Putting the brute in | Screen
A raw new C4 drama asks what it takes to turn five 'ordinary' lads into gang rapists
The crisis in modern masculinity has been well documented in almost every medium over recent years, from the tongue-in-cheek New Lad backlash of Baddiel and Skinner or Loaded, via films such as Fight Club, to the sociological and psychological explorations of books such as Anthony Clare's On Men or Susan Faludi's Stiffed. The observation that the economic and social empowerment of women is contributing to the emasculation of modern man has turned into an easy truism, prompting the question of what happens as the natural progression of this trend? Is male aggression instinctive, and is it being sublimated or suppressed, channelled safely into the arena of sport, or left to fester ominously under the veneer of the well-adjusted husband and father, barely held in check and ready to explode with damaging consequences at the merest provocation?Channel 4's two-part drama, Men Only, charts the latter course, following the lives of a group of five 'ordinary blokes' who spiral into a world of violence and bestiality without noticing their own descent until it's too late.
'I felt that there wasn't any point in doing this unless we showed men going to the ultimate extreme,' explains writer Richard Cottan. This is his first television drama, and has been produced by World Productions, the team behind series such as This Life and Cops. 'It wasn't meant to be another laddish drama, with men doing naughty things, I wanted to show these characters reaching a real nadir. We didn't set out to be sensational - we wanted a borderline area where people are in a degree of denial about whether it's plausible. Some men see it and acknowledge that this could happen to people they know, but others seem to get quite angry and want to dissociate themselves from it.'
The five characters' dangerous journey begins with sport, the acceptable outlet for raw male aggression, tribalism and nationalism. Bound together only by their obsession with football and their own failing five-a-side team, the succession of defeats by younger, fitter teams compounds the feelings of failure and loss of virility that plague the men in their domestic lives. Mac (Marc Warren), a paediatrician, is trying for a baby with his wife and failing, with the growing suspicion that the deficiency is his. Jamie (Martin Freeman) is unemployed and impotent. Des's (Daniel Ryan) wife is openly having an affair with a younger man, while Dwight (Razaaq Adoti) is seeing a therapist, mocked by his father who believes that manhood is measured in units of alcohol. Jason (Stephen Moyer), a nightclub manager, small-time coke dealer and vicious womaniser, the ringleader of the group, is despised by the two women whose approval he most needs - his young daughter and his strident new boss.
The lads abandon the humiliation of Tuesday night games for pursuits that give them back a sense of control - strip bars, drink, drugs, brothels, fights - and so Jason begins egging them on to up the ante each week. At the core of this compulsion to achieve uninhibited pleasure at greater and greater cost is the characters' varying sexual dysfunctions - a primitive need to prove themselves as men through aggressive, selfish sex.
'I think there is now a confusion in men and male sexuality,' says Cottan. 'One of the great differences between male and female sexuality is that when male sexuality is denied or made redundant it can turn into this kind of poisonous violence that's a reaction to a loss of power.'
The drama's climactic moment is the drug-blurred rape of a young nurse, Alice (Zoe Telford), by three of the group, while the others stand by, complicit. The second part then witnesses their contrasting attempts to justify, erase or confront what they have done while keeping it separate from the rest of their lives under the constant fear of discovery.
Though at first glance the idea of a drunken laugh ending in brutal rape seems grimly implausible, the script and camerawork combine to lend the scene a subtle and frightening realism. High on ketamine, the characters see the world at shifting speeds through skewed, kaleidoscopic lenses; control, consent, memory all slide into a fuzzy middle ground with no easy definitions. The tattered remnants of their consciences tell them it was rape, but they can still persuade themselves, as Mac tries to, that it was 'just a fuck, wasn't it? She was up for it.' Only Jason, with his apparent absence of conscience, is cruel enough to state baldly what he knows the others are afraid of hearing: 'No, mate. What we did was rape. Deal with it.'
'One of the recurrent responses from men who have watched this - men who consider themselves liberal and open-minded - is that it would be hard for them to watch the drama with their female partners,' says executive producer Sophie Balhetchet. 'In other words, they can only acknowledge the potential for this kind of behaviour in private, because it deals with questions of male arousal and desire that women perhaps don't want to confront.'
This, in part, is what makes the rape scene so chilling; Alice has spent the night flirting, encouraging and trying to keep up with the men and has willingly made herself vulnerable, implicitly trusting that nice blokes know when to stop. 'I think a point of recognition for a lot of women is that they've probably sailed quite close to the wind and put themselves in similar situations,' Balhetchet adds.
It would be easy to dismiss this 'it could be you/your boyfriend' subtext as sensationalised scaremongering, but the point of Men Only is to watch a possibility unfold to its logical conclusion. The various women in the drama are not consciously pressurising their men, but they are able to articulate their own desires and expect their partners to take responsibility for themselves; drugs and alcohol therefore become for the men a means of avoiding responsibility. While the drama's ending deliberately avoids easy conclusions, the lack of resolution may strike some viewers as unsatisfying.
'We wanted to leave the ending open,' Cottan explains. 'So that there's no moral judgment or sense of redemption. They're left as prisoners of the worst possible version of themselves.'
Men Only is on 3 and 4 June, Channel 4
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