I reviewed Natasha Brown’s Universality for THE WHITNEY REVIEW of New Writing, a slender novel about the power of words told through the events surrounding an illegal rave in COVID-era Britain, where one of the partygoers is viciously pummeled with a brick of gold. You can read the review here with the purchase of the review.
There’s a calculated artistry to how relationships are now found and fostered. As we navigate busy adulthoods, our most at-risk friendships remain alive through cyclical calendar invites, from pre-scheduled dinners to monthly book clubs to annual group trips that mirror a multi-day Bravo episode arc. Hopeful romantics join weekly run clubs to find ‘the one,’ and those interested in making new friends sign up for intramural sports leagues with the real goal of scoring an invite to post-game beers. Even the correct way to maneuver a long-standing group chat with friends is a sensitive and strategic dance.
For many, the opportunity of meeting someone new — be it romantic or platonic — doesn’t come as easy as it did through the landmark vectors of school and work, which is why when Craig, the protagonist in the new A24 cringe-comedy, Friendship, meets his neighbour, Brian, on a chance encounter, their courtship feels refreshingly fated.
When we first meet Craig, he is at his most redeemable; awkward with good intentions, embarrassingly eager, and, at times, overlooked by his wife and son. He’s a loser, to put it plainly, but possesses a child-like earnestness that quickly wins us over. He seems happy in a dream-husband, golden retriever kind of way, just living to serve his family, even if it means he doesn’t have an enriching life of his own. His loneliness — whether it registers as loneliness to him or not, the film doesn’t seem interested in answering — possesses the contours of the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ that we’ve been informed is the source for all debated things as of late, the U.S. election, the ‘manosphere’ media system, and Luigi Mangione.
Mistakenly, I assumed the film’s narrative would be a study of male relationships, the way the system of contemporary masculinity sustains itself while failing those at its center who require belonging the most. Twenty minutes in, I discovered that Friendship, the movie, was not concerned with any of that.
Instead, it focuses on character, chronicling Craig’s journey to maintain a relationship with his neighbour. Brian is handsome — a weatherman by day and an amateur musician by night. When he first meets Craig, he welcomes him with the charming radiance of a camp counselor. It also helps that Paul Rudd, the aspirational bromantic-bestie for a specific straight, white millennial male, plays Brian. After a few social mishaps, ranging from Craig sucker-punching Brian during a boys' night play fight to showing up unannounced at his work, Brian soon realizes that Craig is a weirdo freak who simply ‘can’t hang.’ Unfortunately for both of them, when Brian tells Craig that he doesn’t wish to continue the friendship, Craig doesn’t take the news in stride.
As effective as this setup is for the comedy, rich with scenes of Craig debasing himself to maintain a semblance of relevance in Brian’s life, you find yourself laughing at Craig rather than interrogating the system that created him. In a comedic tone that’s an heir to legendary dude flicks like Step Brothers and Anchorman, you realize that Craig’s immaturity and idiocy are the reason he has no friends and why his family avoids him, not his environment. The other men in the film are noticeably socially conscientious and kind-hearted while Craig, for some reason or another, sucks.
Friendship hinges on the tension of putting its protagonist in social situations that he is ill-equipped to navigate, and by doing so, it’s a successful comedy, earning a steady flow of laughs and snorts from me and those in the theatre the night I saw it. But, inadvertently, it also reveals a more harrowing, bleaker truth in its defiance to speak to the system that has inhibited this so-called ‘male loneliness epidemic.’ Through its omission, Friendship intuits that some men's suckiness has earned them the right to be alone.
I felt similar when I finished Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic, a debut novel from earlier this year, where a 23-year-old Brooklynite named Reality Kahn embarks on a journey. Her mission? To be ‘the greatest girlfriend of all time’ to a man named Ariel who, frankly, doesn’t care if she lives or dies.
Reality’s attempts at love and belonging eclipse Craig’s in absurdity: she consults an antiquated women’s magazine called Girlfriend Weekly for questionable advice on obtaining and maintaining a boyfriend, she smokes crack to bond with her boyfriend before having sex, she begins taking a drug called ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR) to become ‘THE GIRLFRIEND OF HIS DREAMS’ that causes her to crash out and hallucinate, and fakes an affinity for anal sex despite finding it painful. Essentially, it’s a facsimile of Hannah and Adam’s arc on the first season of Girls by way of an acid trip. But the satire of Girls is effective because Dunham skillfully justifies her protagonist’s romantic afflictions by letting us know who Hannah is beyond her desires. We get to know the character intimately, but also how her setting, the system of Brooklyn — be it dramatized or not — contributes to why Hannah has these perversions. And, in some ways, we relate to it.
Although relatability may not be the ambition of Kemp’s novel, I found myself craving a more grounded interiority to justify why Reality went to such great lengths to become Ariel’s girlfriend. Similar to Craig, she may be just a loser, and there’s nothing else to it. But the consistent heights of the zany plot made it difficult to discern if only Reality was unhinged or if her whole environment was off-kilter. Arielle Isack remarks on this, and a bit more, for The Baffler:
“Any will to truth Paradise Logic might have possessed dissipates into nihilist absurdity that is unconvincingly tethered to the rest of the novel. Even if most of what happens prior could be summarized in a tweet-length missive about how women pursue modes of companionship with men that are probably bad for them, this is still, in its simplicity, rich territory for literature to explore. But the book outright refuses to stick the landing, collapsing its insights into a dated and unfunny millennialism… cementing itself as a superficial exercise in aesthetic infelicity that refuses narrative accountability, inundating readers with doodles and the plodding narration of a singularly unlikeable protagonist to no real end.”
For a cringe-comedy to be satisfying, there needs to be a plausible anchor for the protagonist to rub off against so the viewer or reader can spot the tension in the contrasting worldviews. Without this, it ends up being received as a circus of absurdity for no other reason than being cuckoo, which, perhaps, is a worthwhile literary pursuit of its own. And maybe that is the point. When chasing love and belonging, it often doesn’t make sense. If your self-worth is consumed in the desperate pursuit of someone else, it’s a race to the bottom that does not require a logic of its own.
To this, I think of Dostoevsky’s statement in Crime and Punishment, a quote that migrates across my feed from time to time: “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
If you are going to destroy yourself for love, as did Craig in Friendship and Reality in Paradise Logic, you could at least be in on the joke. The only difference between a comedian and a fool is that one laughs with a crowd while the other laughs alone.
If you’re interested in a comedic work that effectively interrogates how losers are made without letting them off the hook, I recommend reading Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte and my review of it in THE WHITNEY REVIEW of New Writing.
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Love this. I spend a lot of time thinking about how losers took over everything and how sometimes the most confusing part is the sheer lack of logic involved- is the answer that some people are just desperately annoying?? IDK, but love the connections here to draw out how people will enter into situations that are bad for them bc of a lack of self respect or a lack of interiority... Much to think about.
Always love the art you gather to accompany your ideas-- it's a fascinating way to expand/offer counterpoints to your writing. Thank you! The "are losers born or made" question also makes me think of Aiden (?) the serial Tinder-swiper whose millions of swipes has landed him a single date. Some are pointing to women's "pickiness"; but it feels like a very clear answer is the Aiden, maybe, just isn't good at understanding what women are looking for.