Whatever (1999)
Movie rating: 10/10
Forget Joker: this is the real incel movie. Back in 2019 there was a lot of hysteria that the Todd Phillips/Joaquin Phoenix Joker film could inspire violence from incels, short for “involuntary celibates”, with the U.S. Army warning about violence in movie theatres. None of that panned out, and the actual film was more about mental illness and cuts to social services than anything related to inceldom. That’s not something you can say about Whatever, currently streaming on Vimeo with English subtitles.
Written and directed by Philippe Harel, who also plays the lead role, the 1999 French production is an adaptation of the debut novel by author Michel Houellebecq. The original French title, Extension du domaine de la lutte (“Extension of the domain of struggle”), is a reference to Marxist slogans put forward by students in Paris during the revolutionary movement of May 1968. Harel stars as the protagonist, known only as “Our Hero”, a depressed and isolated man with a well-paying but dull bureaucratic job instructing office workers how to use software from the Ministry of Agriculture. As the story begins, Our Hero has not had sex in more than two years since a breakup. He spends his weekends at home alone. During a business trip to Rouen with co-worker Raphaël Tisserand (José Garcia), a 28-year-old virgin, he watches the latter’s increasingly desperate attempts to find a woman. Throughout, we hear Our Hero’s inner monologue lamenting modern society and his own alienation and ennui.
Whatever is less similar to Joker than it is to the direct inspiration of Joker, Martin Scorsese’s classic Taxi Driver, as well as Fight Club. Like Taxi Driver, the protagonist is consumed by loneliness and despair at the society around him, and begins to think of lashing out through violence. Like Fight Club, also an adaptation of a popular novel, Whatever conveys something of the ’90s zeitgeist involving a certain kind of protagonist: a nameless, isolated man whose well-paying office job can’t help but hide a profound dissatisfaction with life, revealed through inner monologue. Houellebecq’s literary debut was released in 1994, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was released in 1996, and both film adaptations both came out in 1999. This was the decade when capitalism appeared triumphant following the collapse of the USSR, when the system’s defenders like Francis Fukuyama trumpeted the “end of history”. Whatever society’s continuing problems, we were—and still are—told, “There is no alternative.”
One of the most interesting differences between Fight Club and Whatever is the comparison between American and French perspectives of an isolated, disenchanted male office worker circa 1999. Both the United States and France experienced radical mass movements in the late 1960s at the height of the post-war boom. But in France, the revolution of May 1968 saw the greatest general strike in history, which could have led to the overthrow of capitalism.
Don’t believe me? Take it from no less a source than Charles de Gaulle, who according to the U.S. ambassador told him, “The game’s up. In a few days the Communists will be in power.” Fortunately for de Gaulle, the Stalinist and trade union leaders had no perspective of taking power and instead opted to call off the strike as quickly as possible, hand power back to the bourgeoisie, and return to “normalcy”.
Our Hero always adored these moments when everything grinds to a halt. The whole system goes out of joint, portending a destiny, not just a moment, and affording a rare glimpse of eternity. Thinking back on May ’68, some people said it was a wonderful time for them. Chatting with strangers… everything seemed possible… I believed them. Others recalled that no trains ran, and there was no fuel. I believed them, too. Both versions agreed on one thing: magically, for a few days, a huge, oppressive machine had stopped. There was a wavering, an uncertainty. A state of suspense. A certain calm spread over France. Of course, afterwards the machine ran even faster, more ruthlessly. May ’68 had repealed the few moral rules that had hindered its devouring force. All the same, there had been a pause, a hesitation, a moment of metaphysical doubt.
Today, more than 50 years after the revolution of 1968 and nearly 25 years after the film adaptation of Whatever, the French masses are on the move again. More than a million people came out on the streets as part of a national strike against the attack on pensions by President Emmanuel Macron, who wants to raise the legal retirement age from 62 to 64. One sign seen among the crowds read, “Tu nous mets 64, on te re-Mai 68” (“You give us 64, we give you re-May ’68”). In the state of generalized crisis on all fronts in this time of pandemic, war, austerity, inflation, and climate collapse, history has come back with a vengeance. The anger of the masses, in France and elsewhere, has again reached fever pitch and is seeking an outlet.
In the late ’90s, though accumulated discontent eventually gave rise to the anti-globalization movement, the apparent triumph of liberal capitalism meant a renewed focus on the individual. If you were dissatisfied with your life, well, that’s your problem. This is still the dominant message in bourgeois media today. For protagonists like the Narrator in Fight Club and Our Hero in Whatever, with their material needs met through their well-paying jobs, disgruntlement is more the result of loneliness and personal despair. As Tyler Durden said in Fight Club of this contemporary generation: “Our Great Depression is our lives.”
Whatever has many striking moments when Our Hero ruminates on the emptiness of his life. “Having lived so little, I imagined I might never die,” Our Hero thinks. “I couldn’t believe that a human life could be so empty. I told myself something had to happen one day. Big mistake. A life can be both empty and short. The days trickle by, leaving no marks or memories, then suddenly stop.” He looks at old photos of himself: “Hard to remember, but I once had a life. I had photos to prove it. Probably during my adolescence, or soon after. How hungry for life I was then!” Our Hero’s current existence is so empty that looking at photos from his childhood seems like the life of another person.
Sitting through a largely pointless board meeting, he thinks about the disappearance of all the dreams and aspirations he once had. “How full of possibilities life seemed!” he remembers. “I might become a pop star, move to Venezuela.” Much of the person Our Hero once was in his youth seems to have been consumed by the travails of life, leaving only a burnt-out shell. He embodies a famous line by poet Delmore Schwartz, “Time is the fire in which we burn.”
Bourgeois ideology focuses on the individual’s ability to make change to their own life, rather than the ability of the organized masses to improve their conditions through class struggle. One of the most important aspects of many people’s personal lives is their ability to form romantic and/or sexual relationships. It’s clear this is the biggest thing missing from Our Hero’s life, as it is for co-worker Tisserand. Here’s the point where Whatever might make some people uncomfortable. Our Hero puts forward perspectives that have become common in the incel movement, where some young men enraged by their inability to form romantic and sexual relationships with women have taken out their anger on society through violence and murder.
Spoilers follow.
One of the most infamous acts of incel terrorism was the 2018 Toronto van attack in which Alek Minassian killed 10 people, eight of whom were women. Just before his murder spree, Minassian wrote on Facebook and referred to Elliot Rodger, another mass murderer and self-described incel: “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! … All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” After the attack, The New York Times wrote an article describing Houellebecq as predicting the incel movement, and characters such as Tisserand as “proto-incels”:
The core of Houellebecq’s case against modern sexuality can already be found in his first novel, “Extension du Domaine de la Lutte,” which appeared in English under the unfortunate title “Whatever.” The book’s narrator set the pattern for all of Houellebecq’s antiheroes: depressed, misanthropic men who, precisely because they cannot achieve romantic or sexual satisfaction, believe that sex is the most important thing in life. “Lacking in looks as well as personal charm, subject to frequent bouts of depression, I don’t in the least correspond to what women are usually looking for in a man,” the narrator confesses. Houellebecq has always seen himself as speaking for and to such men; women figure in his novels almost exclusively as their tormentors or saviors. “It may be, dear reader and friend, that you are a woman yourself,” Houellebecq writes. “Don’t be alarmed, these things happen.”
The novel’s French title, which translates literally as “Extension of the Domain of Struggle,” encapsulates Houellebecq’s theory of sexuality (he is typically French in his love of abstraction and theory). The sexual revolution of the 1960s, widely seen as a liberation movement, is better understood as the intrusion of capitalist values into the previously sacrosanct realm of intimate life. “Just like unrestrained economic liberalism … sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization,” he writes. “Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never.” The latter group — the losers — are represented in “Whatever” by Raphaël Tisserand, who is so repulsive that he has never had sex with a woman, despite strenuous efforts to seduce one. He is a proto-incel, and his story builds to a disturbing scene in which the narrator urges him to murder a woman who has rejected him.
Tisserand is portrayed as a character even more pathetic than Our Hero, grateful for the latter’s company in part because Our Hero never mentions having any kind of sex life. Conversely, he also feels respect for the fact that Our Hero has had sex and relationships with women. Throughout the film, Tisserand eyes up women, tries to flirt or ask for numbers, is rejected each time, and grows increasingly desperate. Going out to a nightclub with Our Hero on Christmas Eve, Tisserand dances with unenthusiastic women who walk away from him as soon as they are able. Our Hero, on the other hand, has given up. At one point he looks at a woman sitting nearby. I thought he might finally try and talk to her. Instead, Our Hero goes to the bathroom and masturbates. Unlike Our Hero, at least Tisserand is trying, but his rejections make us feel as embarrassed for him as he must feel.
When a dejected Tisserand rejoins Our Hero at the table, the latter brutally confirms to his virginal co-worker that his situation is indeed hopeless, and always was. “You’ll never be a girl’s erotic dream,” he says. “Get used to it.”
Here Whatever becomes most disturbing. Our Hero tells Tisserand that while he cannot possess women’s beauty, “You can possess their lives.” He suggests to Tisserand, “Take up a career as a murderer. It’s your last chance. When you have those women trembling with your knife, begging you for their youth, you’ll be the master!”
Most audience members will be uncomfortable during these scenes. They should be. It’s here where I must point out a basic concept in art that is often forgotten: depiction does not equal endorsement. The fact that Whatever presents what might drive incels to commit murder does not mean it condones those actions. Nevertheless, this is something that has happened in reality. Take the approach of Spinoza: “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.”
That’s how I view movies like Whatever, Taxi Driver, Fight Club, and Joker. Capitalist society is alienating and drives many people to despair. Unfortunately, many impressionable young men do sometimes turn what are meant as cautionary tales and glorify their lead characters. But there’s one significant difference between Our Hero and Raphaël Tisserand, and the likes of Travis Bickle, Tyler Durden, and Arthur Fleck. The former don’t look cool; they look pathetic. It’s hard to imagine a young man idolizing the two main characters from Whatever. The predominant emotions they spark in the audience might be pity, then disgust or scorn. The first inkling of danger comes when Our Hero buys a large knife. The fact that he encourages Tisserand to kill a happy young couple from the dance club eradicates at that moment any sympathy we might have had for him.
To his “credit” (setting that bar as low as possible), Tisserand doesn’t go through with the murder. Shortly thereafter, he dies in a car crash. The crash occurs when Our Hero is trying to call him, as Tisserand’s car crashes while his hand is shown reaching for a cellphone on the dashboard. When their office announces the news of Tisserand’s death, Our Hero’s expression remains blank compared to the grief of his co-workers. Yet Tisserand’s demise seems to accelerate his downward spiral. After he slaps a female co-worker who tells him not to smoke in the office, he grapples with suicidal thoughts and finally checks himself into a mental health clinic.
Michel Houellebecq appears to be a complex and contradictory figure whose politics have steadily become more reactionary. He’s been accused of misogyny, racism, and Islamophobia. I haven’t read any of his work, so an assessment of Houellebecq himself is beyond the scope of this review. But I admired the film adaptation of Whatever for its bluntness in addressing uncomfortable issues that are rarely addressed so directly on film. There is more intellectual rigour here than in Hollywood equivalents like Fight Club, with Our Hero referring to philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Kant and the events of May 1968 in explaining his views.
Despite the pervasive undercurrents of cynicism, nihilism, and despair, the movie manages to end on a more hopeful note. After telling himself forever that he might take ballroom dancing classes, Our Hero finally does so and partners with a woman who is considerably taller than he is. The two dance together, and she smiles at him. Even though Our Hero told Tisserand his situation was hopeless, he admired how his co-worker kept trying right until the end. It seems that having decided not to kill himself, Our Hero has learned from Tisserand and decided to at least try and be happy. What else can he do?
Well, there’s at least one thing. Reflecting on the 1968 revolution, Our Hero refers to a moment when “magically, for a few days, a huge, oppressive machine had stopped.” That machine was capitalism and the capitalist state. But after the defeat of that revolution, Our Hero says, “the machine ran even faster, more ruthlessly.” The current movement against Macron’s pension attacks shows that workers in France are once more rising up against that machine.
Fightback’s article on the Toronto van attack notes how capitalism has become increasingly alienating for many sectors of the population, and that this is not just an economic but a social question. The phenomenon of incel violence, as Whatever anticipated, is at root a response to this larger dehumanization and alienation which destroys any sense of community or belonging.
Capitalism has atomized people and has actively destroyed working class communities. Social experiences only exist when they can be commercialized for profit – and they often come with a large dose of nationalism and militarism. Dating has moved from a real-world social interaction to profit-driven Internet hookups. Isolated and alienated individuals, often lonely young men, find a community on the Internet amongst those who are similarly angry. Instead of blaming the capitalist system that destroys community, they blame immigrants or women who have rejected them. Manipulative hucksters like Jordan Peterson tell these boys that they are the master race who have been knocked off their rightful supremacy by “social justice warriors”. A small number leave the Internet for the community of a far-right organization, and the most damaged go on to conduct “lone-wolf” mass murders.
Mass killings are becoming a common feature in country after country. In the final analysis they are a symptom of the decay of capitalist civilization. However, it is important not to be despondent when encountering with such horrific events. In the face of such hate there is also much hope and love. Witness the outpouring of support by the people of Toronto—a city typically known for cold indifference. People opened up their homes for those stranded by the subway closures and did whatever they could to help. These selfless acts show that genuine human nature in the face of tragedy is communal solidarity and not capitalist self-interest. And for every sad individual who turns to misogynistic and xenophobic scapegoating, hundreds and thousands of young people look to rebuild working class community by adopting the ideas of socialism.
Houellebecq may recently have fallen into the trap of blaming marginalized scapegoats, but it seems a growing number of people in France once again, correctly, view capitalism as responsible for their growing misery—and its end as necessary to overcome the alienating system depicted in this film.