The male in crisis.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

The movies of the past several years seem filled with images of hysterical men lashing back against threats to white male power posited by women, minorities, and the general decline of patriarchal authority. This anxiety is palpable in the daily headlines, such as the 1997 case of the brutal, homophobic sexual assault by several New York policemen on a young Haitian man held in custody. This type of reprisal against an other seen as threatening to the privilege and security of white men is represented, sometimes very uncritically, in so much Hollywood fare as to provide evidence of a social and cultural predicament that at the moment looks like it will get much worse before it gets better.

"Falling Down" shows a nerdish, disaffected, middle-aged executive (Michael Douglas) turning a gun on a society for which he no longer has patience. The banner of the Angry White Male is picked up rather pedantically by Mel Gibson in his back-to-back films, "The Man Without a Face" and "Braveheart." The former is about returning the paternal authority of the man-boy relationship while supporting the canon of Western tradition against New Age decadence. "Braveheart" turns the cinematic clock back to the time before the anti-hero. Gibson's epic about the medieval Scottish rebel William Wallace constructs a hero who is an unproblematic martyr. It is not accidental that this indulgently homophobic picture ends with his castration and crucifixion by the effete English persecutors.

A few films, such as Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs," attempt to overturn conventions of the Hollywood action genre. Male professionalism and codes of honor are turned inside out, and the not-so-subliminal homoerotic underpinnings of the male group and the violence it produces are showcased.

No recent film has questioned the postmodern male in as devastating a fashion, though, as Neil LaBute's debut work, "In the Company of Men." While at times amateurish (the sound recording occasionally is weak and boom microphones are visible in some scenes), there seldom has been as unrelenting and uncompromising a vision of the contemporary male as in this movie. Two young, vaguely unwholesome executives, Chad and Howard, hatch a scheme over cocktails to return the slings and arrows they have suffered from the female sex by humiliating a woman. Chad, clearly the brains and good looks of the duo, suggests that they pick out a particularly vulnerable woman, woo her intensely over several...