Our Idiot Brother: The Antithesis of Toxic Masculinity
I don’t recall why I didn’t watch Our Idiot Brother when it was released in 2011. Maybe I was afraid it would be what I’ve come to call humiliation comedy where all the gags put the main character in the most humiliating and embarrassing public situations imaginable so that empathy itself becomes ironic. So, it wasn’t until the Covid pandemic when, probably out of boredom while sheltering alone with my two cats, that I finally watched it. I was surprised. The movie reminded me just how jaded and cynical we can be, and, honestly, how detached we are from our own humanity, especially men, and how toxic we’ve become.
The term-of-the-moment, “toxic masculinity,” wasn’t common in 2011. It only started being thrown about in earnest years after Our Idiot Brother was released. The movie had its theatrical run three years before both the Isla Vista massacre brought Incels out of the internet shadows, and the Gamergate harassment campaign showed us how toxic gamer culture is. It was released five years before both Brock Turner got infamous for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, and Trump was elected president while gleefully bragging about grabbing women by the pussy. The movie was six years old in 2017 when Harvey Weinstein, whose eponymous company had released the film, was finally exposed publicly as a serial sexual predator. Since then we have, as a society, become hyper-focused on the horribly toxic ways that men treat women, as well as all the ways men display various hyper-entitled, anti-social, violent, and destructive behavior in general.
Considering that backdrop, Paul Rudd’s portrayal of Ned does, in fact, seem rather like an idiot. His trust and faith in people’s better angels certainly feels dumb compared to our current social order where to be open and honest around anyone feels like an invitation to be exploited. But I’d argue that Ned’s philosophy of life, even though it might seem “idiotic” to us in our toxic culture, is probably the outlook on life that might actually fix some of our ills.
I won’t go through a long synopsis of the movie, nor am I going to worry about spoilers. Seriously, if a movie can be spoiled by knowing how it goes before you see it, then, well, there’s nothing to that movie except the thing being kept a secret, and that’s a pretty thin movie that deserves to be spoiled. Besides the most significant part of the movie begins near the middle where one sub-plot takes over and gives us the clearest view of Ned’s character and the fact that he’s not an idiot.
While living with his sister Liz, Ned is recruited by his ambitious sister, Miranda, to drive her to an interview for a Vanity Fair article she’s writing. There he meets the subject of Miranda’s interview — Lady Arabella. Ned and Lady Arabella hit it off, and she invites Ned and Miranda to a benefit for a women’s shelter. At the benefit, Arabella gives Miranda the cold shoulder and spends the night talking with Ned. Ned tells her about his arrest for selling weed to a uniformed cop, and that he knows it was stupid. He then explains that, “I live my life a certain way and that is I like to think that if you put your trust out there; I mean if you really give people the benefit of the doubt, see their best intentions, that they’re gonna want to live up to it. It doesn’t always work out, clearly, but more often than not I think that if you do, people will rise to the occasion. I really believe that.” When Arabella tells him his philosophy is sweet, Ned says “Oh you think I’m an idiot like everyone else.” I realized then that Ned has consciously chosen to live his life as a guileless, empathetic, and compassionate man, and the moments when he appears to be an idiot are all when someone fails to “rise to the occasion” of Ned’s trust and faith in their best intentions.
An important moment showing Ned’s non-toxic masculinity comes at the end of the evening with Arabella. After hearing about Ned’s arrest and his life philosophy, Arabella opens up to him about an incident involving “the fucking Chilean” and a stabbing. We don’t get to hear the story, of course, but as Ned and Arabella enter an elevator to leave the benefit, she says “You must think I’m a total psycho.”
“I think you’re fucking awesome, I do. Hey, you wanna go out with me sometime?”
“Oh, no, not really. Thanks for asking.”
The first time I saw that, I knew that, if I were a woman, I would have immediately tensed up, waiting for the moment when Ned would start trying to negotiate, or get angry. In the real world, a toxic, entitled, aggressive man might feel entitled to more of Arabella’s time for having already spent so much time and energy being a “nice guy.” But Ned isn’t toxic. He smiles, nods, shrugs . . and the scene ends. He’s accepted his rejection with grace, and that is the end of it.
Later at Miranda’s apartment, he starts to tell Miranda’s friend Jeremy about Lady Arabella, praising her as cool, pretty, smart, funny, and strong. This is not a man who feels he’s been wronged or slighted by a woman’s polite rejection. He may be sad about being rejected, but he doesn’t let that color his positive, glowing impression of Arabella. He still thinks she’s great. There’s no sour-grapes grumbling, no attempt to diminish the good qualities that he liked about her to assuage his bruised ego. Unfortunately, he mentions the stabbing, which causes Miranda to manipulate Ned into telling her about it by making him feel she will withdraw the three hundred dollars she gave him so he could rent the goat barn on his ex-girlfriend’s farm his dog, Willie Nelson, is being held hostage.
After writing up her story about Arabella, the Chilean, and the stabbing, Miranda has to bring Ned into the Vanity Fair office to sign paperwork vouching for the truth of the story he was manipulated into sharing. Ned balks at the checklist of facts he’s shown, saying the conversation was private. Miranda, desperate to get her story approved and certain she can manipulate her “idiot” brother again, tries to corral him into saying they were a reporting team and that Arabella didn’t tell him it was “off the record.” Ned, however, refuses to back down even when a lawyer is brought in. Ned’s refusal to confirm the facts in the checklist kills the story and, of course, protects Arabella’s privacy. For a more toxic man, like Arabella’s ex-boyfriend who sold their sex-tape to pay his legal fees in a theft case, this would have be an opportunity to punish Arabella for turning him down. But again, Ned isn’t toxic, and he’s not an idiot. He’s a good man and so, Lady Arabella is protected from another scandal.
Throughout the movie each person who thinks Ned is an idiot, like Miranda, ends up taking advantage of him for their own gain or protection. The cop who busts him manipulates Ned’s empathy and compassion to entrap him. His brother-in-law lies to him about cheating on his sister, Liz. Miranda, of course, manipulates Ned into telling her private things he learned about Arabella for a hit-piece article. His sister Natalie ignores his advice to tell her girlfriend, Cindy, about her pregnancy, which leads to a breakup when Cindy finds out during an attempt to rescue Willie Nelson. All of these people ignore or take advantage of Ned and manipulate him because they are all caught up in a society that seems to require them to be ruthless, guarded, suspicious, hard-bitten, untrusting, and cynical. However, because Ned is none of those things, because he is, quite literally, a “non-toxic male,” everyone assumes he must be an idiot.
Ned, of course, blames himself for all the trouble his sister’s are experiencing. He’s so down that he violates his parole by smoking a joint and then telling his parole officer. This is the only time Ned acts like an actual idiot, treating his parole officer like a therapist. Knowing he’ll be returned to jail, he tries to have one last, pleasant dinner with his family, but his sisters decide to take their anger out on him by ruining a game of charades. When he calls them out on this, it’s the only time in the movie where Ned gets truly angry and it stuns his sisters. However, before any reconciliation can happen, his parole officer shows up to take him to jail.
When Ned refuses to be bailed out by his sisters, they go to rescue Willie Nelson from Ned’s ex-girlfriend knowing this will get him to accept bail. During the confrontation, Miranda, the sister who failed Ned’s trust and faith the most, says “Nobody loves that dog the way Ned loves that dog. Nobody love anything as unconditionally as Ned loves . . .” and she stops there, open mouthed and shocked because she’s just realized that Ned didn’t kill her article only to protect Arabella. By refusing to vouch for the story she’d turned in, Ned had also protected Miranda from becoming the worst version of herself. A version she might not have been able to live with.
Ned’s purity of spirit, especially within the protected confines of a fiction, is probably unattainable in real life. If any of us handed a stack of money to a stranger on the subway to hold while we cleaned up spilled coffee, we’d probably lose that money. However, the truth of Ned in Our Idiot Brother, especially in relation to our concepts of masculinity, is something I think we need to start embracing as men. Generosity, kindness, open-heartedness, loyalty, honesty, these are traits that we, as men, often say we value. However, most of us are more like the cop who busted Ned, or his brother-in-law who was cheating and lying about it. We’ll chew up and use people to get ahead. We’ll hide our mistakes and our vulnerability thinking that to tell the truth, to be uncertain, means people will stop loving us. And, worst of all, we’ll look at those people who believe in our better angels, in our potential to rise to the occasion and be the kind of people they believe we can be, and we’ll call them idiots when the truth is that we are the idiots for not rising to the level of other people’s faith in us.
