I admit that I found Wonder Boys after searching the internet for Robert Downey Jr. movies. Having seen most of them already (I’ve got a problem, I know), I clicked on this one, saw it had a decent Rotten Tomatoes rating, and decided to give it a try.

Little did I know I was sparking a fire of rage that would burn a gaping hole through my being for eternity.

(OK maybe it was more like inciting a Charmander sneeze.)

Now, this post isn’t an argument for why Wonder Boys is a bad film. It is to enlighten the world about the ridiculous cult-like obsession with two certain types of male writer. This obsession shapes the budding generation of male writers into self-absorbed walking stereotypes with nothing interesting to say besides “I don’t know why, but girls just don’t seem to like me that much.”

So to drive my argument, I want to take you through the laughable landscape of Wonder Boys, which plays on these two specific male writer stereotypes so well that it’s easy to see the movie is not a commentary on it, but a propagator of it.

Here’s a synopsis of the movie in case you haven’t seen it (beware, this post contains *SPOILERS* or as I would call them *RELIEVERS* because you didn’t want to watch this anyway, trust me):

Grady Tripp is a professor/writer living in Pittsburgh who is struggling with writer’s block. Whilst doing this, he also manages to get the chancellor pregnant. In the meantime, he and a college student, James Leer, are trying to find a rare jacket once owned by Marilyn Monroe, and a college girl, Hannah Green, boarding with Grady, has a bit of a crush on him. Source

Michael Douglas’s character, Grady Tripp, is the first stereotype we encounter. He’s a middle-aged professor who’s having marital problems and an affair with a “Strong Female Character” who’s pregnant with his baby and wants to leave her frankly more put-together husband for this wallowing scruffy weirdo. Grady wears typical professorial glasses, which is still somewhat reasonable, but throw in a hobo-hipster beanie, a five o’clock shadow, and a tattered old pink bathrobe with a “story behind it” and we’re teetering on the cliffs of caricature.

 

Grady also resides in the quintessential abode of a successful white male writer: in small town America in a big old Georgian house full of books and sofas and too many rooms for one person to occupy reasonably. His office is a dystopian den of manuscripts and flannel plaid curtains. Despite the fact that laptops have been in use for years already, Grady writes on his typewriter, because, well, that’s the only way a truly great American novel can be born.

Also, everyone in the movie is obsessed with him. His baby mama, a supposedly intelligent woman of high rank in the college, sneaks him into her bedroom during a holiday party at her house just for a few minutes of cuddles and a really disheartening reaction to her baby announcement. Meanwhile, one of Grady’s female students, Hannah, obsesses over his work and therefore falls in love with him, even though she’s like thirty years younger. She tries to win his affections with a moody, sexual gaze and leading compliments. She even FALLS ASLEEP WHILE READING GRADY’S NOVEL IN BED.

Then we have James Leer. But he’s nowhere near a combination of James Bond and King Leer, the only thing “Leer” about him being his confused stink-eye that resembles a salamander woken up from a long nap.

He’s a student of Grady’s, who’s also obsessed with the nutty professor. But check this out: Leer is an apparent WRITER GENIUS WHO HAS ALREADY FINISHED A BRILLIANT NOVEL THAT WILL CHANGE ALL OF HUMANITY! In the first half hour, he’s already shot a poor dog and felt no remorse about it, he’s cried at the site of a Marilyn Monroe jacket, and he’s gotten so drunk he starts to NARRATE HIS LIFE AS HE GOES like some ridiculous junkie.

Leer adds up to male writer stereotype number two–the more dangerous one in my opinion. Here’s a breakdown of this character:

1. Awkward and socially inept to the point you wonder if he’s an alien species
2. Fascination with “old movies” (i.e. ones starring Marilyn Monroe)
3. Wears corduroy pants and blazers that he took out of his dad’s “For Charity” box
4. Absent, slightly glazed look of a confused foreigner in a big city
5. But really he’s just up in the clouds daydreaming and couldn’t be bothered to hold a normal conversation with anyone unless it involved analyzing the best scenes from The Great Gatsby and Grapes of Wrath
6. Inability to recognize when girls are totally into him, and fully denies his own attractiveness because he refuses to be in any way like Dan Brown
7. Inability to “show his emotions” and that’s why his books are so full of emotion and actually if you get to know him well enough you’ll see that they’re semi-autobiographical
8. Loves to exhibit how many female writers he knows about (he’s only read maybe 3 of his list of 56)
9. Loves to listen to “old music” on record players
10. Has a tumultuous home life (AKA his dad sees straight through his bullshit and tells him to put on a fucking pair of jeans, which makes him sulk in his room and contemplate killing his dad in his next book)
11. Makes up stories about his past to make himself seem more interesting 

We later find out that James is a rich bitch who lives in this decked out awesome basement, with his typewriter, a big comfy bed, some neat twinkly lights, a record player (note that this is the time of laptops and CD players), and other writerly doo-dads. Oh yeah. Tumultuous home life indeed. 

Maybe you think these stereotypes aren’t that bad–worse stereotypes exist in the world that get copy and pasted all the time in books and movies. But I think these stereotypes that some men use as patterns for themselves and their identities put forth the idea that they should be idolized and treated more importantly than other writers. For example, Grady’s student Hannah doesn’t get so much as a wink towards HER writing career, which is how I and many of my writing friends in college felt in workshops or classes. Often we outnumbered males by 5 to 1, which made the males even more aggressive in providing unsolicited advice or comments about why their particular style is best.

I’ve had male writers tell me they don’t like female writers because they just can’t get into the perspective, or that they don’t like how much females write about sex and love. If we worship male writers like we do in Wonder Boys, as pathetic as the characters are if you take a damn second to think about it, we’re enforcing men’s inability to think outside their own perspective for once. If J.K. Rowling had written Harriet Potter instead, would it have sold half as many copies?

 

As I watched Wonder Boys and saw all the characters (even Robert Downey Jr., oh the shame!) whirl around this kid writer genius and exclaim, “His book is amazing” and “I think I want to publish this”, I felt like bursting out laughing. Not that men don’t deserve success when they do publish a book–that’s not my argument.

I’m arguing that these caricatures are not only detrimental to male writers, but to the writing community as a whole.  They make other people think this industry is full of holier-than-thou elitists who live under staircases and land-exposed barnacles. Even though in reality we are biting our nails after every submission and asking people for help and sweating under the lime-lights and failing to finish novel after novel. Real writers are not getting portrayed quite enough. A lot of us are quite ordinary–most of us in fact. We have pets, lawn mowers, potted plants, children, day jobs, floors that need vacuuming, and other interests. We don’t ask to be worshiped and we certainly don’t value ourselves over other careers or other writers. We have to stand together and avoid becoming silly stereotypes because we think we have to in order to be taken seriously.

After my anger dispelled a little, though, I did happen to find one good thing about Wonder Boys. This one single frame:

Robert would agree.