“A Crybaby Year For Men in Movies,” a 12.27 N.Y. Times piece by Natalia Winkelman, lists six 2023 films that featured whiny-ass males weeping and hissyfitting about “a perceived loss of power to a woman.”
The man-babies are played by Mark Ruffalo, Ryan Gosling, Alden Ehrenreich, Samuel Theis, Joaquin Phoenix, et. al.
But one significant crybaby has been overlooked.
Cillian Murphy’s titular physicist character in Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer, set in the 1940s and ‘50s, never frets over anything to do with power dynamics between men and women.
He is, however, called a “crybaby” by Gary Oldman’s Harry S. Truman in a pivotal third-act scene, and he does weep about having figurative blood on his hands over the A-bomb having killed thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And so I figured that a Times article with “crybaby” in its headline…I naturally expected that J. Robert Oppenheimer would warrant some kind of side-mention…no?
“No” because Winkelman’s article is a feminist hit piece about shitty little men, not just in 2023 films but in all corners of the current culture. Oppie is therefore excused as his kind of wailing isn’t sexist in nature.
He does, however, whine about having “become death,” etc. Mainly, I would say, because he lacks a certain adult perspective. Oppie would’ve been fine with the A-bomb murdering tens of thousands of mostiy innocent Germans but he felt badly about tens of thousands of mostly innocent Japanese being wiped out. To this day I’m unsure about the difference.
What I’m really saying, I suppose, is that “crybaby” shouldn’t have been in the headline.
