Roger Dodger's (2002) timeless toxic masculinity | by The Spectator | September 2024

by Maximo Bratter '25, A&E Editor

It's 2024, and prototypical alpha males like Andrew Tate and the Liver King have long been viewed as caricatures of their own archetypes, but the desire for greater inner masculinity in society is not a passing fad. Whether or not you personally believe masculinity is an intangible social construct, the fact is that many members of American society feel its pervasive effects on an identifiable emotional level. The Pew Research Center found that male stereotypes like having multiple sexual partners and being ready to fight when provoked were viewed as implicit standards by a variety of American men just before the COVID-19 pandemic. While research mentions other pressing factors for masculinity, the expected notion of womanizer status among men seems to have never lost its appeal. Pop culture has taken note of this in the 21st century—where sex is viewed as either an absurd or extremely important conquest in a young man's life—in films like Superbad (2007) and Licorice Pizza (2021). The aforementioned films are cases of teenagers or young adults understanding societal expectations and enforcing the pressures they create themselves. But what happens when this idea is not only mainstream, but seemingly suicidal, self-appointed mentors—like the aforementioned influencers—reinforce these ideas and forcefully push them on young and impressionable minds? Then you have Roger Dodger (2002).

Roger Dodger was conceived as the rebellious offspring of the post-9/11 exceptionalism revived in New York and across America. Caught between former President George W. Bush's rhetoric about preserving the nuclear family and American interventionism for the sake of cultural isolation, Roger (Campbell Scott) responds with a big “F**k you.” What if I want to put my personal pleasure above my capitalist career? What if I voluntarily excommunicate my family? What if the only way I can bear to spend time with my estranged nephew is to give him sex for the first time? While these are unbearable claims for most, the last part is all that matters to Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), whose mother – whose calls Roger ignores – said he should stay at his uncle's after visiting Columbia University rather than make the long trip back home to central Ohio.

No offense to any 0 Ohioans reading this, but the state is rarely in the news outside of LeBron James and political referendums. That all changed, however, with the nomination of JD Vance as the vice presidential running mate for former President Donald Trump's Republican presidential nomination. Vance, famously from rural Ohio, espouses the same nativist and borderline eugenism theology that Bush did in the early 2000s, but with a modern twist of hyperbole and exclusivity. Roger, while unapologetic about his roots after moving to the big city of NYC, is also from Ohio, and his migration to the heartland of American consumerism embodies the masculine stereotypes used by both Bush and Vance. Roger works for an advertising agency, where he bluntly tells Nick that his job is to make people feel bad and make them crave more products to fill that emotional hole. Both Vance and Bush used the same strategy; not only telling people what they needed, but also reprimanding those who deviated. Nate, a teenager with a malleable mind and a single mother, immediately attaches himself to Roger to learn the methods of social dominance from his uncle, who poses as a master.

Roger is comically calculating in his sexual endeavors and his treatment of women, eerily resembling an Andrew Tate type. He begins to teach Nate how to spot women who have subversively revealed their sexuality through physical promiscuity, and how to ogle them in extremely perverse ways. I say perverse because that's how most people, myself included, see Roger, but Roger would disagree; he has gamed sex and is simply teaching Nate the cheat codes. Roger even goes so far as to explicitly acknowledge this, mentioning NBA greats like Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, the latter of whom he draws inspiration from by describing self-indulgent desperation as a more positive “winning time.”

As the film progresses, you want to hate Roger for all his misogyny and disregard for society's pleasant manners, but instead of being outraged by his self-righteousness, you're drawn to sympathetic disgust. Roger is a patently unhappy and embarrassed man who projects his inner demons onto women in the hopes that they'll like his surface enough not to dig deeper. This is foolhardy, and Roger eventually realizes it through his broken relationship with Joyce (Isabella Rossellini) and the torturous night he inflicts on Nate. Yet Roger has kept up this facade for so long that he eventually decides that since his peers can't take it anymore, he's going to try to reproduce it in future generations à la Nate. And so people like Andrew Tate or those who misinterpret the symbolism of someone like Patrick Bateman (American Psycho) are born: they mold the uninformed and underdeveloped to create a future with people more like themselves, thereby subjecting future generations to the same pressures that harmed them and so many others in the first place. The cycle repeats itself.