Alex Garland’s ‘Men’ is Better as a Dionysian Intoxicant Than as an Allegory of Toxic Masculinity
Nietzsche’s theory of art can help us understand why transgressive horror is sublime
Horror enthusiasts often struggle to explain the appeal of their favorite film genre. The blood, the screams, the suffering, the scares — to the uninitiated, the elemental substances of horror are reason enough to avoid it.
Still, horror fans like me often leave the theater feeling positively giddy — as I did following a screening of Alex Garland’s Men (2022). Men is full of delightfully ghastly sights and sounds of the sort that frequently offend “civilized” tastes.
And, true enough, without a vocabulary equipped to the task, one might be at pains to understand why such horrors are so much fun, let alone explain it to an unsympathetic friend.
Furthermore, Garland’s heavy-handed treatment of toxic masculinity might be interpreted as pandering by #MeToo and feminist film critics — in fact, several notable reviews have already made that observation. Since pandering is always tantamount to trivializing, it’s a serious accusation to levy against Men or any other film.
