New Lads or ‘Protest Masculinities’? Underclass, Criminal and Socially Marginalised Men in the Films of the 1990s and 2000s

Abstract

In a key scene in Paul Tickell’s film Crush Proof (1999), protagonist Neal and his friend Liam lead a piebald horse through a Dublin housing estate. In a moment of dramatic reflection, reminiscent of the signature soliloquies delivered by anti-heroes Renton in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) and Tyler Durden in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), the young men exchange the following words:

Neal: There’s nothing waiting for you when you grow up, just the dole, then a hole for your knob, then another one in the nut and then another fucking hole in the ground for your corpse.

Liam: So, until the inevitable, smashing and shagging.

In 2004, sociologist Anne Cleary and a number of colleagues produced a report entitled Young Men on the Margins, in which they stated that social inequality, unemployment, the decline of organised religion, the re-conceptualisation of community and the family and rising levels of crime had had a particularly negative impact on young, working-class men. It is tempting to assume that the cinematic preoccupation with male social exclusion that emerged in the late 1990s/early 2000s was in direct response to the social reality documented by Cleary et al. However, closer analysis of this cycle suggests that more complex cultural and gender-political factors need to be taken into account in order to explain the genesis and popularity of these images and discourses.