For a film that opens with a barrage of breasts and butts, and makes a hero out of a porn-obsessed male pick-up artist, Don Jon is an encouragingly critical, if shallow, discourse on modern masculinity. This trend of examined misogyny, arguably fostered by the popularity of Mad Men's Don Draper's conflicted womanizing, has grown in recent years with mixed results. Shows like Californication and the new HBO series Hello Ladies often simply make light of casual sexism. And this phenomenon has extended itself outside the realm of film and television into popular music, namely Hip Hop (think Drake's "Marvin's Room" or Kanye West's "Runaway").
Don Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is your typical night club regular. He is always on the prowl; that is until he meets Barbara (Scarlett Johansson). He has to have this "dime" and, of course, she withholds sex from him. What follows is a domestication project. He tries to get in her pants and she tries to make him into her dream guy. Only one of them succeeds. And you can guess who. The film does, however, present an interesting parallel between his idealization of sex in porn and her identification with the heightened love found in romantic films that is reminiscent of our discussions on body genres. It also highlights the emptiness of his promiscuity, though he's never made to seem gross in the way a woman in the same position might be.
Where it falters, though, is the notion that if male chauvinists simply find the right lover, all their bad habits and questionable behavior will disappear. It ignores larger problems within society that create these kind of people. Is it enough for cinema and television to simply present reformed and ambivalent sexism as a model for heterosexual males? One wishes there wasn't such a depiction of monolithic maleness, and that media representations would exist which not only subvert the stereotypes of masculinity but refuse to participate in them.
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