Hancock: Asshole and Crazy

When we’re talking “uncomfortable class imagery” there’s nothing more direct than the pervasive use of profanity. The defining word of the entire movie of Hancock is…

Asshole.

From the very first shot of the movie, Hancock is woken up off a park bench, by a kid wanting him to stop bad guys. When Hancock responds harshly, the little six year old walks off and calls him an asshole. The point of an early morning wake up scene in the beginning of a movie is to say “every day is like this for the character.”

The film uses the word asshole 15 times in the first half. Everyone, including the two other main characters, call him an asshole.

And it’s such a banal insult. Everyone knows he isn’t a supervillain knocking off banks or kidnapping the president. In fact he’s usually saving the day. But he’s being a callous rude jerk while doing it, and that’s just as upsetting.

Instead of picking up a guy off the train tracks, he stops a train and derails the cargo. To catch some fleeing robbers he picks up their truck and pins it on a record company building’s ostentatious spire. He is almost always drunk, and drinking more. He’s unshaven and sleeps on park benches. He uses just as much foul language at others that they gave him in the first place.

It’s hard to tell the line here between what’s “genuinely destructive behavior” and what is just failing to present the polite appearance society wants. And, when you’re basically an unaccountable invincible god, there might not be much of a difference from society’s perspective.

But there’s a cycle here. We are simultaneously shown Hancock acting like an asshole, and people calling him an asshole. And being called an asshole really hurts him. Even though none of these humans present any threat to him, he is always shown to really care and be hurt when someone insults him. That’s some really solid understanding of social abjection there. The threat behind the slur isn’t where the power comes from, but the social reality of the slur in of itself. (Perhaps even more impressively, all of these characters are so sure that Hancock is a neutered dog that they don’t hesitate to call a walking wrecking ball “asshole”.)

This is best reflected in what we call the Routine, a series of lines that happens four times in the movie.

1.     Hancock on his best behavior, tries to talk someone down.
2.     The aggressive human calls him an asshole.
3.     Hancock says he doesn’t like that word.
4.     Aggressive human snidely says something like “What word? Asshole.”
5.     Hancock grimaces. “Call me asshole. One more time.”
6.     Human does.
7.     Hancock does something extremely violent to them.

Hancock, as the infinitely more powerful person in these scenes, has more responsibility.  So this is not to excuse his behavior or say that is was good to get vengeance like that (and the comedic stylings of Routine in jail are supposed to disturb us at the violation that follows.) They epitomize “Call me a monster, and a monster I shall be.”

Oh right, quick check. Hancock is often identified with Frankenstein. His current identity was created after seeing the first movie of Frankenstein in 1930, and his only piece of evidence from that past life is two ticket stubs to it. We’ll talk about how important the 1930’s are later.

So on one level, you have this parable of the gentle giant who wants to help, but because he’s reviled by society, becomes increasingly isolated and violent. But the movie doesn’t make it easy on us. His behavior is not just “sorta misguided”, but genuinely abhorrent. We can very easily see why people find him irresponsible and disgusting. He exchanges racist slurs with Asian crooks, he traumatizes a kid, and he literally shoves a man’s head up another man’s ass (one of the great things about this movie is it shows the after effects of that “joke” on those two men for the rest of the movie.)

But underneath all that, he motivation clearly is to do good and be loved. There are a series of youtubes that have defined his public perception, such as when butt-naked in disintegrating clothes, he pushes aside some kids and climbs into an ice cream truck to take the ice cream. It’s appalling. Of course, the reason he did this was he had just rescued people from an apartment building on fire, and he wanted something to cool down.

There’s an interesting note about superhero costumes here. Hancock is mostly naked in this clip because his clothes burnt off while saving people. This is such a great contrast from 99% of other superheroes who somehow always manage to have a costume that stays in one piece, while they shrug off explosions, superspeed, clawing menaces, and extreme heat. We don’t want their nakedness. We want them to save us and look good for the cameras afterwards.

Hancock does the first but not the second. So he gets called an asshole. So he gets worse and worse at both parts.

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So Hancock the movie spends the first hour establishing how systemic racism (primarily through class signals, and not explicit antipathy towards blackness) degrades black men who become depicted as angry and slovenly and thus not worthwhile members of society, even when they have so much to contribute.

Having done that, Peter Berg goes for the hat trick by applying the same lens to feminism and intersectionality too. It's so great.


A convincing feminist argument is not one that conveys to someone who's already feminist "yup I agree with this", but one that can demonstrate to someone who's not already on board what's difficult about life as a woman in modern America and how they can help fix it. Mary does that in about 20 minutes of screen time in her second mask - that of a parallel to Hancock's black-malehood-as superhero.

She goes immediately from being the helpful housewife, to someone who is angry, violent, and dressed to kill. She goes on at length about the long history she's had with Hancock and how it's ruined her life, holding him responsible for things he knows nothing about, expecting him to follow her train of thought. It's not productive and it leaves both us and Hancock mystified.

MARY: It always end the same way Persia, Greece, Brooklyn.
HANCOCK: Brooklyn? I’ve never been to Brooklyn.
MARY: I have put up with your bullshit for the last 3000 years and I’m done.
HANCOCK: I don’t know what you are talking about?
MARY: Done! You Listening?
HANCOCK: I don’t know what you are talking about!
MARY: I am happy, okay, finally I’m happy! You are not going to mess it up.
HANCOCK: Look at me… I don’t know what you are talking about? I hate to burst your little crazy lady bubble but it must not have been all that great ‘cause I don’t remember you.
[Pause.]
MARY: Call me crazy…. one more time.
HANCOCK: Coo coo!

And then she hits him with a truck! It's so great. We've seen this interaction three times before from Hancock's side, and now the film is explicitly telling us that the same dynamic has plagued women, just with a different twist.

Just imagine what Mary's life must have been like. When Hancock shows his powers, people are afraid of him and demean him. When Mary tried to tell people about hers ("my husband just got mugged by these men who attacked us for no reason and he's losing his superpowers") people must have dismissed her as crazy, denied her, and refused to help her. Hell she probably got the Sarah Connor treatment. After enough times of this, she just gave up. She started living a normal life as a normal human who pretended she was weak and would never bend steel bars, and when no one's looking, she'd sneak out and save the world from the Cuban missile crisis.

The morning after we see her reveal, she asks Ray to open a jar of sauce for her because "you're so strong," and we know all about the double life she's forced herself to lead. It's more comfortable than Hancock's abnegation, but it's still a mental prison.

***

It's important to remember that the movie isn't saying assholish and crazy behavior do not exist. Hancock does act like an asshole. Mary's rant to Hancock does (to him and us) sound absolutely crazy. The core lesson of this movie is that it is wrong to call people those terms anyway because they dehumanize the target.

***

To return to discussions of intentionality in art. I think it's likely that director Peter Berg thought about and purposefully included most of the elements we are discussing here. He's done a lot of very class conscious work (most notably Friday Night Lights, which you should watch.)

But even if he didn't mean it, so what? What would the conversation have been like that led to this scene?

HOLLYWOOD DOUCHEBRO 1: Okay, so he's arguing with Mary, what if we took that same funny interaction where he says "Call me asshole. One more time" and then kicks their ass, but now she gets to say it.
HOLLYWOOD DOUCHEBRO 2: That's great that's great, but is she even an asshole? Would he call her that?
HD1: Right. Well let's just call her crazy instead.
HD2: Oh yeah! And you gotta really sell it. Make the whole scene a "Brittany Spears breaking down in the streets of Santa Monica" type feel.
HD1: Brilliant. Aren't women and black people hilarious. What next? I'm thinking brewskies.

Now oops, you've stumbled upon important elements of how the power structure views minorities. It's still good art, worth analyzing why it made sense to these random douchebros. Which is to say, everyone knows about how our society oppresses people, and good art helps express that directly.

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If you want more analysis of Hancock, you should watch the movie, and read the series of posts at Prequels Redeemed about this movie.