Misanthropy At The Movies: How Is Cinema Confronting The Age Of Humanity’s Self-Hatred

‘Can God forgive us? For what we’ve done to this world?’ These questions posed by Philip Ettinger’s Michael of First Reformed, a soon to be father fearful of introducing a child into a dying world, can be seen to echo across the conscience of man. Each day, man wakes in his home. During the day, he will pollute, destroy forests, commit violent acts and feel little remorse. He lives in indulgent comfort, ignorant that his home burns down around him, completely unaware that he is the one who lit the match and fans the fire. This is an ignorance the cinema seems to wish to decay.

Ethan Hawke’s Reverend Toller demonstrates this ignorance fading in our times. A man of God forced to face a hopeless world; he begins to lose faith not only in Religion but in humanity. With the Earth burning in human excrement, Toller’s notion of ‘doing God’s work’ becomes driven by dreams of terror and martyrdom. Paul Schrader’s penetrating character study is a masterpiece of misanthropy in the current age demonstrating the same intent as Toller himself, and it is far from alone.

Misanthropy – meaning a distrust or hatred of human nature – is arguably a defining term for our era and has many cinematic masters. Lars von Trier’s devastating oeuvre reeks of self-deprecation and distrust of human nature, Pasolini’s first decade behind the camera was almost exclusively pessimistic before his closing note offered one of the true masterpieces of misanthropy in Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, and to be in a Kubrickian world is to be defined by clinical, affectless and inhuman aesthetics. Misanthropic impulses pump through the very veins of both modern ideas and the cinema itself.

It is however by no means an infection in the blood, desperately attempting to bring the tone of the room down. Misanthropy is cinema in a flux of vocal liberation, and it shouts louder now than perhaps ever before. In Reverend Toller’s dying modern world which chokes on the deadly fumes we humans pump into its atmosphere, where sexual assault claims are aimed at lizards in world leaders’ skins, and we continue to fail in our humanity it is no wonder we ask whether humanity is any good at all.

Gods, Ministers, Monsters, and Clowns

Alongside Schrader’s era defining work, the past three years have sewn what you might describe as a misanthropic thread. In 2017, Darren Aronofsky spoke of hurricanes, natural disasters and the pessimism of the news as influences for his biblical destruction of Earth at the hands of man in the abrasive Mother!. A widely conflicted film for its broad formal strokes and basic symbolism, it undoubtably shares blood with First Reformed; only with one operating as barbed wire beneath a vest and the other as a house sized wrecking ball.

Border, Ali Abbasi’s gloriously grim fairytale of this year, can also be seen to be born from the same DNA. In this case, the gaze of the other looks toward us in fantastical form, revealing the evils and prejudices of humanity through the character study of a mistreated mystical being. Beside Schrader, Abbasi completes the misanthropic perspective of God and monsters, where in each case we are revealed to have the destructive potential of both.

Such ideas have inevitably seeped into the mainstream and both Gods and monsters have again left their smear. The current highest grossing release of all time, released this year, follows a first part with empathy for a tyrant set on halving humanity with a snap of his fingers. Misanthropy is at the heart of the Thanos ideal and Endgame’s surprisingly bleak and complex central conflict; forced to the forefront of culture by a purple god with a shiny glove.

He and his ideals are echoed now in the disjointed laugh of a clown. Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker is Travis Bickle resurrected and wearing face paint, broken by his experience of humanity to the point of violent implosion. The film’s adopted perspective is riddled with the crippling misanthropy that, not only reflects upon the monstrosity of humans, but creates it.

It is evident then that misanthropy and nihilism have each found their way into the cultural conscience. With species wide self-hatred rife in an era of self-destruction and ignorance, film has deconstructed the position of the human. Our failures have been made all the more evident by the damning perspectives of ministers, monsters, gods, and clowns.

Aliens and Nymphomaniacs

What must be asked then is where in the potentials of cinema lies the reason for applying such condemning self-reflection through this form in particular? In a medium which thrives on human togetherness, the moral message, and providing affirmation, where is the place for prompting self-deprecating thoughts on the opposite?

Perhaps it sits with this very disruptive subversion. Those seeking affirmation from the screen are instead unsettled by its confrontational projections. In its very mode of reception, the cinema as expression of humanity through empathy, and in the ability to adopt the perspective of another, makes misanthropy all the more penetrating.

Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac masterfully constructs this misanthropic subversion in its framing device. From experience, we understand Stellan Skarsgård’s fatherly co-narrator ‘Seligman’ to be our moral centre. His apparent guidance and understanding of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s ‘Joe’ and her sexual addictions represent a hope in humanity which is swiftly killed at the film’s conclusion when he enters naked, assuming his own turn. It is a spiteful end, and one which devastates in its bleak misanthropy.

The reason also lies with cinema’s ‘othering’ effect. In the passive viewing of the lives of others, unable to influence the fatalism of a linear narrative, we are not human in our viewing, we are the all seeing but powerless ‘spectator’. Here the power centres of film’s ability to remove us from ourselves and view our actions from the outside. When applied to misanthropic cinema, the spectator is forced to encounter and pass judgement on their own vices.

Few films exemplify this ‘othering’ effect better than Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Adopting the perspective of an alien seeking to harvest human skin, spectator and protagonist share a comprehensive view of humanity which begins to shape and deconstruct the female experience. Wearing the epidermis of a beautiful woman, the alien provides an ‘othered’ surrogate who enters humanity for the first time and emphasises its inherent failures. By the film’s end, she has lived as a human and developed humanity before it is stripped from her by an act of violence in the woods; left gazing at the human skin which has peeled from her back, now alien again, she grasps humanity’s true nature.

Taxi Drivers & Bicycle Thieves

It is entirely possible that such patterns emerge as coincidence rather than conscience. Misanthropy and nihilism have each sporadically made themselves known throughout cultural history, yet, their appearances are rarely without historical correlation. The trend for self-deprecation in art has existed as long as human evils but misanthropy rears its ugly head with more frequency and intensity at times when human evil is expressed at its worst.

Post-war cinema movements ranging from Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and the Italian Neo-Realists, to the Film Noirs of European immigrants and beyond practically bathe in the misanthropy of their time. Taxi Driver, a film which Schrader has since mirrored in sentiment and approach with First Reformed, captures a veteran broken by the decadence of a post-Vietnam New York reacting with violence as the only response to meet it. When man does his worst, it appears that the camera will always be there to capture it.

Schrader’s work on Taxi Driver and First Reformed in many ways brings this journey through misanthropy at the movies full circle. What was once the sleaze of the New York streets ‘cleaned up’ by a mentally fractured ‘Nam vet becomes the toxic air of the entire planet driving a faithful protestant minister to hopelessness. Misanthropy takes many forms, but it now appears to grow larger.

It is in this moment of burning worlds and a fading hope in humanity that cinema offers its hand. When the most empathetic of mediums loses its patience, it may be time to watch and listen. In its continued dance with misanthropy, escapist notions of human wonder are rendered unenlightened relics before we woke to realise we shit the bed. Peeling back our skin and snapping its fingers, film forces us to question not whether God can forgive us for what we’ve done to this world, but whether we can forgive ourselves.

Is cinema in a misanthropic phase? Is misanthropy in culture influenced by its time? Let us know in the comments below!