Bill Burr’s Old Dads Highlights the Judgmental Self-Righteousness of Some Progressives
Not Surprisingly They Can’t Take the Joke
In a scene early in Old Dads, Jack (Bill Burr’s character) is driving when a teenage kid in an electric scooter swerves in front of him, taking up the whole road. Jack honks and curses. As the kid escapes through an intersection, Jack stops to scream out the window, “Where you going you little cocksucker?” When he subsequently sees a presumably progressive couple staring and clearly judging him, he attempts to explain himself, asking at the end, “Am I wrong?”
With superb execution, actor Nate Craig — expertly combining thinly-veiled anger, passive aggressiveness, and pity — replies, “Yes.” Then looking at his partner, dismissively says, “Toxic.”
Although one-scene characters like this in the film could be seen as caricatures, they often represent a familiar reaction to people like Jack (and Burr in real life) who do not neatly toe the line of accepted progressive morality. And actually, there are people like this with significant cultural power. Take Mark Kennedy of the Associated Press, whose negative review of Old Dads contributes to its current critic score of 26% on Rotten Tomatoes. After comparing the film to the rantings of paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, Kennedy relates events leading up to a fight scene between Jack and his wife Leah (Katie Aselton):
Their friendships begin to rend and their wives — portrayed as either cold, needy or intimidating — begin bickering. Mostly because Burr is a Gen-X anti-social warrior, prone to go on an angry rant no matter the consequences. “What, you’re mad?” he screams at his pregnant wife. “Cause I’m honest?” No, ’cause your toxic, dude.
It’s not clear that Kennedy even noticed since he appears to have used “toxic” with zero sense of irony, but he is precisely who Burr is parodying. At another point in the film, Jack and his friends are fired from the company they started after their conversation is surreptitiously recorded during a road trip. Here’s how Kennedy describes that situation:
Things go south for all of them when they “exercise free speech” — in other words, spew misogynist hate.
This sort of hyperbole is par for the course for progressives like Kennedy. The conversation from the film is far from, say, what you’d expect from Andrew Tate loving incels who think women need to obey them like dogs. Rather, in the film the three friends are putting their own spin on the admittedly macho “would you rather have sex with this woman in this situation, or this other woman in this other situation?” thing. Later, viewers see that Jack also wondered out loud about what happened to Bruce Jenner’s genitals after becoming Caitlyn Jenner.
While saying things like this may be impolite in certain company, it’s not clear that they indicate a hatred or mistrust of women, which is what misogyny means. Considering that they were recorded surreptitiously, there are also issues concerning privacy that the film addresses but Kennedy ignores. Additionally, it’s not clear that when women get together as friends they don’t talk about men in a similar way and how this might bear on the issue.
The morality here is arguably ambiguous yet Kennedy — dripping with the moral certainty of the guy mentioned above who answered “Yes” — treats the situation as simple and obvious. And herein lies the problem with progressives like Kennedy and the “Yes” guy: as self-appointed arbiters of morality they address those even just a step outside of their bubble with self-righteous judgmentalism. This excessive lack of moral clarity is what allows Kennedy to align a character like Jack — a clearly loving father struggling with generational change — with Pat Buchanan, someone who once disputed the amount of Jews killed during the Holocaust in one of the gas chambers.
To put it another way, to the progressive elites being parodied in the film, morality is black and white and should be understood in terms of the good ones and the bad ones. For them, material progress takes a back seat to rigorous gatekeeping over who counts as being part of the tribe. As Freddie deBoer once put it:
Liberalism has in recent years sloughed off whatever remaining status it had as a coherent political project — an effort by temporary allies to join together despite philosophical differences to achieve a specific and material purpose. Instead, liberalism now functions ontologically, as a form of Being, and specifically of Being Good. The quintessential 2022 liberal is someone who does not want to achieve anything, but rather to be something — an ally, a friend to the movement, one of the good ones.
Indeed, Burr is not parodying any of the traditional goals of liberalism as deBoer states them. He’s parodying the dog and pony show of faux oppression that this liberalism has sadly become in some progressive spaces — where, as deBoer says, it’s more about Being and identity than achievement towards making a better world together.
Although Kennedy in the quote above claims that the women in the film are portrayed as “cold, needy, or intimidating,” I had a different take. Leah, for example, seems to have a not uncommon relationship with her husband (Jack) that includes happy times, sad times, fights, and disagreements. And the main reason why she’s so upset with Jack’s outbursts is not the outbursts per se but because, if he doesn’t stop, the director of their private kindergarten may not write a recommendation for their son.
This touches on deBoer’s point about a material purpose. Especially in academic progressive spaces, behind the incessant talk of inclusivity and justice, there is a darker underbelly that is quite exclusive and ruthless. Part of this underbelly is exposed in the documentary Nursery University, in which parents compete like dogs to get their kids into preschools that will lead them to ivy league universities. And those ivy league universities along with all the rest, behind the land acknowledgements and microaggression accusations, have their own dark underbelly that includes administrative bloat and a professorate composed of over 70% part timers with few rights and even fewer benefits. Kennedy, so bent out of shape over Jack’s so-called toxicity, misses this theme entirely.
In another memorable scene from the film Jack is forced to apologize for inappropriately (yes, this time even he admits he was wrong) directing the C-word at the director of the kindergarten. But as he soon realizes, part of the apology entails other parents airing their grievances directly to Jack about the supposed hurt the incident caused them. One woman says, “Even though I wasn’t there, just knowing that language like that was used in front of the children…” She then breaks into tears as others rush to comfort her.
Again, these may seem like caricatures, but behind the antics of these fictional characters is the “words are violence” philosophy, which is alive and well in many progressive spaces, especially elite ones. Though it is perhaps better thought of as a dogmatic assertion than a philosophy, given its lack of any serious academic foundation. This assertion has moved mountains in some of these spaces and continues to do so — from the cancelation of James Bennet at the NY Times over running an editorial that supposedly made staffers feel “unsafe” to the more recent censorship of Roald Dahl books to make the language “less mean.”
Perhaps the deeper irony of the majority of critics’ reactions to the film is the following. Jack is called out for being toxic, out of touch; Burr is called out by the critics for being toxic, out of touch. Yet it may very well be that the ones most out of touch are those calling people toxic and dictating what others can and cannot say. Although the critic score is low on Rotten Tomatoes, the audience score is at 89%. Yes it’s a biased sample, but phenomena like Latinx and #defundthepolice remind us that elite progressives aren’t always the best at taking the cultural pulse.
There’s also sometimes a Mike Judge-esque aspect to the film, where mundane situations are exaggerated and carried to their ridiculous logical conclusions — like Milton being moved to the basement in Office Space, or the overtalkative neighbor in Extract dying of a heart attack after one rebuke.
Along these lines my favorite scene in Old Dads comes right at the end. Jack has reformed himself, sought help via therapy, and reconciled with Leah. He’s got their new baby strapped to his chest while throwing the baseball back and forth with his son. A guy on a bike approaches (the comedian Rory Scovel, from the top image), oozing condescension. “You really think that’s smart?” he says, “Throwing a ball around like that with a baby strapped to your chest?”
Cleary reformed, Jack refrains from his usual angry outburst and thanks him for the information. Not missing a beat, Scovel acknowledges the reply and pedals away, staring back judgmentally until he’s offscreen. Unfortunately for the rest of us who have any sympathy for Jack or for Burr himself, that judgmental stare continues through the pens and mouths of the Mark Kennedys of the world.
