Some Movies Are Filled Exclusively With Jerks. These Are the Best Ones. - The Ringer

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Most films offer at least one character to root for, but there are a select few that don’t—and they’re all the better for it

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It’s a fallacy that fictional characters have to be likable, but even the darkest or most forbidding films usually offer somebody to root for, whether it’s a crusading hero or a final girl. Typically, there needs to be a figure on whom we can pin our hopes, or in whom we see our best selves reflected. But what about those movies that are completely populated by creeps at every level? If they end up feeling like endurance contests, is that a bug or a feature? Do we end up identifying with somebody—anybody—by default? Or, even more interestingly, does having an ensemble made up primarily of disagreeable monsters enhance the bad vibes or dilute them?

Welcome to Jerks Week

There’s nothing quite like a character you love to hate. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Jerks Week at The Ringer. Vote for your favorite ones in the Best Pop Culture Jerks Bracket, and check back throughout the week for a selection of stories on one of the most underrated archetypes.

Some narratives lend themselves to this kind of situation—for example, Agatha Christie–style murder mysteries, with their inherent need for plausibly malevolent suspects and potential fresh corpses. But as it’d be too easy to mine the collected adventures of Hercule Poirot and Benoit Blanc for titles, we’ve decided to (mostly) look past the and-then-there-were-none genre to focus on films that are, for whatever reason, almost exclusively infested with snide, unsavory, or otherwise hateful characters: the cinematic equivalent of jerk stores, open for business.

10. The Social Network

In the final scene of The Social Network, a paralegal played by Rashida Jones assures Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg that he isn’t really an asshole. She’s entitled to her opinion—as is Aaron Sorkin, who won an Oscar for putting such forgiving words in her mouth—but the pleasure of David Fincher’s Facebook origin myth lies in its sleekly compartmentalized study of (male) nastiness. For instance, Mark’s callow introvert act looks almost sympathetic next to the entitled Winklevoss twins, who in turn come off as nearly noble after pleading their case to Harvard’s unctuous president. When Mark’s pal Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) mockingly compliments Napster mogul Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) for making himself look cool by comparison to them, it’s a put-down perfectly in tune with the atmosphere of beta-male hatefulness. In the end, the movie suggests that the reason these jerks changed the world was that their fears and desires were ultimately pretty universal—they wrote the algorithm that helped the rest of us embrace our worst selves, one click at a time.

9. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

“Where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?”

Of all the riddles posed by Gene Wilder’s candy magnate in Mel Stuart’s 1971 fantasy classic, this query may be the closest thing to a skeleton key for unlocking the movie’s meaning. It suggests, generously, that imagination is a matter of nature versus nurture. The same goes for jerkiness: The almost uniformly unbearable children touring Wonka’s factory are accompanied by parents who indulge and even celebrate their most toxic traits, which in turn takes the edge off their torture by assorted Oompa-Loompas. (It’s no coincidence that the film was written by David Seltzer, who’d parlay his skill for sketching memorably horrible toddlers into the Omen franchise.) As the monstrously posh Veruca Salt—correctly deemed by her host to be a “bad egg” before disappearing down a garbage shoot—Julie Dawn Cole (who was 13 at the time of filming) was snide enough to inspire one of the coolest riot grrrl bands of the ’90s to rock out in her name. Also, don’t underestimate the beautifully modulated menace of Wilder’s performance, which endured beyond Johnny Depp’s more sentimental take and sets the bar dauntingly high for Timothée Chalamet this Christmas.

8. This Is the End

The joke of Emma Watson’s cameo in Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s postapocalyptic comedy This Is the End is that she’s basically the one decent celebrity still standing after the end of the world as we know it; the punchline is that in real life, the actress was reportedly so appalled by the script’s content—specifically the insinuation that the characters played by Danny McBride and Channing Tatum (like Watson, playing versions of themselves) were cannibals—that she almost walked off the set. Rogen has gone on to say that there were no lingering hard feelings, but it’s still funny that a movie predicated on the satirical concept that the most beloved freaks and geeks of the Apatow era were venal, socially inept losers ended up taking on a quasi-documentary dimension. Unintended allegory aside, This Is the End is replete with memorably hateful quotes and cameos, including one by the very game Michael Cera, who slaps (and is slapped by) Rihanna and blows coke in Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s face while clad in a windbreaker. The soft-spoken Canadian’s reward for stealing the film is to suffer probably its goriest on-screen death—an honor that he richly deserves.

7. Burn After Reading

In truth, I could have gone with any number of Coen brothers movies here: Even if we don’t consider any of his costars, John Goodman’s Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski is the big-box-retailer equivalent of the jerk store all on his own, while Inside Llewyn Davis plumbs the spiritual depths of sad-boy narcissism to emerge with pearls of hard-earned empathy. Not only is Anton Chigurh a mercenary murderer, he even shoots an innocent pigeon on the side of the road. And so on. But 2008’s criminally underrated espionage comedy Burn After Reading is probably the platonic ideal of mean-spirited satire, its caustic worldview summed up beautifully by John Malkovich’s declassified CIA spook, who refers to his rivals as a “league of morons.” Never before have so many A-listers strived to be unlikable: We get a cowardly George Clooney, a bullying Tilda Swinton, a self-loathing Frances McDormand, and a blissfully idiotic Brad Pitt, whose grip on pretty-boy innocence is compromised when he decides to charge a “Good Samaritan tax” for returning stolen property. In case any of this goes over our heads, J.K. Simmons and David Rasche are on hand as intelligence-community ghouls who serve as a kind of withering Greek chorus, narrating the ongoing clusterfuck with well-practiced, bureaucratic detachment.

6. Midsommar

In the most harrowing sequence of Ari Aster’s daylight-horror epic Midsommar—a movie that features scenes of death by carbon monoxide poisoning and blunt force trauma, as well as posthumous vivisection—an ambitious anthropology major does the unthinkable: He hijacks his classmate’s thesis topic to his face and tries to pass it off as an act of radical honesty. “I wanted to tell you first, just so it didn’t seem like I wasn’t telling you,” says Christian (Jack Reynor) to Josh (William Jackson Harper), who have come to Sweden to observe a series of bizarre pagan rituals. For anybody who’s ever attended an academic symposium (and gone for drinks afterward), this behavior is chilling; when Slate’s Rebecca Onion wrote that Midsommar’s real villains were the grad students, she wasn’t being facetious. Like Hereditary and Beau Is Afraid, the film deserves credit for threading a snarky satirical streak through its grotesque gross-outs. Aster never misses a chance to show his Euro-tripping characters as a particular, pedigreed breed of Ugly Americans: pseudo-intellectual poseurs who confuse squeamishness for superiority and end up as the raw materials of their own hypothetical ethnographic study. That we don’t feel too bad about their carefully and fatally stage-managed fates suggests either that they had it coming or that Aster’s comic sadism can be contagious.

The Ringer’s Streaming Guide

There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.

5. Pink Flamingos

One of the most gleefully transgressive American movies ever made, John Waters’s Pink Flamingos features a cast of self-styled sociopaths vying for the unofficial but highly coveted title of the “filthiest people alive.” As the eventual undisputed champion, Divine’s outsized outcast Babs Johnson is so hilariously nasty that he carves out his own place in film history. Structured as a kind of inventory of obscenities—with each successive scene raising (or lowering) the bar for bad taste—Pink Flamingos bypassed the MPAA ratings board, and its curiosity factor was instrumental in turning its fledgling independent distributor, New Line Cinema, into the era’s edgiest tastemaker. In a way, “jerk” is either too weak or too harsh a word for Waters’s characters, whose hang-ups and fetishes—including a climactic act of (authentic) shit eating that blurred the line between comic book outrageousness and documentary—run the gamut of the seven deadly sins (and beyond). By tackling so many taboos head-on—and refusing to fully distinguish between toxicity and openhearted idiosyncrasy—Waters and his Baltimore stock company became an unlikely but potent symbol of DIY triumph.

4. Aliens

It’s not exactly surprising that James Cameron is so well schooled in the way of the jerk: It takes one to know one and all that. Most of the time, the stakes in his movies are so apocalyptically high that there’s no time for niceties, and yet there are still characters whose meanness goes above and beyond the call of duty. In addition to its other virtues as a maternal psychodrama and a Vietnam allegory, Aliens is a true masterpiece of posturing obnoxiousness, featuring two very different, equally top-tier irritants: Bill Paxton’s bigmouthed grunt Hudson—introduced asking Jenette Goldstein’s Vasquez whether she’s ever been mistaken for a man and getting exactly the answer he deserves—and Paul Reiser’s ingratiating company stooge Burke, who manipulates Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley into tagging along on an ostensible military rescue mission in the hopes of impregnating her with some extraterrestrial offspring. Paxton would reprise the cowardly loser archetype for Cameron a few years later in True Lies, while Reiser is such a wonderfully disingenuous presence it’s amazing he ended up as a likable sitcom star. When Burke bites it, it’s the most crowd-pleasing moment in the entire movie.

3. RoboCop

When Peter Weller’s Old Detroit avenger engages a perp by droning, “Your move, creep,” he could be talking to pretty much anybody else in the movie. Written as a wicked comic book parody of Reagan-era politics and rhetoric—as well as of the chrome-plated tropes of Hollywood’s post–Star Wars output—RoboCop flaunts what could be called trickle-down jerkiness; the moral rot starts at the top and turns out to be bottomless. The most elevated of the film’s monsters is the Old Man (Dan O’Herlihy), the white-haired, white-collar CEO of OCP (Omni Consumer Products); his indifference to everything except profits generates the kind of moral vacuum where a callous striver like Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer) can successfully pitch a pilot project involving recycled dead police officers or give a boardroom presentation that gets a junior executive killed by some malfunctioning hardware (not that anyone cares). Paul Verhoeven’s film isn’t subtle about skewering corporate culture: The Old Man’s chief lieutenant (Ronny Cox) is literally named Dick, a moniker that gets barked with purposeful gusto at every opportunity. And we haven’t even mentioned Kurtwood Smith’s magnificently malignant drug runner Clarence Boddicker, he of the endlessly quotable one-liners (“Bitches, leave”). Supposedly, Verhoeven had Smith wear glasses because they made him look like the infamous Nazi Heinrich Himmler.

2. The Hateful Eight

Released near the end of 2015—a few months after Donald Trump officially threw his MAGA hat in the presidential ring—Quentin Tarantino’s eighth (and a halfth) feature seemed to simultaneously channel and caution against a brewing storm. While rarely touted as a politically conscious filmmaker, QT has always had an instinctive sense of the zeitgeist, and The Hateful Eight both impresses and repulses as a portrait of a country divided across a series of racial, cultural, and ideological fault lines. The juxtaposition of post–Civil War iconography and flip, anachronistic detachment suggests America’s fractious past is overtaking its putatively progressive future. Here, the great emancipation promised by Abraham Lincoln is a forgery; “The only time Black folks is safe is when white folks is disarmed,” sighs Samuel L. Jackson’s cynical vigilante. In another filmmaker’s hands such dire sociology could have been sentimental or melancholy, but Tarantino keeps things lively by keeping his characters awful, permitting expert scenery chewers like Tim Roth and Bruce Dern to stylize themselves into vile caricatures. The MVP, though, is Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays the distaff gangster Daisy Domergue with enough prickly genius that the rest of the ensemble can barely keep up. Over the course of the film, Leigh’s character is mocked, insulted, and smacked around by a group of bad hombres whose loathing is tinged with fear—or maybe the other way around. Daisy is ruthless and terrifying, but she’s also just incredibly annoying. And unforgettable.

1. Glengarry Glen Ross

“Cop couldn’t find his dick with two hands and a map,” sneers Ed Harris’s real estate salesman Dave Moss after being interrogated by the police in Glengarry Glen Ross. You could take a magnifying glass to every frame of James Foley’s bad-vibes masterpiece without locating a shred of empathy. The question is not whether the hard-driving, perpetually kvetching employees of Premier Properties are in—as their superior sarcastically puts it—a “tough racket,” but whether they’ve managed to retain their humanity in spite of the grind. Spoiler alert: They haven’t, and the spectrum of misanthropy they represent is unmatched in contemporary American cinema. Choose your fighter: the snarling, hypocritical Moss, who manipulates his dim-witted coworker (Alan Arkin) into becoming an accessory to theft before the fact; Al Pacino’s Mephistophelian Richard Roma, willing to thoroughly ruin a client’s life (and marriage) for a commission of $6,000; the unctuous office manager John Williamson (Kevin Spacey), vibrating with contempt for his team and himself; Alec Baldwin’s ferocious corporate fixer, who claims his name is “Fuck You”; or Shelley “The Machine” Levene, the wretched, wizened old-timer played with self-loathing brilliance by Jack Lemmon. Instead of using Shelley as a tragic hero—or victim—David Mamet makes the story’s weakest and most vulnerable character exactly as much of a prick as his (marginally) more successful colleagues, culminating in a vicious, spleen-venting monologue that evokes a broken man’s delusions of grandeur (and the meanness underneath) with uncanny naturalism.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

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