Fellas on Screen
On Friendship, Eephus, Vulcanizadora
Housekeeping:
The folks at Never Hungover would like to extend a warm welcome to those who joined the club in the wake of the swag crisis blog. Things are dire, Jalen Williams just scored 40 points in a Finals game, all we have is each other.
Went back on
with the fellas a few weeks ago to talk said swag crisis two or so weeks ago. If you enjoyed the blog, you will enjoy the conversationI have a piece in the upcoming Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly. It’s about B.G., like the former Hot Boy B.G., and the peculiar album he released this year which, as a term of his federal probation, he had to clear with the federal government before releasing. Subscribe, hold it in your hands.
If you’re in New York, I’m reading tonight with
at Seventh Heaven at roughly 8pm. Come hang out, allow me to buy you a drink, I’m sure we can get the Finals game on a TV, I don’t know, the etiquette on these sorts of things escapes me, we don’t have stuff like this in New Orleans.Conversely, if you’d rather buy me a drink, you can always consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
Now, a blog:
There’s a scene in Eephus, Carson Lund’s indie darling baseball movie, that I haven’t quite shaken since seeing it. A group of mostly old men, significantly smaller than the one with which we start the film, pull around and turn on their cars so that they might play their final game of rec baseball into the night. By the time this scene arrives, the movie has already begun to drag, which dragging is by design. It’s a movie about amateur baseball, which means it’s a movie about men who don’t quite know how to say goodbye to one another.
Men are lonely. Haven’t you heard? They have fewer lasting connections than ever. They are sublimating sexual frustration into violent, radical politics; they golf because toxic masculinity taught them that it’s gay to go for a walk; they will train for an ultramarathon before they go to therapy. They are listening to podcasts. At this juncture, the notion of the lonely American man threatens to subsume the actual possibility of male loneliness—can you really be alone with this much attention lavished upon you? The lonely man drives clicks, helps explain troubling sociopolitical developments, is good for a laugh. Is he real? I don’t know, man.
Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship is the 2025 film most explicitly concerned with the quandary of male loneliness; it is also the one with the least to say on the topic. Friendship is not a bad movie. I saw it in a full theater, and my audience-mates laughed from the moment Tim Robinson entered the frame. I saw it with a male friend, and afterward we asked each other things like “what did you think?” It was a nice experience, which is high praise from a person who considers I Think You Should Leave one of the most corrosive viruses plaguing the modern imagination.
Briefly—Tim Robinson plays a Tim Robinsonian suburban loser who works at a company concerned with making your phone more addictive; he, at the urging of his cancer-survivor wife (Kate Mara) accepts an invite from his cool neighbor (a delightful Paul Rudd); Robinson is immediately taken by his new friend’s job (weatherman), hobbies (anti-mayoral punk band), and social life (extant), but botches a group hang in, again, Robinsonian fashion, prompting an adult friend breakup. The notion of an unc breakup is, per DeYoung, the cornerstone around which the film was built. Point being DeYoung clearly identified in the image of a friend break-up a story worth telling; it feels only appropriate to evaluate the movie accordingly.
Friendship trips over its own feet not for its failure to say anything about male friendship at the universal level—though, of course, it does fail on this front—but for its inability to establish the stakes of its titular friendship even at the level of the specific. The viewer cannot empathize with Robinson’s solitude because he is fashioned not as a vulnerable loser but as an irredeemable narcissist. Friendship amplifies the shortcomings of Robinson’s comedic range, whose constant courting of the absurd feels risky the first time you see it and like a safety blanket the thirtieth time. Robinson’s ouvre ostensibly skewers the American middle-manager suburban loser, but his default character is so far removed from anybody’s lived experience that his satire becomes tongue-tied. Watch a pony repeat its one trick too many times and you’ll start to doubt its ability to say anything about equestrian nature.
I’m being harsh—Robinson is still hilarious in the movie, and it’s not like he wrote it, even though for all intents and purposes he might have. The problem is more that Rudd’s squad doesn’t feel worth hanging with, much less sticking up with a stolen gun. Friendship is more concerned with keeping the laughs coming—which, kudos—than with rendering anything like a felt, human relationship. In other words, it fails to establish either internal stakes or external relevance. Friendship’s loneliness is not fearsome, and its fellas are not worthy. It’s a classic bait and switch: come to laugh at yourself, stay to laugh at the freak.
Writing about friendship requires a certain level of vulnerability because meaningful friendships depend on a certain level of vulnerability. Vulnerability necessitates the risk that you’re going to embarrass yourself. Take the recent New York Times Magazine piece, “Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?”, in which the author admits turning to Joe Rogan and David Goggins amidst bouts of unexpected middle-aged loneliness. Who am I to judge? I’ve formed illusory bonds with similarly faceless voices on my phone, and I wouldn’t let a clinical psychologist see my Instagram explore page. Everyone does what they can to make due. And yet…and yet, the impulse to universalize one’s experience is as tempting as it is misguided, not least when done in the name of pathologizing an entire gendered cohort. Men, like people, resist being explained away with the wave of a hand.
The most striking portrait of male companionship set to screen this year is also the bleakest. In Joel Potrykus’s Vulcanizadora, friendship is recast as a literal suicide pact, the horror and sorrow of which being it only half works. Potrykus plays a pathetic, sniveling man-child named Derek who might not have been out of place in last year’s Rap World who finds himself brimming at the opportunity to hike out to the beach with his sullen, distant buddy Marty (a brooding Joshua Burge). Derek attempts to please like his life depends on it; Marty, in the rare moments he decides to speak, reveals that it sort of does. Marty, you learn, has just been bailed out of jail on arson charges by his sad sack pal. Their hike is meant to end with each of them donning metal faceclamps, placing explosives in their mouths, and lighting one another’s fuse. Marty is convinced that neither of them have anything left to live for and depends upon Derek to finish the job, where Derek is willing to do anything so long as he can spend some time with his friend and hear a jail story or two. You get where this is going: as the resolute Marty grows more insistent upon effectuating their death pact, Derek wavers, negotiates, attempts to back out. They both have something to live for, you’re meant to understand, because they have each other. Derek begs for mercy, Marty begs for deliverance, then only Derek’s head explodes and the boys go 0-for-2.
In the wake of Derek’s death, the film abandons its taut balancing act between sincere laughs and unwatchable agony and settles into something like ambient misery. Marty sulks around his small Michigan hometown reduced to a basically infantile state. His initially imposing silence, which one might mistake for a removed sort of cool, melts into a pitiable vulnerability before sinking into something even lower than that. Vulcanizadora, like Eephus, start by playing stilted male friendship for laughs and devolve into films that by their end are downright difficult to watch. Both structural disintegrations appear to be by design, which means they’re worth paying attention to. Death looms over the shoulders of each film’s friendships; the most these guys seem to have in common is that they’ve got to die one day, and over the course of their respective films they come to realize that if they can find a justification to spend time together they might be able to at least meet death on their terms.
It’s a metaphor, man—or at least it is if you want it to be. These films resist the urge to make some big sweeping statement about the way men have been conditioned to interact with one another. Good—who the hell would want to watch something so didactic? It’s old hat by now: men can’t say “I love you” to one another without affixing a neutering “man,” “bro,” or “dude” to undercut their sincerity; guys watch sports because they can’t just talk about their feelings; dudes seem to need a justification to hang out. You’ve either lived it, or you’ve seen it on your phone, or it couldn’t interest you less. Vulcanizadora and Eephus stand out where Friendship shrinks because they are movies that adopt the logic of male friendship rather than ones preoccupied with commenting upon it. You don’t always get to pick your boys, and your common ground may be perplexingly narrow, but even as the night creeps on and the wheels start to fall off it always proves close to impossible to say goodbye.
Is there a link to your post about why you think I Think You Should Leave is so bad?
They’re listening to podcasts.