Cuck (2019)

Cuck (2019)
Directed by: Rob Lambert
Written by: Joe Varkle, Rob Lambert
Starring: David Diaan, Sally Kirkland, Timothy V. Murphy, Zachary Ray Sherman

CUCK
Directed by Rob Lambert

There’s more than a smidge of Joker about Rob Lambert’s feature debut: a look into the mind-set of a lowly, unemployed, virginal loner who takes up arms against what he sees as an uncaring society that’s made him a monster. It’s almost certainly a coincidence, given both films got made around the same time and this one may even have gotten finished first. Besides, stories of impotent, white, male anger are all the rage nowadays. And boy is Ronnie (Sherman) impotent and angry. In fact, he’s livid about pretty much everything, embittered and probably in need of a blue pill rather than the red one. Hence, outside the Internet, the only woman he gets to see naked is his elderly mother (Kirkland) when he sponge baths her.

We first encounter Ronnie as he dons his departed dad’s military get-up, listening to the sort of sensationalist talk show designed to boil the blood. Shortly after he hangs out in a laundrette, reading a magazine about artillery as he bitterly listens to foreign accents around him. He’s readying himself for America’s so-called culture war, yearning for an imagined past when men were men, aka Chads, and not “cucks” – the lowest of the low. Only this war typically isn’t fought in the real world as much as the digital one. A safe space, where he yells diatribes to like-minded “patriots”, treating his camera like Travis Bickle’s mirror, and wanks off to videos including, among many other girls, his DIY porn-star neighbour Candy (Parent). But spending so much time in his online echo chamber, and further submerging himself in far-right rhetoric, can’t be good for him. And after the army turns him down it isn’t long before he thinks about getting a gun another way.

Cuck isn’t a subtle film. As per The Purge franchise, its sledgehammer to a nut approach to storytelling means its protagonist sometimes functions more as an emblem than a dramatic role. Still, Sherman excels as Ronnie, finding moments of humanity and underdog charm beneath the bile and hateful rhetoric. What makes this even more impressive is how unapologetic both the film and its central performance are, with Cuck never losing sight of how unpleasant a person he is from the start. He’s both a victim of circumstance and the architect of his own destruction. There’s no apologetics like Joker, even if Ronnie’s life is also exaggeratedly bad, or even a late shot at redemption, like in American History X. We know who Ronnie is when we first meet him, and we know he’s not going to change for the better. In a sense, this is a good thing that adds to the realism. Its crude to treat people’s personalities like counterfactuals, as if the difference between them being well adjusted or a white supremacist is a handful of formative experiences. Still, these sorts of arcs, in which we see someone get radicalised, are more satisfying to watch than one in which an already bad person gets worse. Liberals won’t like him since he’s already a jerk, and the far-right won’t like him because the film makes him the villain. For a start, they can be tragic.

Admittedly, there are decent attempts to contextualise Ronnie’s behaviour, with the film taking time to reflect on life in the sort of no-hope Rustbelt state that recently turned red. Likewise, his near-mythic father, who died serving his country, provides a foil by embodying the sort of stoic masculinity to which Ronnie aspires. The dichotomy between being “a real man” and a cuck provides much of the tension during the second half when the storytelling narrows in on his relationship with cam-girl Candy and her partner (Diaan). For me, this focus killed its momentum. Granted, the way that Cuck works its name into the story is darkly funny, but also too far-fetched (I also don’t buy that Ronnie would be unfamiliar with the racial element). Up until this point, scenes like Ronnie inadvertently setting up a date with a feminist or getting into a fight with three black guys have felt contrived, but believable. Whereas this plotline appears to sacrifice plausibility for convenience, and Ronnie’s uneasiness with women is a flimsy rationale for him putting up with Candy and her partner’s sexual degradation. The change of tone it prompts, to sleazy psychosexual thriller, along with its move away from socio-political issues, makes me think it’d function better as part of an episodic narrative rather than the centrepiece. It’s, above all, boring too. The lack of likeable characters during it, along with the overuse use of dramatic irony as Ronnie somehow doesn’t catch on to what’s happening, slows things down. Moreover, by making his new community secondary to his sexcapades, the film also forfeits much of its contemporary relevance and makes the world wide web feel small. It becomes less a story of Elliot Rodgers than a lot of rodgering.

It’s a shame, as for a lot of the first half Cuck does a commendable job of exploring the dark corners of the Internet, giving a crash-course in the alt-right playbook. It also taps into the grievances of people who feel lost in today’s America – the left-behind communities who fell for Trump. Despite showing how they have been let down by an unforgiving economic system, it never sentimentalises their plight. Instead, they’re shown to be flawed people, out of touch in the modern age. Ronnie’s uncle, who tells him the “rains pussy” for masculine men, moans that you need to be trans to get in the military these days. Likewise, his religious mother, who whines when he’s in earshot that there hasn’t been a man in the house for years, finds the balance between being poorly and a pain in the ass. Some of the comedy lands too, like him failing to get a job with a courier company because her car, which he’d be using, is covered in anti-abortion stickers. However, other supporting roles are simply too caricatured, with several scenes even going some way towards validating Ronnie’s viewpoint by having people behave in ways that are consistent with his strawmen. Had the whole film looked at the macro level, instead of zooming in on what we get told is a micro-penis, I think it’d have been better. In other words, I’d prefer if it had continued to acknowledge that we live in a society.

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