Film Serves As Warning Against Power Abusers

The brewing controversy about “In the Company of Men,” suggests it’s a movie about gender conflict. But the battle’s really about power, and how its abusers can poison society by drawing the “everyman” into an industrial machine harmless on its face, but evil at its core.

Director-screenwriter Neil LaBute’s cautionary tale of how power-mongers get ahead at the expense of those they conquer left me numb in my seat, frustrated, angry and sad. The trigger wasn’t its relentless contempt for women but rather the underlying abuse of power that goes unchecked against character after character. With total control as the lead character’s goal, his wielding of misogyny as a weapon shouldn’t shock us.

Chad, a young executive, talks wimpy Howard into romancing a vulnerable hearing-impaired woman. They both seduce her, before heartlessly dumping her at the end of their six-week business trip - all for fun. It’s the two embittered men’s revenge for how they’ve been treated in the past.

In the end, what goes around doesn’t come around. The bad guy gets away with being bad and we don’t see justice served. That’s maddening. It stings, because too often, it’s how things really are.

Chad’s description of women as nothing more than “meat, gristle and hatred,” was quoted in several depictions of the movie as a commentary on gender relations. But the film’s broader theme is revealed in Chad’s advice to Howard:”Never lose control. That is the key to the universe.”

Though masked as a ‘90s barbarian, Chad exhibits frightening similarities to 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s egomaniacal superman - “a big, blond beast,” who tramples over opposition, despises happiness and creates his own rules. Nietzsche, who advocated subordination of women, argued that the urge to overcome, to command, to master, is the core of life. Meanwhile, reason and consciousness become mere surface phenomenon - as in Chad’s case.

LaBute’s been accused of condoning abusive behavior by letting Chad get away with it. But that element is exactly what makes it, in my mind, one of the more feminist films of recent years.

In our last visual of Chad, we watch as he reclines smugly onto his bed. His girlfriend dutifully kisses his torso before disappearing below the screen. This scene needled me. Chad would get his cake and eat it too. He would wake up and wreak more emotional hell, as he did on Christine and his own friend Howard, on the black male intern he humiliated in his office.

Rather than condoning mistreatment of women, minorities or the disabled, LaBute is using irony to deliver a shocking dose of realism.

A fairy tale would have brought Chad to justice in some tidy, efficient manner. Instead, my blood boiled - in the best possible way - as the movie concluded.

By exaggerating the worst male behavior - I don’t know any Chads - he cautions the cutthroat in all of us.

Beneath this slightly distorted reflection of corporate culture is a disturbing kernel of truth that anybody who’s been mistreated will recognize: It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and the pitbulls are overweight.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: Today two writers, one male, one female, examine the movie “In The Company of Men, which has aroused so much controversy over gender relations. These two observers take divergent paths to surprisingly similar conclusions.

For another view see headline: Premise misogynistic, but film is much more by Dan Webster