Power Plays

Manodrome begins with an exposed nipple. A woman breastfeeds her baby in the back of an Uber while the driver stares at her in the rearview mirror. She catches his gaze, is understandably furious and rushes out. With the opening scene of his competition entry, writer-director John Tengrove establishes both, the unsparing ways in which the world views women and how close the protagonist is to losing sight of himself. Ralphie (Jesse Eisenberg), who will eventually find himself inducted into a ‘libertarian masculinity cult’ that denounces the ‘gynosphere’ — an invented term for the imagined women-led society they denounce — has already begun to display the kind of behaviour that makes him the disquietingly natural fit for it. As he continues to gawk, a tight close-up of that rectangular pane of glass become a reflection of how myopic his gaze is.

The film could not seem more different from Todd Field’s TÁR, set in the elite world of classical music and following the first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (Cate Blanchett) whose career and public persona hit a series of screeching, discordant notes after personal wrongdoings are revealed. Taken together, however, both films locate the fascinating, frightening intersection of masculinity and power structures, and how women find themselves at the mercy of it. In these films, the adoption and posturing of a certain kind of masculinity is portrayed as a way to advance yourself and get ahead. In both, it only brings ruin. Manodrome and TÁR are also movies of this specific time and age, speaking to present concerns about the rise of the incel subculture, the #MeToo movement and cancel culture. They both co-opt millennial language to mocking effect — in TÁR, a ‘bipoc pangender’ student becomes a punchline to the joke about how an inability to separate the art from the artist leaves you with a stunted worldview, while in Manodrome, the concept of a ‘safe space’ is taken as license to say vile things about women.

Eisenberg, with his bumbling awkwardness and timid fragility, is a great, obvious choice for movies about men at odds with the world’s brand of aggressive masculinity. In the dark comedy The Art of Self-Defense, he enrols in a karate class that gradually begins to resemble a cult of hypermasculinity, in which the leader insists that he listens to aggressive rock music, watches porn at the office as a power move and trades his dachshund for a more imposing breed of dog. While that film was a satirical take on masculinity, in which men learn to assert themselves by having other men tell them what to do, Manodrome considers its sinister side.

Ralphie’s girlfriend is pregnant, he’s lost his job and medical expenses are piling up. This subsequent cocktail of inadequacy and loss of control are what lead him to be easily seduced by the charismatic Manodrome cult leader ‘Dad’ Dan (Adrien Brody). “You have a cataclysmic power to create and annihilate”, Dan coos, so hypnotically that Ralphie begins to believe it. It’s a heady God Complex that also recurs in TÁR, in which the conductor describes her hands as having the power to shape time itself. When Ralphie flexes his arms at the gym to take selfies, the sequence speaks to a man obsessed with image. This prompts larger questions about society as a whole — in whose image are men looking to remake themselves? Who are they modelling themselves on or after?

TÁR, playing as part of the Berlinale’s special gala programme, might have a female protagonist, but you get the sense that the only way Lydia could fit into, and rise to the top of a profession created and dominated by men, was to follow the pre-existing path carved by her male mentors. She’s a butch-presenting lesbian. Her wardrobe is composed entirely of sharp menswear. While intimidating her young daughter’s bully at school, she identifies herself as “Petra’s father”. She runs a programme benefitting young female composers, but still champions and extols the work of old White men. When she poses for a publicity still, she arranges herself in the exact pose and setting as that of the male composer whose work is the focus of that concert. It’s thus a cruel joke that she ends up conducting for an audience of cosplayers at the end — the emulating of an idol is something she’s been doing all along. Lydia might rebuff the notion that her gender is in any way important, but writer-director Todd Field uses it to complicate what might otherwise be a predictable story about predatory men that we’ve watched play out in real life so many times before. When she holds her adoptive daughter’s foot at night — a comforting gesture to help her go back to sleep after a nightmare — it feels like a rejoinder to all the “What if she was your mother? Or your daughter?” questions lobbed at men to get them to empathise with victimised women. Lydia has a daughter. She knows what secret terrors the little girl harbours. She knows what keeps her up at night. And that still doesn’t stop her from preying on women much younger than herself.

Both TÁR and Manodrome depict the kind of masculinity that feeds on the vulnerable by exploiting that vulnerability, offering up the armour of an ideology. The cycle continues when those, having been inducted into the cult, now default to exploiting those who are weaker than they are. Ralphie begins to terrorise his pregnant girlfriend, and in one of the movie’s most problematic scenes, a depiction of overt physical violence as the outlet for repressed emotion, he follows a man from his gym to an abandoned building, has sex with him and then murders him. Is the movie falling back on the tired notion that homophobia stems from repressed gay desire?

Despite Lydia being at the apex of power, building and destroying careers with the same practiced ease with which she approaches conducting, her desires prove to be her undoing. She has a history of implicitly promising students and subordinates professional success in exchange for sexual favours. One of the students she was in a relationship with, and whose employment prospects she has since hampered, has committed suicide. Her wife is her first violinist, which points to the unequal power dynamic in their working relationship, mirrored in their private life in which her infidelities are known and borne silently. Despite the outward appearance of being poised and calculated, the inner churn of an infatuation to a cellist is what continues Lydia’s series of wild missteps.

There’s a gauzy quality to certain parts of both movies that lead the audience to sometimes wonder if what we’re seeing is real, a figment of the protagonists’ imaginations or a manifestation of their baggage. In Manodrome, Ralphie is flashed, or thinks he’s been, by a panhandling Santa Claus. Another tense sequence, which also plays on his homophobia and repressed homosexuality, features a gay couple trapped in the back of his cab as he speeds wildly through traffic. It cuts away abruptly and without a resolution. TÁR too plays with an avoidance of the consequences — Lydia attempts to delete incriminating emails and texts, but even then, ghostly figures begin to haunt her house. Out for a run, she hears a woman screaming in the woods. She’s diagnosed with nerve damage or ‘notalgia paresthetica’ which she mishears as ‘nostalgia’, a grim irony for a woman trying desperately to leave her past behind.

Manodrome softens and makes excuses for Ralphie’s behaviour, rooting it in childhood abandonment issues. And while TÁR’s reversed opening credits offer a clue as to how the film is about power structures and their dismantling, the ending suggests that cancel culture isn’t real — predators will always find a way back to work, no matter how undignified the first few attempts might seem. Both films urge us to think about power. One through the eyes of a violent internet subculture that blames women for their inadequacies; the other by gender-swapping a role originally written for a man, making for a much more complex examination of women in influential positions, how they navigate them, and how society perceives them. They both illustrate how closely power is linked to isolation, either intentionally — Manodrome cult members urge new recruits to abandon their families so as to become the only ‘family’ they have — or as a side-effect, as seen with how brusquely Lydia dismisses those she no longer has use for, insulating herself from ever having to contend with them as people rather than means to an end. Power might be a seductive path, but it’s also a lonely one.