Sightlines · a viewing thread

The American Male Comes Apart

A run of self-made men — brokers, founders, dealers, drifters — hollowed out by the very thing they chase, each film pressing the same nerve where ambition curdles into alienation and violence.

Mostly crowd-tested and endlessly quoted, with the Taxi Driver canon at its spine and a few cooler, less-seen cousins (The Game, 25th Hour, Killing Them Softly) rounding it out — accessible but often brutal, so cue the run up when you're ready for some ugliness about men and money.

• Fight Club (1999)
• American Psycho (2000)
• The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
• The Social Network (2010)
• Taxi Driver (1976)
• The Game (1997)
• 25th Hour (2002)
• Killing Them Softly (2012)
• The King of Comedy (1982) — If Taxi Driver landed, this is the under-seen Scorsese/De Niro cousin to finally pull down — the same alienated man starving for recognition until his delusion tips into a criminal act.
• Wall Street (1987) — The one that basically wrote the greed-is-good gospel Wolf of Wall Street later riffs on — a hungry young broker corrupted whole by the money he cold-calls his way toward.
• Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) — The endlessly-quoted Mamet gut-punch about men and money you forgot you'd saved — salesmen ground to dust by the sales board, all bluster curdling into desperation.
• Boogie Nights (1997) — The overlooked PT Anderson rise-and-fall that rhymes with Wolf of Wall Street — a nobody remade into a star by an industry that then hollows him out, coke-glazed ambition sliding into paranoia and violence.
• Michael Clayton (2007) — The cooler, quieter cousin to Killing Them Softly — a corporate fixer corroded by his own complicity until the machine he serves finally breaks him open.
• Margin Call (2011) — The under-seen bookend to Wall Street — one sleepless night where money's abstractions curdle into ruin, all restraint where the others are brutal.