"I learned at an early age
what it is to be angry. Angry. Helpless." Angry young men don't have
the best reputation these days. "What we know is
the preponderance of hate crimes are perpetuated by men." When we think of the phrase,
we think of male violence, masculinity in crisis, "You talkin' to me?" a generation of men unable
(or unwilling) to be emotionally mature. "Fellow angry white
American guys… give it up! We've been running
the show for 10,000 years!" Yet if we look back,
the "angry young man" trope onscreen originated
as something very different: this character came onto
the scene in the so-called "kitchen sink dramas"
of the 50s and 60s British New Wave as a working class anti-hero, who challenged
the established orders of society. "It's possible to take people
of all classes seriously, and their opinions seriously,
and their intelligence seriously, and their wit seriously." Outside of Britain, the character
also took off as an agent of disruptive political protest. Over the years, angry young
men of color onscreen also increasingly vented their
(even more justified) rage against systemic oppression, "Why you need to see my id?" "Son— I said I need ID." "I'm not your son." yet these characters' anger
frequently hasn't been viewed with the same
legitimacy or acceptance. "Did you know it was an incendiary film
when you were making it? Did you know it had
a kind of explosive—" "I really would not
use the word incendiary." Recently, the angry white man
onscreen has evolved into something closer to a villain — as seen in 2019's Joker [Screaming] "What do you get
when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons
him and treats him like trash?!" and Star Wars' Kylo Ren — but the immense popularity
of both these characters and their films proved that this trope
still attracts a lot of attention and identification,
as well as controversy, in our culture. "What the film certainly does
is takes the temperature of a particular moment where people,
it seems to me at least, feel dissatisfied,
oppressed, and split." So looking over the decades, who are the angry young men we listen to,
and who are the ones we challenge? Is all anger equally valid,
or equally heard? "The world took everything
away from me! Everything I ever loved!" Here's our take on
the Angry Young Men (and increasingly
women) past and future. "You're watching…" "The Take." "Let us know your take!" This video is brought
to you by Mubi, a curated streaming service showing
exceptional films from around the globe. It's like your own
personal Film Festival, streaming anytime, anywhere. The angry young man as anti-hero
first emerged on the stage and on the page — with many viewing Kingsley Amis'
1954 novel Lucky Jim "Merrie England? Lutes and flutes
and chase-me-round-the-maypole? Phoney baloney! It never
was merry! It was murder!" and John Osborne's 1956 play
Look Back In Anger as the start of the movement. "The injustice of it is almost perfect —
the wrong people going hungry, the wrong people being loved,
the wrong people dying." Both helped establish
the Angry Young Man genre as defined by gritty realism and a focus on dissatisfied
working-class characters. "Jim is a socialist I suppose
after a fashion, but I think both he and I are, or would be by now,
um, Anti-Conservative people rather than socialist." Before these films came along, British cinema was preoccupied
with the middle and upper classes, as evidenced in the highly successful
comedies that came out of Ealing Studios, "There was Admiral
Lord Horatio Descoyne. There was General
Lord Rufus Descoyne... There was Lady Agatha Descoyne." So when Young British directors
of the Free Cinema movement — Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson,
and Tony Richardson — all adapted angry young man novels
into their feature film debuts, the very act of portraying
the reality of working-class life was a kind of political protest, raging against the elitism
of the dominant narratives of the day. "Nigel and Alison, they're what
they sound like, sycophantic, phlegmatic and pusillanimous!" When working-class characters had
featured in British films before this point, they were frequently
one-dimensional props serving or interacting
with the upper classes. "Is this the boy sir?" "Yes I'm afraid it is." "Afraid?" "Poor little fellow,
he's hurt himself." [Shouting] "I did that sir! I stopped him! I cut my knuckles against his mouth!" But the more authentic working class
portrayals of the Angry Young Men movement painted a different picture: far from being disheveled,
down-and-out beggars, these characters do
have disposable income; it's just that the money from
their hard work doesn't translate into social mobility. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning's
anti-hero Arthur Seaton (played by a young Albert Finney)
wears nice clothes, goes to bars, has a fashionable haircut. "I'm me and nobody else, whatever
people say I am that's what I'm not, because they don't know
a bloody thing about me." But he's not motivated by the promise
of working his way up the ladder, and openly criticizes the older
generation for chasing that goal. "Fred's alright, he's one of them
who knows how to spend his money, like me, enjoys hisself, that's
more than them poor beggars know." As a result, his anger is nihilistic,
disaffected, directionless — he's violently unsatisfied with
his lot and his options in life. And his anger ends up
being, ultimately, tragic, as in the film's climax he appears
about to settle down and follow the same domestic
path as his parents, whom he'd previously described
as "dead from the neck up." "This character, for example, had
practically all the earthly bread he wanted, but he didn't have any
spiritual bread whatsoever of any kind." Even when the angry young men
characters weren't themselves political, their lack of social engagement
was itself political. [Trumpet sounds] "Look, if you don't want
to watch the film, don't spoil it for those that do! If they don't like this country,
why the hell don't they get out?!" As writer Leslie Paul, whose 1951
autobiography was titled Angry Young Man, put it: "The angry young men
of the ‘50s belonged to a generation seemingly devoid of political interests,
and the moment of their rise coincided with the deepest trough
of political and spiritual apathy Britain has passed through
since the end of the war." To this early Angry Young Man, maybe even more important than the class
divide was the generational one. Travis, the anti-hero of Lindsay
Anderson's 1968 movie If…. isn't coded as working-class,
but his anger stems from rage against the older
generation's establishment. "The thing I hate about you Rowntree
is the way you give Coca Cola to your scum and your best
teddy bear to Oxfam, and expect us to lick
your frigid fingers." Travis' rebellion against the violent,
rigid and abusive class system of his school environment is symbolic
of the greater atmosphere of revolution in the world at the time, as evidenced in protests against
the Vietnam War, the birth of the anti-nuclear movement, and the student riots
in Paris in May 1968. "There's no such
thing as a wrong war, violence and revolution
are the only pure acts." Certain social realist films veered away
from, or supplemented, the harsh realism of the early
kitchen-sink style with a more surreal and strange streak. These dreamlike touches (which can be found in more
modern examples of the genre, too) suggest that — in a world
that traps its citizens — the only true escape possible
may be a mental one. "You know, I believe my mental
condition is extremely illegal." Outside of the social realist genre,
Stanley Kubrick's 1971 dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange — in which
he cast Malcolm McDowell directly off the back of the young
actor's performance in If… — also centered on disturbing, violent,
directionless male anger, coming up against an establishment
that seeks to deprive its youth of all individuality and agency. "I was cured, all right." Meanwhile, the trope took on
a new life beyond the shores of the UK. In the 1970s, Amitabh Bachchan
was dubbed India's "angry young man" for his roles in Bollywood films
such as Zanjeer, Deewaar, and Kaalia. "I'm also a person who never
stands behind anyone. The line always starts
from where I stand. Fill the plate." Again, the character held
a mirror to wider society, reflecting a tumultuous period for India, which was coming out
of the 1971 war with Pakistan and in the midst of a Government
policy of population control that led to more than six million
(mostly poor) men being coerced into sterilization. "Some way it reflects
the temperament of the people. What they want their leading man
or hero to behave like, to conduct himself, even on screen." Around the same time in America,
blaxploitation cinema, with films like
Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song and Black Caesar, showed
young black male anger as a response to the systematic
oppression these young people were facing on a daily basis. "He doesn't look very tough to me,
does he look tough to you?" [Gunshot sounds] The angry young man character had
taken root in cultures around the world. In France in 1995, Mathieu Kassovitz' film
La Haine, which focused on three youths in the suburbs of Paris, was
seen as so important that then French Prime Minister
Alain Juppe set up a private screening for his government to, in the words
of The Independent at the time, "see what it was up against." "You talkin' to me, man?" In Britain, modern films in the social
realist tradition to this day use updates to the Angry Young Man
(and sometimes the Angry Young Woman) to articulate political or social problems. [Shouting] "Shut up
about the Falklands!" "Why?" [Shouting] "'Cause I want you to!" [Shouting] "There's f-[BLEEP]—g loads of dickheads dying
out there for nothing!" [Shouting] "My dad wasn't a dickhead!" As global as he became, though,
the Angry Young Man has varied a great deal in his different iterations — and there have been crucial
differences in how he's received. "I just wanna say to my critics,
I hear your voices, and I'm aware of your concerns." [Screaming] "So maybe if y'all can
chill the hell out for a second, then maybe I can focus
on some shit y'know?!" While white male anger has been
treated in so many of these films as noble protest, there's a long history
of black men being stereotyped as aggressive and violent. [Music] This racist caricaturing has
its roots in white society using these false characterizations
to justify slavery. As sociologist Abby L Ferber writes: "Black men were defined as beasts
who had to be controlled and tamed to be put into service." So when black male anger was shown
on screen as a response to racism — despite this being a far more
legitimate reason to get mad than any of the white angry
young men ever had — this was criticized in a way that
white anger never was. "So, since we spend much money
here, we do have some say." "You looking for trouble? Are you a troublemaker,
is that what you are?" Take Spike Lee's 1989 film
Do The Right Thing, which ends with a harrowing
scene of police brutality followed by the central character,
Mookie, throwing a trash can through the window
of Sal's Famous Pizzeria. "Your money couldn't begin
to pay for the window you broke." "Motherfuck a window. Radio Raheem is dead." Despite the fact that Mookie has just
witnessed the murder of his friend, and Sal and his sons are racist
to their majority black clientele throughout the film, the conversation around this ending
is often framed as a debate of the question: was Mookie
right to start a riot? Isn't it unfair that Sal
loses his premises? "They put more weight
on the loss of white owned property than a black life. So, that s-BLEEP-t
has not changed." Meanwhile, initial reviews of the film even insinuated that the scene would
start riots in the black community. Newsweek's Jack Kroll called it
"dynamite under every seat." New York Magazine's Joe Klein wrote, "If black kids act on what they see,
Lee may have destroyed his career." David Denby, also writing
in New York Magazine, said Spike Lee would "like to be
counted in the black community as an angry man, a man ready,
despite his success, to smash things." [Screaming] "You stood there like a fuck
and you watched them burn me down!" "I watched it. I also watched
the cops murder Radio Raheem." Lee has called those reviews
"uncut, unfiltered racism," saying "to think that black moviegoers
don't have the intelligence to discern what is on screen, and that they would duplicate what
Mookie was doing, was ludicrous," but this response shows
that when anger is placed into the hands of young
black men on screen, it's traditionally been seen
as dangerous, even irresponsible. "20 years since the film came out, and no black person has ever asked me
why Mookie threw the garbage can through the window. Only white
people ever ask that question." The 2015 NWA biopic
Straight Outta Compton depicts just how much
heat the group took after releasing the song
F-BLEEP-k The Police. "How do you explain
inciting a riot in Detroit? What do you have to say about that?" "I have to say that
we didn't incite that s-BLEEP-t." Straight Outta Compton also offers
a kind of origin story for the song, juxtaposing its creation with the group
members being harassed by LAPD outside of their studio. [Shouting] "Get on the ground, now!" Once again, the social anger of the song is illustrated as a direct
and justified response to injustice, but their artistic response
of self-expression is viewed by their society as criminal
and used to punish them. "You got something to say, boy?" "Cube, get inside, let's
get back to work." "You heard what your
master said, get inside, boy." This is not just true of men, either. Black women have long been
plagued by the Sapphire — or Angry Black Woman — stereotype. "Whenever someone weaponizes
anger against black women, it is designed to silence them. It is designed to discredit them
and to say that they are overreacting." While the stereotype gets
called out and resisted, this "misogynoir" still appears
frequently in pop culture. [Singing] "I don't get no sleep
‘cause of y'all! Y'all not gonna get
no sleep ‘cause of me!" And what of women in general? What happens when they get angry? "Don't be mad at me, 'cause
I didn't invent the world, but nobody likes an angry woman." Arguably the most iconic rebel women
in cinema are Thelma and Louise, and while the film is remembered
almost as an escapist fantasy of female friendship, the anger that binds these
two women together is rooted in a tragic
acceptance of rape culture. [Screaming] "Just about a hundred
god damn people saw you dancing cheek to cheek with him all night! Who's gonna believe that?! We don't live in that kind
of a world, Thelma!" Their anger doesn't free them; it traps them, and in the end the only
way they can liberate themselves is through death. In Erin Brockovich, Erin may eventually
come out of the film as the winner, but the fact that she's a volatile, tempestuous character is constantly used
by others as an attempt to discredit her. "This is serious." "And what — and I'm not serious?" "You're emotional. You're erratic. You say any goddamn thing
that comes into your head." Andrea Arnold, continuing
the British social realist tradition for contemporary audiences, features
young working-class female characters whose dissatisfaction reflects
an unfair society that's neglected them. "Talk about ugly you
skanky little pikey." [Screaming and yelling sounds]
"What you gonna do about it?" As society has evolved, the angry
young man trope has evolved with it. And those dissatisfied white males who
were once admirable political antiheroes, have morphed into social villains. "I got some bad ideas in my head." One of the biggest films of 2019 was
a social realist-style character study about a working class man whose
anger at society manifests itself in violent ways. "All I have are negative thoughts." And the explosive controversy
surrounding the film testified to the fact that the angry young man
continues to be as politically charged a figure as ever, and scary to many people, especially
if he aligns with the wrong politics. The slew of think-pieces debating
whether the film was dangerous before it even came out read
a little like those early reviews of Do The Right Thing, "The movie makes statements
about lack of love, childhood trauma, lack of compassion in the world, and I think people can
handle that message." but in this case it was the film's
alt-right fan base critics feared. "The thing that this movie's really
about is white male rage! White male rage!" The angry young man
is inevitably read as a mirror of his time's broader social climate,
and Joker wasn't the first time when the figure was linked
to an unsympathetic or alarming politics. Joker consciously models itself
on early Martin Scorsese films starring Robert DeNiro, including
Taxi Driver, whose racist, sexist, disturbed Travis Bickle
embodied the dark side of the 70s American angry young
white man — psychologically damaged by Vietnam, alienated by the harsh
realities of city life. "Here is a man who would
not take it anymore. A man who stood up
against the scum." The climax of 1968's If, featuring
a mass-shooting of the school's elite, read in its time as a symbolic
expression of youthful revolt, yet it would hardly play that way now, amidst our conversations of toxic
masculinity and the all-too-real tragedies of far too many school shootings. In 1988, American History X told
a shocking tale of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, but
in the context of the time, it was viewed as an investigation
into a disturbing but small subculture. "You can see within him the things
he could have been, but he's overtaken by rage." As Heidi Beirich, director
of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said, "I don't think anyone watching
American History X in the nineties thought its white supremacist characters
would ever become mainstream. Today, some of [these views] are being
echoed from the White House." "Our border policy is a joke. Every night thousands of these
parasites stream across the border like some f-BLEEP-ing pinata exploded!" So it's easy to imagine that, if
American History X were released today, our climate would lead to the film
being viewed very differently. "It's everywhere I look now." "What?" "This affirmative black-tion." The same can be said of other movies who portrayed anger that felt
appealing at the time. "I want you to hit me
as hard as you can." Still, American History X's ultimate
message of how easily the anger of lost, misguided youths can be co-opted
and exploited by nefarious powers remains as apt as ever today. "This radicalization is a huge
public health crisis that we really need to solve." And the charismatic villain version
of the "angry young man" is so of our times that he's even at
the center of our biggest blockbusters. "Sir, the villagers?" "Kill them all." When Star Wars returned with
The Force Awakens in 2015, one of the more surprising characters viewers were drawn to was
the antagonist, Adam Driver's Kylo Ren, proving that, on some level, many of us
continue to relate to this brand of raw, youthful rage and its resentment
toward the older generation. "I'm being torn apart. I want
to be free of this pain." Perhaps the most charismatic
mainstream villain of our times, though, is a black man with very good
reasons to be angry: Black Panther's Erik Killmonger. "These items aren't for sale." "How d'ya think your
ancestors got these? You think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it, like
they took everything else?" Killmonger's childhood hardship,
and his philosophy that all black people around the world must be taken care of, make him in many ways more
sympathetic even than the film's hero. "Y'all sitting up here comfortable,
must feel good. It's about two billion people all over
the world that looks like us. But their lives are a lot harder." Despite the righteousness
of his cause and his rage, though, Killmonger's anger still consumes him, eating him from the inside so that he's incapable of being a leader who makes constructive
change in the world. "I learn from my enemies. Beat them at they own game." "You have become them!" Billy Joel might have said
it best when he sang: "There's a place in the world
for the angry young man, with his working class
ties and his radical plans. So where is the place
for the angry young man and his radical plans
in the 21st century? Anger is a response to feeling powerless, an attempt to seize control
when you have none. Thus the anger of the disenfranchised and unheard will always
be a crucial political force to be harnessed for change, "That they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness, unless you're loud and black
and possess an opinion." as well as a volatile agent of chaos
that's ripe for misuse and misdirection. "Burn it all!" Throughout the decades, the angry
young man has remained a constant, but his significance has evolved
as his landscape has shifted. What began as the emblem
of a working-class hero fighting for space in the mainstream
became an intolerant group desperately trying to hold
onto its privileged position. "This is the most unethical sham
since I've been in politics!" Today, instead, the most
politically powerful anger is coming from oppressed minorities who have long been
told to suppress their rage. "You call your friend a racist and yet
you're surprised when he's upset." "Yeah, we're friends, but suddenly, I'm supposed to give you
n-BLEEP-a dispensation?" After all, there are plenty of things
to still be angry about. "Excuse me if I get a little offended
because I didn't see all of this outrage when everything was happening
to all of my people since we were stuffed on
boats in chains!" The reason the angry young man trope
still resonates so widely is because we all know that,
sometimes, it's good to get angry. It's the right thing to do. "A bullet that can puncture my skin,
take all my dreams away, a bullet that can silence the words
that I speak to my mother just because I'm other." If you're new here,
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