inhumanity of white, male privilege. I would say though that if there’s any hope it’s that everyone I know who has seen the movie has been equally as repulsed by the characters onscreen. Whether this is because we all as humans tend to recoil from such a raw and naked depiction of a human being’s capability to do damage to another or because as a society we have grown to reject that capability is unfortunately not up to me to say.