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The Mask You Live In (2015), documentary
Director: Jennifer Siebel Newsom
IMDB: 7.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes: Zero Reviews (WTF ???)
The Mask You Live in is in some ways a sequel to "Miss Representation", a documentary made a few years back about how the media portrays women, made by the same director Jennifer Siebel Newsom. This documentary is not so much about how the media portrays males, but about how we raise boys and later men.
The material treaded is mostly familiar I think to well-read people, we raise boys to be unfeminine, which necessarily delineates girls and later women as lesser human beings. We encourage violence, aggression, and dominance; and we discourage crying, empathy, and affection. This leads to rape and mass shootings, on a trajectory passing through video games and pornography.
This would really be a tedious, nauseating, utterly depressing bore yet somehow Newsom manages to present this material in a fresh manner, and to inject hope in it. Though the subject matter is what's most important, I will say that she did a great job as a *filmmaker*, this does come off as a hard documentary to make for the same reason most documentaries are boring: it's difficult to straddle the divide between obvious and esoteric and be informative. There's an elegant narrative structure where the documentary largely goes from discussing boys, then teenagers, then adult men, but never quite fully doing so as interviews with adult men and some women are interspersed throughout. There isn't the annoying background music forcing emotion that you'll find in most documentaries. The emotions here are earned by the subject matter and presentation itself, not the orchestra telling you what to feel.
I think I ... related to a lot of the subject matter discussed. I remember when I was 6, in Kindergarten, even though the boys and girls were nominally in the same class, we had "naturally" separated by social means, the boys chose to hung out with the boys and the girls were icky. If you sucked for whatever reason, your status was said to be reduced to that of girl. That was in 1989. The exact same sequence is described in the movie, in greater detail since you have social workers speaking to kids rather than my fuzzy memory. I would think there's been progresss in this era of more active fathers and little boys liking Frozen but it really sounded like the social dynamic is *exactly* the same in 2016 as it was in 1989. Among the extra details mentioned that I can't recall if they were the case in my time, one of the boys apparently was friends with all of the girls at the start of kindergarten, and the transition to socially-enforced gender segregation was gradual throughout the year. Some of the boys enforce rules by a mechanism of "firing", which I think relates to our current idolization of the banking and corporate sector.
I also heard of a 7 year-old who told a social workers he wants to be an investment banker when he grows up -- of course he does. Most 7 year-olds -- most adults -- don't even know what investment bankers actually do. They just know to worship them.
There's some interviews with actual murderers in prison that I found gutsy, when do we ever see that in a US documentary? It's really trampling on a sacred cow there. One man said he couldn't value another human being because he never learned to value his own. Another one said he never truly felt power in his life until he shot a man six times. This is presented in an unorthodox, humanizing way that I'm surprised hasn't generated more controversy. The prisoners are first introduced as prisoners, for all we know they could be in jail for petty property crimes. We are later told that they are murderers, or at least two of them are, after having been introduced to them as human beings. That is unconventional filmmaking -- normally the audience would immediately be told that these men are murderers, so that the audience would know that they are supposed to hate them from the first. Instead, the movie makes us sympathize with them.
There's discussion of campus sexual norms and the push on men to chase as many as possible. I remember that push. I was in an unconventional situation ... I really only had feelings for one girl in CEGEP, and one girl in University (not the same one), and pursuit of any other usually (always) felt incredibly unnatural since I wasn't actually interested. That might place me at the monogamy end of the monogamy-polyamory spectrum. Men are interviewed in the movie stating that one of the top goals in college is nailing as many women as possible.
There is criticism of how we define masculinity in terms of athleticism. They find a former NFL player and coach to make that criticism. I'm much more synpathetic than I would have been five years ago. I value athleticism, personally, I see it as a sign of vitality, but ... I'm gradually losing interest in pro sports. The NHL, the NFL, the Olympics, the World Cup, and so on are the modern equivalent of bread and circuses. I've also seen my lifelong interest in the Montreal Canadiens whithering away recently, as they're managed by an uneducated, unintelligent, socially illiterate, arrogant moron (Marc Bergevin) who shouldn't be trusted to run a hamburger joint. To see such mediocrity be given a position of respect, authority, and money only reminds me that it's not a respectable system. I don't owe them my fandom, my time.
Something you wouldn't see in this documentary if it were made four years or five years ago is discussion of the corrosive effects of pornography. Psychologist Gary Wilson and others have led a convincing campaign in the past few years, demonstrating the damages that porn watching can do to men. We don't see Wilson directly mentioned in this film, but they're clearly aware of his work. They specifically mention socialization, watching serial pornography prior to sexual experiences, and dopamine.
Watching this is certainly timely. I've felt like crying out in despair in the past few days over what happened in Orlando. A man only thee years younger than me, living not far from where some of my family lives, went and murdered 49 people with more critically injured. There are a lot of social failures going on here. I certainly believe in more gun control, but ... as this movie reminds us, men are ~9x more likely to engage in shootings than women. This loser is a textbook case of all the issues discussed in the film, he's a self-hating gay, he couldn't find an identity, he had a pathology of control, and so on.
This is an issue on which both liberals and conservatives are correct. We should have more gun control. But women live in a world with exactly the same gun control laws as men, and if American men had the same homicide rates as American women, there'd be ~24,000 fewer premature deaths per year. Men are more likely to kill, and that's our collective failure.
The Mask We Live In doesn't tread too much new ground, but it's well structured and coherently presented. The selection of interviews is well-made, and it's around 90 minutes long. You should watch it. I watched it on Netflix.
Director: Jennifer Siebel Newsom
IMDB: 7.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes: Zero Reviews (WTF ???)
The Mask You Live in is in some ways a sequel to "Miss Representation", a documentary made a few years back about how the media portrays women, made by the same director Jennifer Siebel Newsom. This documentary is not so much about how the media portrays males, but about how we raise boys and later men.
The material treaded is mostly familiar I think to well-read people, we raise boys to be unfeminine, which necessarily delineates girls and later women as lesser human beings. We encourage violence, aggression, and dominance; and we discourage crying, empathy, and affection. This leads to rape and mass shootings, on a trajectory passing through video games and pornography.
This would really be a tedious, nauseating, utterly depressing bore yet somehow Newsom manages to present this material in a fresh manner, and to inject hope in it. Though the subject matter is what's most important, I will say that she did a great job as a *filmmaker*, this does come off as a hard documentary to make for the same reason most documentaries are boring: it's difficult to straddle the divide between obvious and esoteric and be informative. There's an elegant narrative structure where the documentary largely goes from discussing boys, then teenagers, then adult men, but never quite fully doing so as interviews with adult men and some women are interspersed throughout. There isn't the annoying background music forcing emotion that you'll find in most documentaries. The emotions here are earned by the subject matter and presentation itself, not the orchestra telling you what to feel.
I think I ... related to a lot of the subject matter discussed. I remember when I was 6, in Kindergarten, even though the boys and girls were nominally in the same class, we had "naturally" separated by social means, the boys chose to hung out with the boys and the girls were icky. If you sucked for whatever reason, your status was said to be reduced to that of girl. That was in 1989. The exact same sequence is described in the movie, in greater detail since you have social workers speaking to kids rather than my fuzzy memory. I would think there's been progresss in this era of more active fathers and little boys liking Frozen but it really sounded like the social dynamic is *exactly* the same in 2016 as it was in 1989. Among the extra details mentioned that I can't recall if they were the case in my time, one of the boys apparently was friends with all of the girls at the start of kindergarten, and the transition to socially-enforced gender segregation was gradual throughout the year. Some of the boys enforce rules by a mechanism of "firing", which I think relates to our current idolization of the banking and corporate sector.
I also heard of a 7 year-old who told a social workers he wants to be an investment banker when he grows up -- of course he does. Most 7 year-olds -- most adults -- don't even know what investment bankers actually do. They just know to worship them.
There's some interviews with actual murderers in prison that I found gutsy, when do we ever see that in a US documentary? It's really trampling on a sacred cow there. One man said he couldn't value another human being because he never learned to value his own. Another one said he never truly felt power in his life until he shot a man six times. This is presented in an unorthodox, humanizing way that I'm surprised hasn't generated more controversy. The prisoners are first introduced as prisoners, for all we know they could be in jail for petty property crimes. We are later told that they are murderers, or at least two of them are, after having been introduced to them as human beings. That is unconventional filmmaking -- normally the audience would immediately be told that these men are murderers, so that the audience would know that they are supposed to hate them from the first. Instead, the movie makes us sympathize with them.
There's discussion of campus sexual norms and the push on men to chase as many as possible. I remember that push. I was in an unconventional situation ... I really only had feelings for one girl in CEGEP, and one girl in University (not the same one), and pursuit of any other usually (always) felt incredibly unnatural since I wasn't actually interested. That might place me at the monogamy end of the monogamy-polyamory spectrum. Men are interviewed in the movie stating that one of the top goals in college is nailing as many women as possible.
There is criticism of how we define masculinity in terms of athleticism. They find a former NFL player and coach to make that criticism. I'm much more synpathetic than I would have been five years ago. I value athleticism, personally, I see it as a sign of vitality, but ... I'm gradually losing interest in pro sports. The NHL, the NFL, the Olympics, the World Cup, and so on are the modern equivalent of bread and circuses. I've also seen my lifelong interest in the Montreal Canadiens whithering away recently, as they're managed by an uneducated, unintelligent, socially illiterate, arrogant moron (Marc Bergevin) who shouldn't be trusted to run a hamburger joint. To see such mediocrity be given a position of respect, authority, and money only reminds me that it's not a respectable system. I don't owe them my fandom, my time.
Something you wouldn't see in this documentary if it were made four years or five years ago is discussion of the corrosive effects of pornography. Psychologist Gary Wilson and others have led a convincing campaign in the past few years, demonstrating the damages that porn watching can do to men. We don't see Wilson directly mentioned in this film, but they're clearly aware of his work. They specifically mention socialization, watching serial pornography prior to sexual experiences, and dopamine.
Watching this is certainly timely. I've felt like crying out in despair in the past few days over what happened in Orlando. A man only thee years younger than me, living not far from where some of my family lives, went and murdered 49 people with more critically injured. There are a lot of social failures going on here. I certainly believe in more gun control, but ... as this movie reminds us, men are ~9x more likely to engage in shootings than women. This loser is a textbook case of all the issues discussed in the film, he's a self-hating gay, he couldn't find an identity, he had a pathology of control, and so on.
This is an issue on which both liberals and conservatives are correct. We should have more gun control. But women live in a world with exactly the same gun control laws as men, and if American men had the same homicide rates as American women, there'd be ~24,000 fewer premature deaths per year. Men are more likely to kill, and that's our collective failure.
The Mask We Live In doesn't tread too much new ground, but it's well structured and coherently presented. The selection of interviews is well-made, and it's around 90 minutes long. You should watch it. I watched it on Netflix.
