Abstract
Alex Garland’s Men (2022) has been widely noted for one particular seven-minute sequence of body horror, though it has been most commonly read as a work of folk horror. After all, its main horrors occur in the English countryside, where the principal character retreats after having suffered a terrible trauma in London. Unfortunately, her trauma in the city is largely related to the effects of patriarchy, and she will quickly discover that a retreat into the traditional past is hardly a way to escape patriarchy. However, any definitive interpretation of what happens in the countryside is defeated by the postmodern structure and logic of the film. Nevertheless, the main implications of the film in terms of the persistence of patriarchy over time are abundantly clear.
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Notes
- 1.
There are, incidentally, a number of resonances of colonialism in this film, adding to the overall suggestion that the British past was hardly a peaceful and idyllic time to be looked back upon with nostalgia. Meanwhile, the often observed structural parallels between patriarchy and colonialism (for two rather different approaches, see Moane 1999; Anderson 2020) mean that Men’s features toward colonialism add important resonance to this film. In addition to this Yeats poem, there is the fact that Harper is played by an Irish actor who speaks the part with her natural Irish accent. James, meanwhile, is played by an actor whose family is from Ghana, another former British colony. Also, the Sheela na gig figure that appears in the film is most commonly found in Ireland, but mostly in areas of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland, while they are seldom found in areas that remained unconquered at that time. On the Sheela na gig, especially in Ireland, see Kelly (1996).
- 2.
Most reviewers seem to have regarded Men as a work of folk horror. In contrast to VanderMeer, though, Calum Russell regards the film as a folk horror “masterpiece” (Russell 2022).
- 3.
Importantly, the only seemingly “normal” people Harper encounters while in Cotson are the 999 operator (voiced by Garland regular Sonoya Mizuno) and the policewoman who answers the call (played by Sarah Twomey), suggesting that her perceptions might be affected by her gender-based expectations, especially as the policeman who answers the call seems just like all the other men in Cotson.
- 4.
Cotson is identified within the film as being located in the county of Herefordshire, which is indeed one of the most rural counties in England. However, the actual filming was done in the neighbouring county of Gloucestershire and in the village of Withington (a suburb of Manchester), standing in for Cotson. The M4 motorway, incidentally, does not pass through Herefordshire.
- 5.
Shakespeare and Daniel mutually influenced one another. Particularly relevant to this rape-themed scene is the fact that Daniel’s long poem The Complaint of Rosamunde is generally acknowledged to have been an important influence on Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (Brown 2009, 194–95). Rape culture has a long history.
- 6.
The same song also plays at the beginning of the film, in a version recorded by Lesley Duncan, who wrote the song, a rather conventional pop love song of a type that obscures the gender issues addressed by this film.
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Booker, M.K., Daraiseh, I. (2024). Patriarchy Then and Now—With a Twist: The Postmodern Horror of Alex Garland’s Men. In: Bacon, S., Bronk-Bacon, K. (eds) Gothic Nostalgia. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_12
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