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    Jessie Buckley’s Monster Talent

    According to the teachings of the paduan theater artist Giovanni Fusetti, one of the great clowning masters in the world, the Italian word folle, as in il Folle, “the Fool,” comes from the Latin word follis, which means the bellows, that implement that gathers and directs air toward flame to feed it. The Fool, he says, is like the bellows: full of air, full of breath, full of spirits and full of feeling. Fools talk of everything and nothing, the silly and the profound, and their ability to talk freely without much culpability makes them fonts of truth. Their words propel plots and topple kingdoms. Conduits of air, of inspiration, are implements of ignition. Fusetti is known as the midwife of clowns. The theory goes that everyone has a clown inside, and instead of inventing it or imposing it, you simply coax it forth. The process of learning to clown is in fact the process of finding your inner clown, the part of the self that is full of inspiration and raw emotion, the part most in touch with the fact that “we understand nothing and we feel everything,” as Fusetti said in a 2019 interview. “The clown feels that life is beautiful and tragic.” The Irish actor Jessie Buckley — best known for roles that have placed her variously at the mercy of horrid vicars, mythological monsters, serial-killer boyfriends, ghost rapists, abusive husbands, nuclear disasters, warring dynasties and unseemly hungers — is currently fascinated with clowning and is an admirer of Fusetti’s, with whom she trained in Padua this year. This doesn’t quite track with her résumé, but it makes sense to the people who know her, or the people who understand clowning to be about, as Fusetti describes it, “the extreme sport of being alive.”“The first thing he has you do is carve your nose,” Buckley said. We were walking around a residential neighborhood of Toronto on an unseasonably warm day in October, kicking leaves. Buckley was on a break from the set of “Fingernails,” a new film she was shooting with the director Christos Nikou. “You have a red ball, like a play ball, and how you carve your clown nose is very important because it has to fit your nose perfectly.” Once you carve your nose and mount it on your face, you do an exercise in which you come into the world as a clown, as if seeing everything for the very first time — with the nose on. She found the exercise extraordinary in the way it surfaced people’s clowns. She is curious, however, about clowns’ relegation to a marginal art form. “They used to be in the core of society. They used to be, like in the Fool in ‘King Lear,’ you know, they were the ones kind of exposing the wounds in society.”I asked if her clown spoke. “Mine didn’t yet. Some clowns do. My clown was a very — well, I had kind of two clowns, but — she was a child. She was a very young clown.” She smiled. “And she was in utter awe of the world. And wants to get so close to it — but was terrified of getting that close as well.” Buckley rummaged in her pocket.“Here,” she said, holding out her phone. “That’s her.”There was Buckley, swallowed in a black oversize men’s coat and loose black pants. Her feet were bare, and her hands were lost somewhere in her coat sleeves. She looked hapless, amazed, delighted.“OK,” I said. “What was your other clown?” She smiled again lopsidedly. “Just mischievous.”Wonder and mischief, as twin temperamental undercurrents, form the complex charisma that Buckley brings to her work. She has an affinity for harrowing roles, which she then infuses with fierce vibrancy, wit and unexpected lightness. This year she has starred in two films that she has come to think of as a diptych: the folk horror film “Men,” directed by Alex Garland, and “Women Talking,” directed by Sarah Polley. In each film, Buckley portrays women who navigate the commingling of desire, pain, fear and awe. Her performances force us to consider how we can live with respect for the fact of human life’s murkiness. “In a way they were for me in dialogue with each other,” Buckley said about the two films, “Men,” with its male cast and a male director, and “Women Talking,” with its female cast and a female director. Each in its own way tried to get at the heart of a seemingly ancient monstrosity that can exist between men and women, one that necessarily exists alongside love. She wanted to put herself at the center. “Where is the wound?” she said. “I feel like I need, I want to understand the monster.”Buckley in “Women Talking.” Orion Pictures, via Everett Collection“I just don’t think since Marlon Brando or Robert De Niro that there’s been this kind of pure power coupled with this fierce intelligence,” Polley told me. “She’s just got this, like, atomic power that comes out of her.” On the set for “Women Talking,” Polley explained, they erected a large screen outside the main set — a hayloft — that functioned as a monitor. One day Polley found a group of people clustered around it. “It was a bunch of locations people and a few drivers, and a lot of the Covid team and P.A.s were all around the screen.” She asked what they were doing, and someone answered, “Whenever we hear you’ve turned around on Jessie, we all run in.” Polley was startled — she had never seen anything like that before. These were seasoned crew members who do several blockbuster movies a year, and who had no particular interest in “Women Talking” or its subject. But Buckley was like a magnet, she said. “They just didn’t want to miss a second of watching that pure explosion of power that happens when she’s onscreen or where the surprise is, what the hell she’s going to do next.”What did she feel couldn’t be said? ‘Female … desire. Female hunger, female bodies, female intellect — yeah, a female hunger.’“Women Talking,” adapted from the novel by Miriam Toews, is based on a true story. A community of Mennonite women spend years living with a gruesome mystery: They wake up in the mornings brutalized, apparently raped in the night, but with no memory of the violation. Their religious leaders insist that the phenomenon must be caused by ghosts or demons, but then the women discover that it was their own men, their husbands, fathers and sons, attacking them with the help of cow tranquilizers. The movie centers on a small group of the women gathering in a hayloft to debate how they will respond to this discovery. Buckley plays Mariche, a woman with a husband so violent that the mere mention of his name pales the faces of everyone in the room. Both Mariche and her young daughter have been attacked in the night; still, she is initially pessimistic that there’s anything to be done about it. Buckley plays Mariche in a way that highlights her deep fear, her biting honesty, her self-sacrificing courage, all of which are wrapped in a rage that’s practically radioactive.Polley was considering Buckley for a few of the characters in the film; it was Buckley who chose Mariche. This surprised Polley: Mariche is the hardest part. She’s meanspirited, funny, caustic. She mocks others’ vulnerabilities; in one scene, she berates another woman who is having a panic attack, complaining that none of the other women’s traumas have manifested in a way that demands so much attention. She laughs at the idea that women so sheltered as they are could possibly make their way in the world. Polley described Mariche as an obstacle to progress for much of the story. She has internalized much of the violence to which she has been subjected, and she finds herself spitting it back at others. Polley asked Buckley why she chose Mariche; Buckley told her it was because Mariche frightened her. In Mariche, Buckley told me, she saw “the kind of internalized monster,” the way that Mariche’s cruelty had been planted in her “from a legacy and archetype that goes way back, that has been given to her by her mother, and given to her by her husband, and given to her probably by her own children.” Reflecting on this dynamic during another conversation, she elaborated. “But I think the more interesting thing than that is about how, within violence — how people try to emancipate themselves from it or move out of it.”Maggie Gyllenhaal described to me something her husband, Peter Sarsgaard, said about Buckley after acting with her in “The Lost Daughter”: “She’s buoyant.” Gyllenhaal agreed. “She’s full of life, and it floats her back up to, like, where the light is,” Gyllenhaal said. “Even though she’s totally interested and curious and powerful enough to swim down in the depths of the darkest places, she’s going to emerge full of life in one way or another, including all the darkness and the pain and the perversity.” The clown goes down to the depths and then floats back up to the clouds. Buckley was born in a small town, Killarney, the oldest of four sisters and one brother. Her parents encouraged Buckley’s creativity, and she wound up in the school plays at her all-girls Catholic school, often playing the boys’ parts, like Tony in “West Side Story.” She remains close with her family, but she talks about those years as fraught with existential dread. All the life paths readily available to her seemed unmanageably constricted. She couldn’t imagine a future for herself; she felt trapped.“When I was a teenager, there was a lot of what I felt, especially as a woman, that wasn’t allowed to be said,” she told me. “I sometimes felt like I was going to explode, like I was too much. There was all this feeling in me — I felt so much, and it felt like it was being kept so quietly and tightly.”What did she feel couldn’t be said, I wanted to know, and she paused to find her words. “Female … desire. Female hunger, female bodies, female intellect — yeah, a female hunger. I felt like everybody was starving around me. And in a way, if you were starving, you were doing great. In order to join the world, you must starve and be smaller than yourself, and then you’ll be palatable. Internally, I was exploding.” When, as a teenager, she felt depressed and frustrated, she dove into old films, obsessing over Katharine Hepburn or Judy Garland. At 17, she applied to drama school and was rejected, bringing that dream to a halt.The next day, she decided to audition for the reality talent show “I’d Do Anything,” in which young actresses competed for the role of Nancy in a West End production of the musical “Oliver!” The footage of this competition is still on YouTube, and in it, teenage Buckley stands center stage week after week with her moussed spray of red curls and wide gold hoop earrings, doing something that can only be described in clichés: singing her heart out, singing for her life. Her voice was applauded, but she was criticized repeatedly for what the judges perceived as overly ‘’masculine” body language — she was coached to “be more ladylike” and to “get your womanly head on.” I looked back at the footage and found this assessment of her physicality to be bizarre, not to mention sexist. It seems, in retrospect, like another expression of the kind of rigidity around “palatable” displays of womanhood Buckley has spent her adult life reimagining. It’s not footage she seems to enjoy re-encountering. She was clearly a talent — she was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s favorite — but also just an earnest teenager gamely belting one power ballad after another, voice clean as brass. Still, there’s a blueprint of the present-day Buckley there: a certain urgency that comes through in her performances. When she sings “As Long as He Needs Me,” she looks hungry, as if she could swallow the whole world and it wouldn’t be enough. When she was filming “The Lost Daughter” during the pandemic, Buckley says Gyllenhaal developed a habit of whispering images and notions into her ear when they were between takes. What Buckley remembers her whispering most was, “You’re starving, you’re absolutely starving.” The film is based on an Elena Ferrante novel about an academic who abandons her young daughters to pursue a love affair and the space to write — a choice she looks back on decades later with mixed feelings. The film shows the protagonist, Leda, in both eras of her life: suffocating under the weight of early motherhood and domestic obligation, and reflecting on her life as an older woman vacationing alone. The older Leda is played by Olivia Colman; Buckley plays Leda the young mother, desperately in love with her children but even more desperate to get away from them. The movie probes the taboo of a mother whose needs don’t align with those of her children and, facing that conflict, chooses herself. Leda calls herself an “unnatural” mother. This self-accusation is undermined by the tenderness and pathos with which Buckley plays her. Buckley’s Leda is tired and trapped, but also playful, loving, dutiful. She resists villainization. She holds her children as if she never wants to let them go — until she lets them go. Who wouldn’t want what she wants — more time to think and write, to sleep with Peter Sarsgaard? Buckley said she loved the opportunity Gyllenhaal gave her to “be curious about what is maybe a version of what motherhood or womanhood might actually mean, not something that’s just palatable. The unspoken truth of what it is to be a woman and to actually really take a bite of the apple. And relish it. And not apologize for it.” If there is a thread connecting Buckley’s early work, it’s her taste for playing women who want something they are not supposed to want. In “Beast,” her 2017 film debut, Buckley plays Moll, a 20-something who is so desperate to get away from her controlling mother that she begins a relationship with a man she comes to suspect is behind a string of local rape-murders of young girls. In “Wild Rose,” often thought of as her breakout role, she plays a 24-year-old Scottish woman recently released from prison who is desperate to be a country singer in Nashville, a dream she struggles to subordinate to the needs of her two young children. In the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl,” she plays the pregnant wife of a firefighter who responds to the nuclear explosion; she chooses to be with her husband as he dies despite being warned that his body is radioactive and dangerous to her pregnancy, a choice that costs her the child. In Season 4 of the TV series “Fargo,” she plays a cheerful Minnesotan nurse who, calling herself an “angel of mercy,” surreptitiously kills her patients. In a 2020 filmed production of “Romeo and Juliet” for the National Theater, she plays an earthy, forceful Juliet with an adult sense of what she wants. These women might be seen by others as morally compromised — certainly the nurse is — but maybe more to the point is that they’re intentionally colliding with the most complicated aspects of human agency.In “Men,” Buckley plays Harper, a young widow who takes a solo retreat to a manor in the English countryside, where she is slowly hunted — or haunted — by a series of male archetypes: a policeman who disbelieves her; a vicar who accuses her of stirring his lust; a silent, naked figure covered in leaves, meant to evoke the Green Man, a pagan figure with a face covered by foliage, who symbolizes the cycle of life and death. For two and a half hours, Buckley is mostly alone onscreen with these many men who attack her, mock her, flash her, lurk outside her windows, gaslight her, blame her. (All of them are played by one actor, Rory Kinnear, with the exception of Harper’s dead husband, who is played in flashbacks by Paapa Essiedu.) Among other things, the movie is an allegorical recitation of all the ways men have ever brutalized women. Buckley in “Men.”A24, via Everett CollectionThe film is tough, obviously, and gruesome in a way — but it also has a soaring feeling, or perhaps it’s better to say that Buckley as Harper is full of awe and pleasure, both fight and spiritual flight. There’s a scene in which she is alone in the woods staring down the barrel of a dark, abandoned railway tunnel. It’s foreboding, pitch black, precisely the kind of passage you hope the woman in the horror movie comes to her senses in time to avoid entering. Harper lingers on the edge of the darkness, looking alert, apprehensive. Then she sings a quick note, sending it into the dark. It comes back as an echo. She smiles and does it again, and then again, singing calls and responses until the tunnel is duetting with her, wrapping them together in song.I’ve been meditating on Buckley’s choice of words, to “really take a bite of the apple.” That original sin — an ancient, biblical act — is unequivocally a disobedience, but it is also a foundationally human gesture: to expand oneself no matter what it costs, to demand the right to see the world as it really is, to eat what is delicious. The forces opposing this kind of act are fierce. In “Men,” one of the first things Harper sees upon her arrival to the country house is a tree teeming with apples in the front courtyard. She takes one on her way in, closing her eyes to enjoy it. A few minutes later, the house’s landlord, touring her around the home, sees the apple with a missing bite, and his face darkens. “No no no no no. Mustn’t do that. Forbidden fruit.” In a moment he will tell her he is kidding, but in the intervening seconds, as Harper begins to stammer an apology, she looks genuinely afraid. After we concluded our walk, I headed for the airport, and Buckley went to work: She had an evening of script review to attend. Still, before I made it home, she managed to send via email and text a shower of things she loves: a video of a Georgian men’s choir sitting around a table crowded with beer and thick sandwiches and bowls of waxy fruit, singing a Christmas carol (“I would give my clown’s nose to be a fly on the wall at that Christmas dinner,” she wrote); a playlist of songs that she has been returning to for the last two years; a book of works by Peter Birkhauser, who painted from his dreams; a Richard Brautigan novel; a more recent novel by Kiran Millwood Hargrave about a 17th-century Norwegian village where all the men died, leaving the women alone. Later, she sent me Joni Mitchell’s song “Little Green.” “Good auld Joni to crack the heart wide open,” she wrote. She signed off, “Big huge love.” From a different person, especially an actor under observation, I might have dismissed this as disingenuous. But Buckley seems to move in a spirit of abundance. She wrapped me, upon first meeting face to face, in a big huge hug while wearing a big huge puffer coat. She was full of big huge questions. (“Do you have dreams for yourself, for what comes next, as an artist and as a woman?” she wanted to know.) Her laughter is full-bodied. “Her laugh just takes over every space in the most glorious way,” Polley told me. “When I think of those times in that hayloft, we were dealing with such difficult subject matter, but one of my main memories is Jessie’s laugh and how infectious and contagious it is — how once Jessie starts laughing, everybody starts laughing, because it’s like with her whole self.” Frances McDormand told me that when Buckley arrived on set for “Women Talking,” “she immediately found a place in town that had bulk nut supplies. I guess she eats a lot of nuts — and so she brought everybody bags of nuts.” McDormand snorted with laughter. “She’s just — she’s just a good ’un.” McDormand also told me she recognized herself as an actor in Buckley. I pressed her on it, but she didn’t know how to be more specific. Gyllenhaal said something similar, telling me that she felt that Buckley was “somehow artistically like a sister.” The repetition struck me, but it didn’t exactly surprise me. One reason I have found Buckley so hard to look away from onscreen, no matter what her characters are enduring, is that she seems familiar to me, too. Her hunger is recognizable.Her current project in Toronto is a dystopian sci-fi romance about an institute that can measure, based on a sample of someone’s fingernails, whether you are 100 percent in love with your partner. Buckley plays a woman who is in a “100 percent previously tested relationship” certified via fingernail but who finds herself wondering whether what she’s experiencing really is love in its totality. “That hundred percent isn’t necessarily — it doesn’t feed her enough,” Buckley said, laughing. She has been listening to a lot of Peggy Lee’s “Is This All There Is?” It’s a jaunty, plucky song about a woman facing the worst, watching her house burn down and thinking, Is that all there is to a fire? I pointed out to Buckley on our walk that most people prefer not to spend their time imaginatively inhabiting the most unsettling contradictions of human desire, or confronting humanity’s ugliest responses to it.“I mean, I’m drawn to it.” She laughed. “And sometimes that’s scary. I can’t help it. I don’t know why,” she said. “But don’t you think it’s healthier, instead of denying our reality, that we live and die, and there’s pain, and there is damage, and there’s also a huge amount of love, and there’s hope, and there’s fear, and there’s institutes, and there’s chaos, there’s … ?” She shook her head, as if stunned. “Like, what the hell are you doing if you’re not, like, standing in the middle of it?” And it comes out one way or the other, she argued. Refusing to attend to the wounds won’t make them go away. What she noticed, working on “Women Talking,” is that “the violence is almost like air. You know, it’s always around, but it never actually presents itself. It’s something that’s continuous.” The women cannot isolate the evil behind what’s happened to them to one man; they can’t even only blame the men. The monster is everywhere, even behind the faces of people they love. It’s in some of their religious teachings; it’s in the ways they were taught by their parents. It’s in them, the women, too. The women are considering whether to stay and fight for change or to leave, a choice that would be made much more difficult because they were forbidden as children to learn how to read, or even to know where they were in the world. Most of them have never even seen a map. This, too, is a kind of violence, the women realize. Their way out, they have decided, is to look at the problem directly and to talk about it. What they will do next — whether that’s changing their culture or leaving it — requires inventing a conception of the world, and of their place in it, that they cannot even begin to fathom. They’re engaged, one woman says, in “an act of wild female imagination.” This phrase — wild female imagination — was used by their religious leaders to dismiss the assaults as fiction, to claim that the violence was all in the women’s minds. Now the women will adopt those words, and their wild minds, for a different purpose.That feeling, of pushing toward a better, bigger way of being in the world that you can only barely imagine, is familiar to Buckley. What she likes about clowning, Buckley told me, is the presence it demands. “Proper clowns are so alive,” she said. “The best part of clowning is it happens in the moment,” and failure is as likely as transcendence — the two things are bound up with each other. In images, the archetype of the Fool is often depicted balancing at the edge of a cliff, one foot hovering out over the abyss, suspended in the possibility of both fall and flight. There’s an openness to possibility, no matter what the outcome may be. “I love it,” Buckley said, pausing over every word for emphasis, a look of pure glee on her face.Jordan Kisner is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of the essay collection “Thin Places.” More

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    Pregnant Men Were a Movie Punchline. Now They’re Horror Villains.

    The idea of the pregnant man has long been mined for Hollywood comedy. This summer, he becomes a menace.When I was four months pregnant, just as my midsection had grown vast enough to convert my pregnancy into a public event, I escaped to the movies. I saw “Men,” Alex Garland’s May horror film about the young widow Harper (Jessie Buckley), who sets out on a restorative countryside getaway only to be terrorized by a village full of unsavory male archetypes — pervy vicar, passive-aggressive nice guy, condescending cop — all played by Rory Kinnear.Near the end of the film (spoiler alert), one of these men spontaneously sprouts a distended belly much like my own. A slimy slit ruptures between his legs, and one of the other guys slithers out of the hole. He grows a belly and births a third guy, who grows a belly and births a fourth guy, and so on, until the film’s full cast of men has replicated at Harper’s feet.A few weeks later, I was beached on my bed at home, watching a screener on my laptop for Andrew Semans’s “Resurrection,” when I was again confronted by the specter of a menacing pregnant man. The thriller, which debuted in theaters last week, follows the tightly wound corporate hot shot Maggie (Rebecca Hall), who unravels when she spots David (Tim Roth), a man from her past. Maggie reveals (more spoilers!) that 22 years ago, David lured her into an abusive relationship, impregnated her and ate their baby. Now he informs her that the little boy he gobbled is gestating in his gut and missing his mommy. “He’s moving,” David tells Maggie, handling his middle-aged paunch like a baby bump. “Would you like to feel him?”In Alex Garland’s “Men,” a young widow (Jessie Buckley) is terrorized during her countryside getaway by a village full of unsavory male archetypes (all played by Rory Kinnear).A24Andrew Semans’s “Resurrection” follows a corporate hot shot, Maggie (Rebecca Hall), who unravels when she spots a man from her past (Tim Roth).IFC MidnightSo the horror villain of the summer is the pregnant man. He represents the patriarchal domination of women, or maybe the cyclical nature of male violence, or maybe the surreal outer edge of psychological trauma — but whatever he’s supposed to signify, he implicates me. My pregnant state, grafted onto these men, is pitched as the apotheosis of grotesque social commentary, a sight meant to be so bizarre, disturbing and deep that it is preserved for the crowning spectacle of a horror film.Pop culture has long been obsessed with the prospect of male pregnancy, though it has mostly been used as a comedic gambit, as in the dismal 1978 farce “Rabbit Test,” the sentimental 1994 rom-com “Junior,” or the elaborate rollout of Lil Nas X’s 2021 album “Montero,” during which he traipsed around the internet sporting a photorealistic bump before simulating birthing an LP. Of course, some men can and do become pregnant — trans men — but works that exploit the idea of the pregnant man rarely acknowledge the reality of the pregnant man. He must exist purely as a fantasy, a counterfactual, a metaphor. Like a mythical boogeyman, he has stalked the culture for generations, occasionally appearing to impart a lesson on gender relations in his time. Now he has shape shifted from a clown into a creep — a visceral interpretation of male control over women’s bodies.Over the past several weeks, I watched many of the artifacts of the pregnant man genre. I started with “Rabbit Test,” Joan Rivers’s misanthropic comedy in which the aimless bachelor Lionel (Billy Crystal, in his first movie) miraculously conceives after a one-night stand with some pushy broad. Released at the tail end of the second-wave feminist movement, “Rabbit Test” is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are.Its “first pregnant man” conceit is just a setup for a carnival of broadly racist and sexist scenarios that evinces little interest in the reality of pregnancy itself. Lionel hardly looks pregnant, he hardly feels pregnant, and as his due date approaches, he is not concerned about how he is going to become un-pregnant. “Rabbit Test” is so incurious about women’s experiences that it doesn’t even bother exploiting them. It’s just a movie about a guy with a pillow under his shirt.“Rabbit Test,” starring Billy Crystal and Doris Roberts, is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are.AVCO Embassy Pictures, via PhotofestThat shifted a little with “Junior,” the 1994 rom-com in which an embryo is implanted into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s musclebound abdominal cavity. “Junior” is from the “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” era — a time when men and women were pitched as fundamentally different organisms, but when men who attempted interspecies communication were praised for accessing their “feminine sides.” Schwarzenegger (playing, naturally, a scientist) literalizes the trend when he is impregnated as a part of a clandestine medical experiment, pumped with estrogen and reduced to a maternal cliché. Suddenly he is craving pickles with ice cream and weeping at Kodak commercials.“Junior” is built on a sight gag: pregnancy as a laughable twist to Schwarzenegger’s herculean form. But pregnancy has the power to render any body ridiculous. And yet, as I trudge down the street, my increasingly preposterous dimensions inspire such affirmational outbursts from strangers that I feel at the center of an immense gendered conspiracy, where the self-evident absurdity of my physical situation is instead pitched as the cheerful apotheosis of my life as a woman.Maybe that’s why, watching “Junior,” I was struck by the sensitivity of Schwarzenegger’s performance. Though he is dropped into a parade of offensive scenarios (there is an interminable sequence of shoddy drag) and fitted with a limited emotional range (pregnancy is uncomfortable and confounding, never degrading or grim), he endures his ludicrous situation with unexpected grace. His pregnancy makes him not into a joke, but a father, and a plausible love interest for Emma Thompson. And when he hurls a rival scientist across a laboratory and fashions an abortion rights slogan into a steely Austrian-accented catchphrase — “My body, my choice” — it feels earned.In “Junior,” Schwarzenegger’s surprisingly sensitive performance as a pregnant man makes him a plausible love interest for Emma Thompson.Universal PicturesIf Schwarzenegger’s baby in “Junior” were real, she would be older than the 23-year-old Lil Nas X, whose own interpretation of pregnant imagery exists on an elevated plane. The campy visual world of “Montero” — which also finds him riding a stripper pole into hell — seems unbothered by gendered expectations at all. Like Billy Crystal’s in “Rabbit Test,” Lil Nas X’s prosthetic belly is just a costume, but this time it’s worn by a queer pop star rapaciously churning cultural shibboleths into internet chum.Now, just as Lil Nas X has chucked the pregnant man into the recycle bin, the movies have reclaimed him and primed him for a heel turn. Hollywood’s comic interpretation of the pregnant man always masked some deeply misogynistic ideas, and now they have emerged from the subtext to define the character himself.“Men” is a film that does not challenge the gender binary so much as wallow in it. Harper’s ill-fated getaway is suffused with dour shots of fertility idols and portentous biblical references; before she is terrorized by a pack of pathetic and violent men, she chomps an apple she’s plucked from someone else’s tree. Garland, the film’s director, has said that “messing around” with ancient masculine and feminine symbols led him to the image of “a guy with a vagina on his chest.” When that vagina births a succession of bad guys, rendering them all as laboring parents and mewling babes, it reads as a kind of misanthropic final judgment, as if men abusing women is a grotesque but ultimately inevitable cycle.The imagery of “Resurrection,” on the other hand, originates from nowhere. There is no mythical antecedent to David smugly carrying his beer gut like a womb. He requires no padding or prosthetics. He just asserts that there’s a baby in there, and he does it with such psychological intensity that Maggie starts to believe him. Watching Roth’s riotously unsettling performance, I felt freed from the reality of my own pregnant body, and also a little bit won over. David’s claims are ridiculous, but so is pregnancy. Though I am of course aware of the biological process through which babies are made, it still feels so supernatural that if you told me that people get pregnant by gobbling up live infants, I might believe it.After plodding through decades of pregnant-man tropes, “Seahorse” — a 2019 documentary that follows Freddy McConnell, a British journalist and trans man, as he conceives, carries and gives birth to his first child — came as a welcome relief. Finally, the image of the pregnant man is freed of the distortions of comedy, horror and metaphor and presented simply as a human experience. As McConnell endures the physical and mental trials of pregnancy, he must also contend with intense social pressures: He feels alienated from other men, patronized by women, ignored by medicine and estranged from his own identity.The backlash against gender-neutral language like “pregnant people” — and the assertion that it somehow “erases” women — is unintelligible to me. It is the coding of pregnancy as the paramount expression of femininity that make me feel expunged. The gendered constructs of pregnancy work differently on McConnell’s body than they do on mine, but I identified closely with him. He describes pregnancy as a process, and that is clarifying. It is not an extension of my personality. It’s just the wildest thing I’ve ever done.For me, the most unsettling image in the annals of pregnant-man movies came at the end of “Men” — not the birth scene, but the one that followed. Throughout her weekend of horror, Harper is in touch with a friend, Riley, who becomes so concerned for Harper’s safety that she drives overnight to find her. When Riley steps out of the car, we get the film’s final reveal: She’s pregnant! If pregnancy represents horror in a man, it is meant to signal the opposite in a woman — she must be nurturing, preternaturally understanding, good. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about that, but I know how I felt: like a punchline to an old joke. More

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    ‘Men’ | Anatomy of a Scene

    Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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    Nobody Makes Films Like Alex Garland. But He Might Stop Making Them.

    The man behind “Men” says of directing, “I don’t particularly enjoy it. It’s something I have to force myself to do.”Alex Garland knows that calling his new film “Men” is a provocative act. “It’s quite interesting that such a short, simple word can be so freighted with massive and entirely subjective meanings,” he said.As a writer and filmmaker, Garland is drawn to subjects that demand discussion: In the twisty robot parable “Ex Machina” (2015) and the Natalie Portman sci-fi drama “Annihilation” (2018), he favored a bold, stark setup that sat at the intersection of a cultural flash point. The tricky “Men” operates in a similar vein, casting Jessie Buckley as Harper, a woman coming to terms with her husband’s death and the blame he levied at her in his final moments.Harper rents a British country house to work through her trauma, but the men of the local village (all of whom are played by the actor Rory Kinnear) insinuate, belittle and wheedle her, too. One of them even stalks her, appearing naked in her front yard, but whom can Harper register a complaint with when all of the men around her — or all men, period — are, deep down, the same guy?I spoke to Garland on a video call this month while he was in the middle of directing “Civil War,” an A24 action epic starring Kirsten Dunst. Garland, who is 51 and British, sounded a bit weary. Before making “Ex Machina,” he only wrote screenplays for other filmmakers to direct — including “28 Days Later,” “Sunshine” and “Dredd.” The more we spoke, the more he questioned whether he wanted to continue directing at all.“I’m tired of feeling like a fraud,” he told me. “I’ve got so many other reasons to feel like a fraud, I don’t need to add to it in a structural way with my job.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.In “Men,” Jessie Buckley plays a widow coming to terms with her husband’s death. Kevin Baker/A24Do you read reviews of your films?Sometimes, because there’ll be a set of websites that I go to, and then I will see — with a horrible, sinking feeling — that they’ve reviewed the thing I worked on, and I’d have to be a monk to not read it. I broadly try to keep away from them. The first thing I did in any kind of public forum was write a book, “The Beach.” I was 26 or 27 when it came out and read everything, and I realized that I could get incredibly wounded, that it was really personal. It was a slow stepping back, because it’s now 25 years that I’ve been doing this. I think I’m probably stepping back from all sorts of different things.What else are you stepping back from?I think it is partly a function of getting older: I know less and less people, I have a smaller and smaller circle, and I go out less and less. Everything’s just getting progressively quieter and smaller, I’d say.Your films kind of reflect that attitude. They have very small casts and very circumscribed locations. There isn’t much clutter.That would definitely be fair to say. I find my myself interested in less and less things, but the things I’m interested in, I might go deeper and deeper into. And also, I’m not really a film director, I’m a writer who directs out of convenience.You didn’t expect to have this career as a director?It wasn’t that I had any great urge to direct, it was more born out of anxiety based on writing: I’d find it very agitating if something [in the film] felt totally wrong to me, or something that I felt was important was absent. But I have been thinking that after the film I’m directing at the moment, I should stop and go back to just writing. That might be part of the reversing away from the world — it’s time to get away from it, I think. I’m not temperamentally suited to being a film director.Why is that?It would be more honest, probably, to say I don’t particularly enjoy it. It’s something I have to force myself to do. It’s incredibly sociable, because you are with a large group of people the whole time — and, in my case, having to do a lot of role play. At the end of the day, you feel a bit fraudulent and exhausted.Garland is having second thoughts about directing: “I’m tired of feeling like a fraud.”Olivia Crumm for The New York TimesBecause you have to become sort of a showman?Yeah, exactly. I will find myself standing in front of a group of extras saying, “All right, so what’s happening now is dah, dah, dah,” raising my voice and being encouraging and intense. It just feels incredibly performative. Whenever I watch a chat show, and I see the host engaging in witty banter with a guest, I look at them and think, “What if they’re feeling really depressed right now?” Here’s the requirement for a quip, here’s the requirement to be interested in something you’re not interested in, and inside you’re feeling incredibly bleak and existential. It always makes me shudder — I almost can’t watch those programs because I feel that so strongly. And my version of being a talk-show host is standing on a film set.Still, I would think that you’d want to be on set to supervise the physical realization of your worlds and themes.Oh yeah, but that’s the limit of it. There are many directors where the set is where they need and want to be more than any other place, and as soon as the film is finished, they’re scheming to be in that space again with as short a delay as possible. And that’s just not me.I’ve seen some directors reach old age, and it’s as though they have to keep directing in order to live. Sometimes, there’s another film placed in front of them even before they’ve finished the last one.No question. Immediately, as you said that, I had a Rolodex of names appear in my head, and I was thinking, “That’s exactly who he’s talking about.” But there’s also another kind of director who suddenly stops, people like Peter Weir and Alan Parker. They must have been walking away from something, and maybe they just tired of it.Is this the shortest period of time between you being on two movie sets? You shot “Men” in the middle of last year and started “Civil War” not long after.Yeah, the last day of postproduction on “Men” was 48 hours before the first day of principal photography on “Civil War.” Literally, it was a Saturday and a Monday.I remember speaking to Kirsten Dunst after she was cast in “Civil War,” and she said she was excited that she finally got to play “the boy part” in a movie.I hope she feels happy with the process, but you never know. I don’t think it’s just me that finds it difficult. Film sets are strange places. They’re Calvinist, punishing spaces of abstinence. People work really, really hard — like drop-down exhausted hard — and you see it on everyone’s faces at the end of the day. There can be elements of addiction in that, but it’s like, I’ve got an alarm bell in my head ringing the whole time, thinking, “You need to stop doing this.”Was “Men” that arduous to make?“Men” was really difficult. The subject matter gets into you, and you have to live with it, but it was also difficult on a technical level. We had a very short shoot, and we were trying to get a lot done very quickly. I often worried about Rory particularly, because the last few weeks of the shoot, he’s naked in the middle of the night, and it’s freezing cold. An enormous amount of filmmaking is actually logistics, and it’s like a managerial job. How do you execute this number of things within this many hours? Literally, how do you do it?Rory Kinnear plays all the men in “Men.”Kevin Baker/A24It’s the sort of movie that will leave people arguing about its intent, and about what it’s trying to say. You once told me that with “Ex Machina,” you wanted at least 50 percent of the film to be subject to the viewer’s interpretation.Over the years, I have been consciously putting more and more into the hands of the viewer. There’s probably another element to it, too, if I’m honest, which is that it’s making the viewer complicit. This is another reason to pull back, because there’s a part of me which is really subversive and aggressive and is kind of [messing] with people. At times, I felt with “Men” that I’ve gone so far that it’s borderline delinquent.What kind of reaction have you gotten to the film?I’ve got good friends who I really respect who I’ve shown “Men” to, and their convinced interpretation — “I know what this film is saying, it’s saying this” — is 180 degrees different from what I thought it was.When that happens, does that feel like a successful experiment?No.No?No, it just feels inevitable. When we’re watching a film, we have these responses that on a rational level, we know are subjective, but we treat them as if they’re objective, and that’s just the way it is. I have such distrust in my own responses and other people’s responses as being reliable — they could vary on a day-by-day level. So when I offer something up, I have no expectation that everybody’s going to agree on it. I have a full expectation that people will disagree, and I see it primarily as a reflection on them.What are some of the things your friends said about it?“Who’s the protagonist?” “Is this about what a woman thinks, or is it about what a man thinks?” It’s people’s certainty that I find strangest: “This means this, this means that.” I find myself getting less and less certain about everything.Even your own work?Oh, I have no certainty about that. That’s just a bunch of compulsions. More