You want to fight women over who has been more wronged in the field of sex and power. A lot of people also tried to invade Russia in the winter.1
— Laurie Penny
Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner 2049 is an example of a certain cinematic trope with a modern twist — the strong, silent male hero. Whereas the archetype previously revelled in an unabashed masculinity — a certain cruelty in the sneering lips, a particular steely glint in the eye — Gosling’s more brooding, contemplative modern take is subtler, giving just a glimpse of the deep emotions felt by his character from soft eyes set in a strangely doughy, featureless face. There is something in Gosling’s almost mute performance in this film and others that many find troubling, or even abhorrent. In films like Blade Runner 2049 or Drive, Gosling’s characters are strange, shallow, aestheticised portraits of reserve and repression. His performances are the fetishisation of white male silence.
The conception of ‘whiteness’ as an inherent category, an unspoken symbol, is one of the knotty problems at the heart of Gosling’s performance of masculinity. The false nature of ‘white’ as a category is indicated by the ways it has widened, over the years, to include previously excluded national and ethnic identities, like Jewish and Irish people. Yet it is the conception of the ‘white male’ that is at the heart of our discourse, whether he is the subject we propose to defend or to condemn. The concept of whiteness is slippery, just like any identity (or even moreso). But when we look at Ryan Gosling, we know. He is a mute symbol of all that whiteness and maleness can represent, both good and bad.
In the current political moment, discussions around identity, masculinity, gender, race, and the nature of discourse itself require nothing less than the silence of white males. To give space, to make room, to listen — none of these are bad things to be asked to provide within the cultural spaces in which we all operate. To cultivate the skills of listening, acknowledging others, and feeling empathy for them is what Slavoj Žižek would call “good Leninist work” focused on solidarity. This is complicated by the fact that our silence is not so much expected, elicited or encouraged — rather, there is an attempt to licence, police and impose it. This is most problematic not where the tactic is applied by those excluded by the privileged white male position, but where it is attempted by privileged white males themselves.
Žižek writes:
The prohibition of asserting the particular identity of White Men (as the model of oppression of others), although it presents itself as the admission of their guilt, confers on them a central position: this very prohibition to assert their particular identity makes them into the universal-neutral medium, the place from which the truth about the others’ oppression is accessible. And this is why white liberals so gladly indulge in self-flagellation: the true aim of their activity is not really to help the others but the Lustgewinn2 brought about by their self-accusations, the feeling of their own moral superiority over others. The problem with the self-denial of white identity is not that it goes too far but that it does not go far enough: while its enunciated content seems radical, its position of enunciation remains that of a privileged universality.3
The internet is full of men desperate to offer criticisms, deconstructions and disavowals of their own identities wherever they see them reflected in others. Many of these men would wish to distance themselves from their whiteness, their maleness. Perhaps, as allies, they see themselves as critics of ‘real’ white men — whoever ‘they’ might be. To imagine the ‘real white man’ is to conjure all the phantoms of race war, colonialism and toxic masculinity — to acknowledge their hero / villain as real… perhaps to picture him walking very slowly away from an explosion without looking back.
What, then, are we to make of the silence of Ryan Gosling? Perhaps the actor’s stoic yet vulnerable presence makes him a contemporary embodiment of the male gaze. In Drive and Only God Forgives he is the cipher through which we, the audience, view what takes place. His gaze exoticises everything it touches, from the sadness of the tormented love interest in Drive to the hallucinatory Korean karaoke scenes of Only God Forgives. His silence is problematic because it operates as an inauthentic universalism, that of the white male, the ‘hero’. But these heroic signifiers are left strangely empty, unrepresented, by Gosling’s semi-mute performances. In the void left by Gosling, we see how this patriarchal hero’s gaze functionally and practically obscures the voice, the lived reality, and the politics of the ‘Other’. Gosling is the barred signifier4 of white male identity — erased by his silence, but still obstructing the view. Silent, but complicit. Almost invisible, but completely in the way. What makes Gosling’s quietly smouldering performances problematic is the crux of an irresolvable oxymoron at the heart of twenty-first century white male identity.
White male silence is now both required, and abhorred. It is at once the only appropriate vehicle for the expression of solidarity that the oft-cited ‘cisgender, white, heterosexual man’ (abbreviated to ‘white, cishet’) can offer, and their greatest sin. It is the demonstration of their dominance and privilege. We may abhor our ‘whiteness’ but we cannot negate it. We can afford to stay silent, so we must speak. We make too much noise, and must be silent.
It is these contradictions that Gosling’s performances eroticise for the viewer. It would be fair to ask what else might we expect from films produced by the Hollywood system, dominated as it is by networks of patriarchal and socio-economic advantage. Blade Runner 2049, for all its arty direction, solemn borrowing from Nabokov’s Pale Fire and its existential plot and characters, is pure capitalist entertainment. The version of white male heterosexual identity it offers is of course inherently fetishised; it is inherently an image, and not a reality.
Rejecting the silence of Ryan Gosling does nothing to silence powerful white men in the real world. Nor does it resolve the problems of male silence raised in the 2024 trial of Dominique Pélicot, accused of orchestrating the rape of his drugged-unconscious wife by more than eighty men, over the course of several years. This secret life, and the silence of the men who participated in the abuse despite some of their proclaimed misgivings, demonstrate how pernicious a cloak male silence can be.
As Rachel Hewitt writes, this is as true of the philanderer and the secret gambler as it is of the rapist and the abuser:
The strong desire for living secret lives is a contemporary male pattern, which some men pursue in malevolent forms while others pursue it in innocuous ways… How could those men initiate a conversation with other men, when the necessary secrecy of their behaviour means that they have no idea whether they’re outlying individuals, or whether all men are doing this?5
Keeping silent allows horrific abuse like Pélicot’s to go unchallenged. Gisèle Pélicot, the wife who survived this horrific ordeal, considered her husband an empathetic and supportive partner until confronted by police with evidence of the abuse she had unconsciously endured. The men who raped her and said nothing permitted this fiction. This silence can be categorically condemned. At the same time, if we reject something artificial as though it had power to affect the real world, we abnegate our own responsibility and agency to make change, to find solidarity. To disavow Ryan Gosling’s commodified, mediated, very modern masculine aesthetic is in itself a form of ‘white male silence’. It can be seen as the symbolic silencing of the archetype, and any who might fetishise it. If I publicly reject the white male silence of a Ryan Gosling performance, that disavowal is an attempt to demonstrate that I am both aware of the need for Gosling’s silence, and the fact it was potentially problematic. I indicate my intention to stay silent by speaking out against silence. My silence itself is not enough, it must be performed. In this way, both silence and speech remain problematic territories for men, fraught with danger. We are caught between our dual fears of the implicit violence of complicit silence, and the need to make space for others to speak. We are aware that the void of our silence can conceal and contain monsters, as Freddie deBoer writes:
A decent man does not have to put on an elaborate performance of being sexless and unthreatening towards women, in part because he understands that such a performance is no guarantor of safety at all. Very often, such affects are the very tools of predation.6
And yet, there is still a need for men to appear, to be present in discussions of male violence and abuse without using them as an opportunity for self-aggrandisement, self-protection, or the concealment of their own abusive behaviours. Women are now asking, why aren’t men talking about scandals such as the Pélicot case? As Caroline Criado-Perez writes:
Men have to start talking about this. They have to face up to the sickness that is in their community and they have to reckon with how pervasive it is. Because this thinking, this behaviour, it flourishes in silence. Men who think like this need to know that their fellow men do not secretly wish that they could do it too if only they had the balls or the opportunity. Hell, women need to know it. We need to hear it. We need to see you discussing it with each other and to know that it bothers you as much as it bothers us. To know that you’re as desperate as we are to find a solution to this scourge of male violence against women.7
Croado-Perez is correct, but what she asks seems impossible for men to deliver. What a Ryan Gosling performance offers, then, is a commercialised, consumable form of male silence and stoic reserve that eroticises precisely the silent, secretive interiority of masculine identity, and its dark shadow. Are we safe in Gosling’s taciturn presence? It’s difficult to tell. But is the Gosling archetype truly a new male identity, or simply an inversion or an occultation of the traditional Hollywood male hero? He feels closer to the latter — a marketing team’s attempt to redefine what a man should look like, how much he should share, and how much he should conceal.
“Consumerism will attempt to fill the hole left in masculinity following the collapse of industry,” wrote Darren McGarvey in 2016. He concedes that many of the tropes and assumptions about masculinity are due for “renewal”; that in some sense they must be challenged, even overthrown. But he correctly warns that the cost of this, nor the vector for it, should be the silence of white males:
It is extremely important that we do not, in our virtuous attempt to make overdue space for marginalised voices, inadvertently set up an esoteric talking shop that sneers at the very thought a man (white or otherwise) may have an opinion on his place in this new plural society.8
McGarvey’s identification of the “esoteric talking shop” which both requires and abhors men’s silence and their speech describes a particular suburb of our overheated online discourse; one which can be broadly subsumed into the larger district of what is known as ‘identity politics’. Only a discourse informed by identity politics could produce, at its centre, an antagonist as fundamentally contradictory as the pre-supposed ‘cishet white male’ who is constantly invoked in online discussions.
Disciples of left-wing identity politics as an ideology situate this homo sacer — the sacred or accursed man, he who is ‘fair game’ to be killed or destroyed — at the centre of their discourse. His exclusion is a hidden trope, an unspoken sentence of exile implied within the foregrounding of any identity conceived to be marginalised. By making him the always-unspoken adversary, they give the silent white male his seeming omnipresence. By making him the ultimate straw man, they also make him all-powerful. They accept the definitions of whiteness and maleness as real, and pervasive9 — and thereby project them onto all men.
What is required of a young man entering the territory of this discourse? His silence or speech is not enough, even when passionately arguing for the extinction of those who look and sound like him. His physical ‘whiteness’ is an unavoidable genetic and existential consequence, and cannot be abnegated, even if the categorisation of who is white and who is not is still a site of disagreement. But everything else that makes the young man homo sacer is subject to potential alteration in the process of his self-discovery and self-mythologising. This is enabled by the possibility that he can ‘identify as’ another non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual identitarian category. If he feels tarnished by the association with maleness, he can identify as nonbinary or transgender. If he is heterosexual in his preferences and erotic life, he can nonetheless identify as bisexual, and therefore opt out of his heterosexual identity, with all of the narrow and unpleasant associations it has in the milieu of the identity politics market. Finally, his socio-economic class can be misrepresented, distorted; his history rewritten to show an amount of struggle that perhaps negates some or all of his masculine, ‘cisgender, white’ privilege, and his origin within the most wealthy and profligate section of western society.
The newly-minted option for us to ‘identify as’ anything we say is potentially the ultimate get out of jail free card for any self-hating cishet white male. And who can blame him for hating himself? In fact, this is precisely what we ask of the men to whom these labels are applied, or who apply them to themselves. All of the above identity categories can be misappropriated in an attempt to mitigate one’s own identitarian failings of privilege. A male who opts into an alternative identity category is somehow quantifiably ‘less white’ or ‘less male’ than a typical ‘cishet white male’, and therefore less culpable; more able to criticise, and to be an ally.
None of these examples call into question the reality of transgender, queer, or class-based identities. In fact, such examples of identitarian dishonesty actually obscure the challenges faced by members of these marginalised identity categories. But as homo sacer, the hated cisgender white male cannot be blamed for seeing these identities as choices, or as useful disguises; as potential routes out of long, painful, unasked-for exile. Perhaps parallels can be made with the dilemma faced by generations upon generations of homosexuals, who had to ‘pass’ as straight to avoid being discriminated against, imprisoned or killed. The stakes are completely different but the logic is the same. Dissimilation is a natural choice if the alternative is silence or invisibility.
The feminist writer Victoria Smith considers this a betrayal, as she writes in a piece against the introduction of ‘self-ID’ policies to support people seeking to legally change sex. Smith writes:
It is an insult to the humanity of all male people for a minority of male people to look at the culture on offer and decide it just isn’t for them personally — as though most men are cannon fodder, except for them.10
Her argument tends to frame this flight from masculinity as cowardice, rather than understandable fear and shame. Men attempting to seek refuge from whiteness and maleness are not fleeing persecution, but attempting to avoid exile. Many mistake the latter for the former, and perhaps this explains some of the radicalisation found in the odious ‘men’s rights’ movements. Many men are so aggrieved to lose their entitlement that they radicalise. Others submit, and that is understandable. At least if one finds a way to disassociate oneself from the category, one can then contribute in kind, by taking part in the silencing of the self and others on behalf of the marginalised. Often, the only universality available is the abnegation of one’s own identity, as Ryan Gosling’s Ken discovers in Barbie.
Failing to set up a patriarchal system in Barbieland, Ken realises that patriarchy is a hollow premise. In the cumulative musical number, he comes to terms with being “just Ken.” No actor but Gosling could have sold this narrative. His encounter with outdated male tropes and assumptions in the ‘real world’ leads him to attempt a caricatured performance of masculinity. He becomes a plastic incel, caught up in fantasies about what he should be entitled to own or control. These simplified identity tropes are just another shell, concealing his emptiness. He finds this performance unfulfilling, and at the film’s conclusion, admits that he would prefer to simply be nothing.
Ken is content to let go of all masculine signs and signifiers, to simply be ‘himself’ — a genderless sex doll, denuded of genitalia, a kind of human furniture, completely harmless in his emptiness, his pure adjacency to the vivid celebration of female identity at the film’s heart. This is a safe space for Ken to occupy, and its appeal to both male and female audiences is understandable, because it posits a way for men to be in the world without their traditional, and often toxic, patriarchal signifiers.
In a cruel but hardly unrelated irony, the film’s female director Greta Gerwig and lead Margot Robbie were overlooked for Oscars, while predictably, Gosling took home the prize. The gestural allyship, the stepping aside implied by the seemingly revelatory admission that he was “just Ken” eclipsed the film’s defining and salient points about feminine identity. Traditional male cinematic heroes used to embody an implied universality, a shared morality and ethics. These were almost universally heteronormative and patriarchal. We’ve grown tired of such heroes, stories, and meanings. We love Gosling best when he is at his most figuratively empty, when he is telling us it’s okay to be nothing. Barbie cannot offer much in its simplistic deconstruction of male identity, even as it attempts to dismantle it to entertain us.
Slavoj Žižek has argued that replacing one false universality with another, or a multiplicity of others, creates more division rather than working towards a true universality, the “true struggle”. He writes:
The true struggle is the struggle for universality… the problem is, how do you define the universal dimension? … Every particular identity politics implies a universal dimension of how you construct the space in which particular identities coexist.11
He would argue that cisgender, white, heterosexual men still have more in common with any oppressed identity under capitalism than there exist differences between them; and that the struggle to dismantle, criticise and invalidate one subjective reality does not lead to any kind of true universalism. Rather, it leads to a situation where one identity is silenced and vilified at the expense of the other, reproducing the very divide-and-conquer tactics of empire and capitalism which evolved into the hegemony of ‘whiteness’, white males, and the white male gaze in the first place.
This is a cruel trick to play on young men. While the binary of self-abnegation or silence is presented as a choice — accept your privilege and become the villain of the piece, or ‘check’ that privilege and disavow everything that makes you who you are — it is a false binary, perhaps the first of many this young man may face over the course of his life. He is asked to accept the false premises of ‘whiteness’, of ‘maleness’, and of ‘gender’, but not to end them, only to punish himself — a superego injunction of self-hatred. This is another of Žižek’s ‘false choices’:
The trick performed by the superego is to seem to offer the child a free choice, when, as every child knows, he is not being given any choice at all. Worse than that, he is being given an order and told to smile at the same time… The superego orders you to enjoy doing what you have to do.12
The choice is submission to ‘traditional’ patriarchal values, their rejection, complicit silence, or exile. Most submit, and become one kind of misogynist or another. Homophobia, transphobia and racism are just a step away. The logic is obvious: ‘They hate me, so I will hate them.’ Those who choose silence become institutionalised, or seek to impose silence on others.
The real-world brutality and online rhetoric of the radicalised misogynist is perhaps what we project onto the silent, half-smiling face of Ryan Gosling when we watch him. A sense of inevitable, promised, latent violence. Cathartic shootings, fantasies of dominance… the fertile spawning ground of incel dreams and white supremacist memes.
Critic Scott Tobias writes of Gosling in Only God Forgives:
[He is] a character who’s been rendered a zombie by circumstance, stumbling through events he doesn’t have the standing or courage to stop.13
Your hatred of Gosling as a deconstruction of the white male hero cipher, or your desire to be like him or fuck him, cancel each other out. Patriarchy, zombie capitalist dominance and widespread inequality remain unchallenged by this version of masculinity, and by attempts to reject or re-frame it. This will continue long after Gosling’s brooding goes out of fashion. Just as the phantasmic charge of glamorous violence in his films is ultimately symbolic and empty, his silence solves nothing.
Laurie Penny, “We’re not done here”, Longreads, 18 Jan. 2018.
“pleasure gain”
Slavoj Žižek, “The Three Whites and the Two Blacks”, Žižek Goads and Prods, 14 Apr. 2024.
Jacques Lacan’s concept of the barred signifier describes a symbol that has been ‘effaced’ (erased), but retains its significance: “...the signifier is a sign that doesn’t refer to any object, not even to one in the form of a trace, even though the trace nevertheless heralds the signifier’s essential feature. It, too, is the sign of an absence.” - Jacques Lacan, “Seminar III”, 1955 (Quoted in lacanonline.com essay by Owen Hewitson, 2010).
Rachel Hewitt, “Why aren’t more men talking about this?”, In Her Nature, 7 Sep. 2024.
Freddie DeBoer, “You Don’t Have to be a Try Guy”, Substack, 3 Sep. 2024.
Caroline Criado Perez, “Not All Men… But How Many?” Invisible Women, 7 Sep. 2024.
Darren McGarvey, “Privilege and Prejudice: Social justice in an age of male confusion”, Bella Caledonia, 26 Feb. 2016.
This is in strict opposition to much of the theory in postcolonial studies and feminism, many strands of which are dedicated to the deconstruction of whiteness and maleness (or gender itself) as categories; these fields of critical theory are, broadly speaking, anti-essentialist (see Part 1: Gender in Trouble for an analysis of how this plays out in the theories of Judith Butler).
Victoria Smith, “Self-ID and unprincipled exceptions”, The Critic, 29 Sep. 2023.
Slavoj Žižek, “For a left that dares to speak its name”, YouTube, 2019.
Scott Tobias, “Hear me out: why Only God Forgives isn’t a bad movie”, The Guardian, 8 Jan. 2021.
I'll kick off the comments this month by saying, this essay and the one that follows it were the most fun to write in the whole series.
I decided to start the book with some film criticism because it's through Hollywood movies and TV that we see ourselves 'represented' - it's how we commodify ourselves, by looking to archetypes and icons to explain our own identities and desires.
This is even more true in an era where we like to denounce or decry the mediated versions of ourselves we see in screen, in order to demonstrate our virtue. As Slavoj Žižek says in The Pervert's Guide to Ideology: "Pretend to renounce and you can get it all."
With that in mind, here's my disavowal of the "white male silence" of Ryan Gosling - how it is performed, what is enunciated and what is left out, and what that means for young men who idolize or repudiate him.
What did you think?
Thanks for all your comments so far on the essays in the series - and a massive thanks to paid subscribers. Exclusive content is on the way for you next week.