I Want a Dyke For President
On the morning of Saturday, 18 February 2023, Sean Penn spent 45 minutes at a press conference promoting his new film Superpower, a documentary co-directed with Aaron Kaufman, which had premiered the night before at Berlinale Special. As he muttered remarks as profound as “the Ukrainian people are the Beatles of today”, Penn donned cargo pants, a black hoodie, and a bomber jacket, the military-inspired uniform of a rich – “but cool!” – Boomer-dad about to drop off his toddler twins at pre-school. A camouflage snapback completed the look, its front embroidered pink gothic letters spelling ‘Killer Tacos’.
Killer Tacos, I later found out, is a tame-looking restaurant on Oahu’s North Shore. In the context of a press conference for a politically charged film like Superpower, Penn’s hat signified two things, antithetical only at first sight: on the one hand, it told his audience that he is, in fact, just a regular dude who enjoys Hawaiian vacations and Mexican-ish street food after an early morning surf sesh. On the other hand, it positioned him as a freedom-fighting political activist, ready to shed the ‘good vibes only’ attitude when his friends are in danger. Sean Penn does not just eat tacos. He fuels his body with Killer Tacos!
On display at the press conference was a particular kind of masculinity: stern, taciturn, breaking the silence only to voice ideals and convictions, among them admiration for the ‘heroic’ actions of the Ukrainian president and people, his love of freedom, liberty, et cetera, and the urgent need to support the war effort with long range ballistic missiles. Penn’s hat offset the starkness of this message, mingling war and violence with a nod towards femininity – the letters were pink, after all – and the post-ironic aesthetics of a kitschy souvenir. Instead of softening his strongman performance, this detail only made it more appalling, putting him in aesthetic vicinity to the hodgepodge para-military look of those who sought to deal a blow of death to whatever was left of democracy on January 6th.
Later that day, screening in Competition at the Berlinale Palast, John Trengrove’s Manodrome examined a particular mix of libertarianism and masculinity, locating it somewhere in an especially bleak part of the American Midwest. Protagonist Ralphie (Jesse Eisenberg) recently lost his job and is now scraping by as an Uber-driver. He spends his downtime at the gym, lifting weights and taking sweaty, victorious mirror selfies. At home, his pregnant girlfriend (Odessa Young) is desperately trying to create the kind of family atmosphere neither of them grew up in, but Ralphie is not ready to inhabit the role of father and adult he is about to be thrown into. Perpetually under pressure and entirely unable to share or articulate his emotions, he soon gets sucked into a libertarian incel cult, led by the charismatic and soft-spoken Dad Dan (Adrien Brody), who likes cable knit sweaters, Glocks, and sharing his country club-style McMansion with dozens of disciples.
Trengrove’s film certainly has grave shortcomings: it veers dangerously close to suggesting that Ralphie’s obsession with muscles and masculinity is rooted in suppressed homosexuality, accompanied by a fearful fascination with Black men, who are never more than tokens in the film. Manodrome thus figures inflated masculinity as the last resort of losers, of men who aren’t man enough, of, yes, pussies — as becomes clear when Ralphie is penetrated by a guy who mistakes his stalking for cruising.
On point, however, is the film’s peculiar combination of old school ideals of manliness (eat steak, shoot guns, hate women) with the lingo and gestures of the new age: the desk drawer in Dad Dan’s wood-panelled office holds a money clip and a semi-automatic weapon, as well as a sage bundle for initiation ceremonies. In one scene, Dan wins Ralphie’s trust by tenderly putting his hand on his chest, giving the battered boy permission to feel, granting him a moment of touch and intimacy. At other points, he captivates his followers with motivational slogans that wouldn’t be out of place at a Soul Cycle class: “there is a staggering beauty inside of you”.
Both Penn’s appearance at the press conference and Trengrove’s vision of a masculinity cult blend military rhetoric with those soft-power mechanisms that blossom under neoliberalism, and which may come in the guise of a sage bundle or a surfer dad. By figuring ‘toxic masculinity’ first and foremost as a response to the demise of the working class, Trengrove overlooks the rich guy libertarianism of Burning Man aficionados and the Sean Penns of this world. The latter may look progressive, but in the end use pink, post-ironic letters only to reinforce the tough guy image they like to project.
If a man of this creed is given a stage at Berlinale and gun-slinging masculinity, in its most recent iteration, thus appears as an unquestioned byproduct of war, it’s time to re-iterate Zoe Leonard’s words, from a 1992 poem of the same name:
“I want a dyke for president…”