Kinds of Kindness is a Great Film About the Psychological Roots of Fascism
Which I found perversely comforting.
I find solace in strange places.
Last week, needing to take a break from all the hyper-anxiety-inducing political news, I went to see Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, Kinds of Kindness. I did so in part because I’d heard it described as cruel, difficult, even disgusting, and I knew I needed something potent to get politics off of my mind. Beverly Hills Cop wouldn’t do the job.
To my surprise, the film was (a) excellent, (b) actually, in a deep way, about our political-psychological moment, and (c) a source of some consolation. So, if you would like a little break from reading more takes about What Biden Should Do (Or Be Forced To Do), sit back and enjoy the next few minutes. Mild spoilers follow.
First, I should disclaim—as I have before in my once-per-quarter film reviews—that I like films that are slow, contemplative, challenging, and ultimately about the profound depths of the human condition that can only be explored in long works of art. Recent favorites in this genre include Perfect Days, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, and Evil Does Not Exist, all of which were thoroughly enjoyable to me… but potentially not to everyone else.
I also don’t usually find such films confounding, even if they resist simple explanation. Human life is confounding, and films like these show, don’t tell, to invoke a writing cliché. The tensions and contradictions of love, meaning, work, technology, and devotion always resist efforts to tie them up in a bow, and refusing to do so is, to me, one of the distinctions between art and pop. (Not that there is anything wrong with pop; I love pop.) It’s also a distinction between art and self-help books.
Kinds of Kindness consists of three thematically-linked short films – the total length is 160 minutes, which is a lot. The same cast appears in each, led by Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe (Stone and Dafoe also starred in Lanthimos’s last film, the comparatively accessible Poor Things; Stone won the Oscar for it). In the first, Plemons plays a follower of an all-controlling, quasi-corporate-cult-leader (Dafoe) who loses everything when he defies him. In the second, Plemons is a cop whose wife (Stone) is rescued after being lost at sea, but who Plemons insists is an imposter. And in the third, Stone is a devotee of a purity-wellness-cult-leader (Dafoe again) who is searching for a quasi-messianic healer, but who is tempted to return to her pre-cult life.
Yes, as other reviews of this film will highlight, all these characters do terrible things, ranging from murder to self-mutilation, though only the second tale has true gross-out moments. But the heart of the film lies in why they do it: devotion, love, obsession. All are wounded people. Plemons’s first character is unable to make decisions for himself, having surrendered all decision-making to Dafoe for years; he becomes like a child left unsupervised in an uncertain world. His second is heartbroken over the loss of his wife, and cannot accept that she has returned. And Stone’s character is a true believer in Dafoe’s quack pseudoscience about purity and bodily fluids, seeking safety and certainty.
Does any of this sound familiar?
It should. This is why people join religions, cults, and political movements—or, in the case of American Trumpism, a combination of all three. (Watching Plemons in Kinds of Kindness reminded me of his chilling turn as a nationalist murderer in Civil War.) As I wrote about at length here a few weeks ago, we come to religion not for answers about how the world came to be or what happened in the Middle East 2500 years ago, but for making sense of the existential questions – death, suffering, love, community – and crises of every day. Here's critic Terry Eagleton in his book Reason, Faith and Revolution (thanks to my friend Sam Brody for alerting me to this quote):
‘[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.’
Kinds of Kindness subtly, evocatively depicts this crisis. It’s not about religion or politics, but it shows how we alchemize the pain of being human into the power of devotion and the horror of domination.
As Freud and Foucault have insisted, sex is part of it, too; Dafoe’s first charismatic leader dictates when and how Plemons is to have sex with his wife. In the second story, Stone and Plemons are in a four-way erotic relationship with another couple. And in the third, Dafoe is in full sex-cult mode, dealing out sex with his disciples as a reward for good behavior. (In a nice twist, Hong Chau plays Plemons’s wife in the first story and Dafoe’s wife/partner in the third; once a follower of a madman, then a co-leader with him.) Eros is at once liberation from power and a tool of power. Its regulation is a fundamental act of the state. And Plemons’s masculinity is constantly challenged, finding fulfillment only through the charisma of the strong male leader.
Again, this should sound familiar, especially if you’ve watched a Trump rally lately.
So why was any of this consoling to me? Because we are living in what feels like an unknown, unprecedented time. In some ways, this is true; certainly in American history, we’ve never had a felon and insurrectionist seize power, with the blessing of newly-created immunity conferred upon him by a compromised Supreme Court. This is new, and it can be terrifying.
But it’s also true that this is very old—or at least very deep. Strong men (almost always men) providing insecure men with a sense of direction, purpose and meaning – precisely when the usual measures of meaning are threatened.
For two hundred years of American Christian capitalism, men have defined themselves by their work, by their ability to provide for their families. Now women can also work, lead, and provide. And now many men are no longer able to do so, due to globalization, or technology, or changes in what our economic system values. This is a crisis so profound that the people experiencing it can barely express it except in rage.
Relatedly and at the same time, America has been defined, for most of its history, by a “civic religion” grounded in Protestantism, yet is now increasingly moving away from that foundation. What is progress to a queer liberal like me is the destruction of the world to a religious fundamentalist. (Just this past weekend, Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, which produced the Project 2025 document, called for a Third Great Awakening and a re-orienting of American law around “Judeo”-Christian values.) Even the “Intellectual Dark Web” is now finding Old Time Religion, as a way to find certainty amid the chaos.
And of course, for most of American history, white men were the dominant actors in politics, economics, and culture—but now, white people are barely even a demographic majority. For God’s sake, you have to Press 1 to hear the announcement in English.
To be clear, none of this appears in Kinds of Kindness. Instead, the film is a kind of fable, or parable. The dynamics that drive its cultic or love-obsessed antiheroes are personal, not political. But they are the same dynamics that drive much of our politics.
And as for the movie’s cruelty, how cruel is a single murder or act of violence, in comparison to the profound violence of Trump, who has promised to build concentration camps for “illegal” immigrants? Not to mention that, according to World Health Organization estimates, between 2030-2050, climate change will cause approximately 250,000 deaths every year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress. The acts of cruelty depicted in this film pale in comparison to promises Trump makes every day.
I didn’t come away from Kinds of Kindness with the belief that we can defeat the human tendencies toward fascism and authoritarianism, domination and submission. But in depicting them so skillfully, it recontextualized them for me. They are not a quirk of 2024. For better but probably for worse, they are part of who we are.
Yep, love bites, as Def Leppard said. Otherwise, this week, I’ve been on a mini-binge of
’s Search Engine podcast. Loved the episode with my friend and spiritual doppleganger Zvika Krieger on what it’s like to believe in God. Love-hated the episode on Clearview AI — my own self-search of the face recognition engines turned up some interesting results. And also love-hated the episode with Ezra Klein about the latest death of new media. Check it out!And, yes, I’ve read lots of Biden takes. Although a bit different from my spiritual-psychological take last week,
wrote a comforting one that I liked. But I won’t say more about that subject for now, because you can read about it literally anywhere else.Thanks for your support, subscriber!
My wife and I watched Kinds of Kindness last night and I'd say we both found it to be the opposite of comforting -- perverse or otherwise. I loved Lanthimos' Poor Things, liked The Favorite very much, and kind of liked The Lobster. But the nearly three hours of unrelenting nastiness in Kindness was hard to take. As for its connection to the nastiness Trump has normalized, I take your point.
Auden coined the phrase The Age of Anxiety in his book length poem about the 1940s and it seems like that age has persisted in many ways. Somewhere along the way we also entered a post-modern Age of Irony, and in the 21st century an Age of Anger (described by Pankaj Mishra in his brilliant 2017 book by that name). It feels like these “ages” are cumulative, like layers atop each other. But now I think we’ve added a new (and of course ancient) layer: an Age of Cruelty. How else to describe things like the latest pro-Trump rallying cry by young men, “Your body, my choice”? Or the troll culture perfected by Trump, Musk, and the very online New Right? Or the idea of mass deportations, of even legal immigrants, and immigrant concentration camps? Or these cabinet nominations that on their face seem absurd, trolling taken to a new level? Or the full-throated support for the literally murderous cruelty of contemporary Israel?
I think that cruelty has become the point.
Appreciate this a great deal. And it reminds me of a quote I stumbled upon in book research. In the '70s, the sociologist Klaus Theweleit suggested that the men of the proto-Nazi Freikorps were motivated more than anything by a fear and distaste of women and their growing participation in society. Many of them would go on to form the nexus of the future Nazi Party, including SS chief Heinrich Himmler; his rival Ernst Röhm, the head of the Storm Troopers and a closeted homosexual; and Rudolf Höss, who would eventually become commandant of Auschwitz.