This all happens at first before, then alongside, the golden showers, and then there’s the goat. If you’re the type to feign unflappability, then Goat’s coterie of frivolous barbarity may come off as standard: Kappa Sig’s initiates are forced to drink until they puke, subjected to verbal assaults upon their sexuality and manliness, forced to eat things blindfolded most of us would rather not eat at all (“shit,” for example, where “shit” means “a banana soaked in the toilet”), and so on and so forth. Neel’s movie is an act of abuse, inflicted on members of his audience in much the same way that its graphic recreations of frat hazing rites are inflicted on bright-eyed pledges. Goat is based on a novel of the same name, the memoirs of one Brad Land, a former frat brother for Kappa Sigma who put his experiences with the Greek system on paper as a way of working through them. Don’t blame a person for wishing, of course, but the language we use to talk about destructive male tendencies does a poor job of articulating just how destructive those tendencies are. In the case of the former, “toxic” has limited application: You better believe the poison spewed by the film’s supporting cast of frat boy douchebags is self-produced, but you’re kidding yourself if you think their bullshit is easily ameliorated. The trouble with buzz phrases is that they never quite seem to cut it. You could call Andrew Neel’s Goat an examination of toxic masculinity, and you could also call The Wolf of Wall Street a portrait of wealth privilege.
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