Whenever I have tuned into American politics over the last ten years, I have felt like I am watching a car crash in slow motion from afar. I am an American who has spent 32 years outside of my passport country, so it sometimes feels like watching a remote reality show, unfortunate, but unrelated to my life here in Germany. But with Elon Musk’s latest meddling in European politics, J.D. Vances scolding of European politicians in Munich not even an hour away from me, the recent election results here in Germany, and now the President’s and Vice President’s posturing and maneuvering to get Ukraine’s resources, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore that this car crash is also swerving and tumbling into our lanes over here on this side of the Atlantic. Witnessing history in this frame by frame slow motion of daily events can often obscure the larger narrative that is unfolding before our very eyes. We can lose our ultimate bearings while we negotiate and react to the urgency of each successive moment. For me, the movie The Bikeriders squeezes this long, drawn out “car crash” into a two hour kind of metaphor that not only brings its overarching trajectory into clearer focus, but also offers us distinct character studies of the main players involved, which might give insight into why the car is crashing in the first place.

(This isn’t going to be a movie review in the strict sense (how can I be objective when Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer are in it?), but I will spoil it for you, if you haven’t seen it first.)

Loosely based on the work of photographer Danny Lyon, who spent four years as an official member photographing and interviewing The Outlaws, a Chicago motorcycle club, The Bikeriders imagines some of those impressions into a narrative around the fictional club The Vandals. Many reviews will tell you the movie is about a triad between the three main characters, Kathy (Jodie Comer), Johny (Tom Hardy) and Benny (Austin Butler), where Kathy and Johny each have their own designs on who and what the beautiful and reckless Benny could be for them, and that the biker club more or less only offers an interesting, retro context and cool costumes for this personal melodrama. One review pushes this take so far as to insist that the movie-creator, Jeff Nichols, showed cowardice for not culminating the “homo-erotic energy” of the movie into a passionate kiss during an intimate and pivotal scene between Benny and Johny.

I shouldn’t blame her (though I do) for so thoroughly missing the under-text of the movie in this way, since absolutely everything in our culture is saturated in this sexualized narrative. But what the Vulture reviewer mistakes as “Homo-erotic energy” is actually something more primal and archetypical, and to miss this is to miss not only the overall narrative, but who, or what, the main characters actually are. The movie is not about Danny or Johny or Kathy: we are given scant insight into their personal histories, left to guess their personal motives, and are never privy to their inner-musings, which the Vulture reviewer also felt entitled to. It is also not about the biker club. Nichols gives no assurances of biographical vigilance to either Lyon’s book nor to the larger context of America’s biker history which spanned between the end of the 1950’s until the late ‘70’s.

The Iron Triangle

The protagonist of the film, as I see it, is actually Masculinity itself. That is what the lens of this film is focussed on for 1:58 minutes. For nearly two hours, we watch masculinity trying to simultaneously assert, indulge, and hide itself in ways that would make no demands on it. There is definitely a triad in the movie, but it is not between Johny, Benny, and Kathy. Rather, the film shows us raw male energy trying to negotiate the unavoidable triad of Identity, Autonomy, and Attachment all while attempting to dodge the vulnerability, the limitations, and the accountability that those realities bring with them. By the end of the film, perhaps without even meaning to, the creator has artfully sketched the three different ways men try to reach for the one while circumventing the other. (Women do this too, of course. Different movie. Different costumes.)

Johny

Johny is the primary, but not the only, character that answers the call that identity, autonomy, and attachment make on his life with domination. Inspired by Marlon Brando’s character in The Wild Ones, Johny seizes upon this image from which he aspires to fashion his own identity. It is an image of strength. An image of sovereignty. An image of power. Johny, portrayed as a solid, tough but principled, oldest brother figure, who will rise to a brawl but not start one, and whose wife and kids seem to play no role in his ambitions, creates The Vandals as a next evolution to his dirt-bike racing. By creating this rowdy, unwashed, fringe group of lost boys, which has laid claim to a local bar and asserts their unique and contrary identity loudly on their bikes through the streets of the town and countryside, Johny both disassociates from the wider, conventional community and asserts this new image of strength over it. By doing this however, he has only simulated the hard work of individuating necessary for identity formation and maturing to actual adulthood. Instead, he has manufactured a brotherhood that does not question nor ask him to answer for his maleness, but rather only mirrors and validates it.

As the leader of the group, however, the very freedom he had been seeking, for which these biker gangs are the quintessential embodiment, is curtailed by the responsibility he carries for the group. He has been willing to make that trade off because what Johny loses in autonomy, he gains in preeminence. Having a dominant attachment style makes Johny willing to be in relationship, care, protect, have affection for others, and even let them weigh him down (to some extent at least), as long as these others remain in a subordinate and useful role to him. As long as Johny can keep the ultimate dominate position in the group upon which his sense of strongman identity is based, he is willing to sacrifice some amount of his freedom. Anyone who challenges that position and control, however, is put back in his place or ousted from the group, as is depicted in a few scenes of the movie.

The Joiners

Unlike Johny, who created and controls the club, the second type of man, the majority of the men, is the type that joins such a group. These men are like moths drawn to a bright light. There was the enticement of the shiny motorcycle and the magic jacket that could bestow upon its wearer a new identity of cool, superior strength like a big middle finger to any and everyone who had ever slighted them, doubted them, or expected them to be more. There was this sparkly, buzzing, parenthetical space to conventional society which embraced a new ethical code granting them permission to indulge their appetites and urges without limit or censor or repercussions. But above all, there was the warm glow of relational bonds without vulnerability, of being known without ever having to divulge oneself, of seeing their own image reflected back to them in the mirror of the other members, and, not least of all, there was security in numbers. In other words, the club appeared to offer these particular men what they craved most: the low risk, low responsibility of deferent attachment.

These wooden Pinocchio men fell over themselves to get on the wagon, or rather bikes, going to this Land of Toys, as we see one of the threads going through the movie is the growing number of members and chapters spreading across the country. But for these men, the Joiners, even this Pleasure Island turns out to be in the iron triangle. The security they most hunger for comes at the price of their autonomy and individual identity. Having rejected the customs and control of “society,” these men willingly take on a subordinate role in this group of outlaws. A group which may give them more elbow room than before, but in which, never-the-less, they find their initiative and autonomy capped by Johny if they become oversized. Johny’s whole story arch shows him trying to keep pace with the growing size and ambitions of the very group he created, and so there are scenes of him “capping” the tall poppies that crop up. Additionally, we are told by Kathy, whose interview responses narrate the film and explain the culture, that these Joiners are quick to shed “their colors,” their member jackets, whenever they are isolated from the larger group, for fear of being caught out alone and unable to defend themselves from the aggressive responses it provokes. In fact, the film opens with such a brutal scenario. So much for an integrated, personal identity.

Among this cohort, we see individual identities and autonomy dissolved into the amalgam of a flashy group security blanket, and their group identity disappearing into the vacuum created by their own cowardice. These men were more than happy to let someone else carry the risk and responsibility for their identity, autonomy, and attachments, and willingly paid the tax on their own creative agency for that service.

Benny

But not so with Benny. Benny sheds his colors for no one. It is Benny who gets pulverized by two blokes in a bar when he refuses to remove his Vandals’ Jacket in the opening scene of the movie. It is Benny we see on his motorcycle testing the limits of “good”society, running through a record breaking number of red lights and stop signs. It is Benny who thrills in the adrenalin of the police chase that ensues and is only stoped by an empty tank of gas and his own lack of forethought. It is Benny who impulsively jumps into and throws the first punch in a standoff, setting off blows between rival groups. And it is Benny who gets the girl without saying so much as a word. Benny is our third archetype of a maladaptive Masculinity.

For the first part of the movie, we are almost seduced into believing that Benny, alone, has escaped the hard choices of the iron triangle of identity, autonomy, and attachment. It appears that he has found the sweet spot, has managed to preserve his individual sense of self, follow all of his impulses, and keep company with the club and get the girl without having to sacrifice one for the others. Benny defiantly wears the jacket not because of solidarity with the larger group identity, but because this insignia, these “colors,” represent his own personal ethos and identity, for which he is willing to take a beating if need be. Benny recklessly follows his impulses across any line, and willingly accepts the consequences and threat which that poses for his own health and well being (not to mention those of others). And not only is Benny a member of the The Vandals, but he has legend status within it. He is one apart, exceptional. Benny embodies the Vandals’ motto more than any other member, even more than its creator, Johny, who says this at one point in the movie. Benny represents what they all want, but for which they are not all willing to make the trade offs he is willing to make to live out this unreflected, aimless, and unbounded self-assertion that he does.

But eventually the tradeoff that Benny makes, and with it his attachment style, emerges over the course of the film. The Johny-Benny-Kathy dynamic that begins to take shape, is neither erotic nor even romantic, contrary to the Vulture review. Neither is it strictly over Benny’s loyalties. We first see a conflict heat up between Kathy and Johny over Benny’s well being. After Benny suffers serious injuries from being brutally jumped at a bar, both Kathy and Johny begin to press Benny for what they each need from him. Kathy urges him to reign-in his reckless impulsivity and to safeguard his life and well-being, which seem to be of more value to her than to himself. To this end, she tries and fails to enlist Johny’s influence and collaboration. Unknown to her, Johny has his own agenda for Benny to replace him as the leader of the Vandals. Disregarding Benny’s need to recover, Johny first maneuvers, then flatters, and then pressures him to become the instrument he needs to extend his power over the growing group while regaining some of the freedom he has lost while leading it. Both of these plot lines escalate over the rest of the film, and we see the iron triangle closing in on Benny, until he eventually disappears from both Kathy and the biker club.

Finally forced to choose between an “unadulterated,” exceptional, purely self–asserted identity of otherness; an autonomy submitted to nothing and no one but his momentary impulses and urges; and the two types of committed attachment represented by Kathy and Johny, Benny ditches attachment altogether rather than give up his self-assertion and free abandon.

Containers for the Masculine

What I see in the Johny-Benny-Kathy dynamic is not two people vying for Benny’s attention and affections. Rather, Johny and Kathy each represent alternative paradigms in which the raw male identity and autonomy could be formed and find its expression. They are each a kind of container for masculinity. Benny does not leave because they are each pulling on him, tug-of-war style, and he refuses to choose between them. Benny leaves, because each one of these containers begins to close in on him within its own paradigm.

The Vandals had provided a container where he once could be in the club but not of the club, could be lauded and applauded by members and move at will through the spaces in-between the members rather than actually be connected to the members, and where his reckless, uninhibited behavior ran up against only the larger society. But over the years, with both the rise in newer and more disturbing members and Johny placing ever increasing pressure on him to orientate, submit, and invest his masculinity toward something other (ie, to Johny’s project) than his own interests, appetites, and urges, that space grew tighter and tighter and became more claustrophobic.

At the same time, Kathy had at first been willing to allow Benny to dictate the terms, scope, and intensity of their relationship so as to give himself maximal leeway with minimal effort and commitment, and molded herself around his taciturnity, caprice, and elusiveness with gymnastic flexibility. But as he squandered her good will with his neglect, recklessness, and unreliableness, endangering not only himself, but also her, even she proved unable to contain Benny’s rigid relational style of Detachment .

Only Courageous Men Grow to Full Maturity

When I watch this movie of adult-sized men on loud, fast Motorcycles, all in the same denim uniform, whose patches and insignia do the talking for them, I see a bunch of scared adolescents refusing to face the fundamental challenges that life poses to all of us. As sure as we must breath, eat, and sleep to stay alive, we must answer the questions that Identity Formation, Autonomy, and Relationship pose to us throughout our lives. If, for whatever reason, we answer these challenges maladaptively, we will have a rigid and reactive response to others from one of the three types so neatly portrayed in this film. We may find ourselves defaulting to a strategy of Dominance (controlling), Deference, or Detachment. In other words, our sweet spot in relating to other people will be to habitually position ourselves in one of these three places: Over them, Under them, or Apart from them. This is the spot in which we have come to feel most secure when confronted with the other, but which isn’t necessarily conducive to our best interest, nor theirs, in the long run. No doubt we will all inhabit each of these positions at various times in our lives, and as long as it is transitional, and we have the flexibility to reflect and intentionally choose the response that is most appropriate to the situation and to our higher objectives of transformative growth, then it is adaptive: we are born into a position under our parents, but if it never transitions into an alongside of and with them, and in the end often for them, it most likely indicates a dysfunctional relationship, and those caught in it are not able to move toward full maturity.

If we answer those questions adaptively, we can advance toward our fullest expression and maturity, both individually and collectively. It is a process of Individuation, of exercising our agency, and of social integration. When done well, we become adults that have a sense of their Internal Cohesion, who live Intentionally, and can participate in a collaborative community with people who are not us and not like us. In other words, we become people who “wear our true colors”even when we are a minority of one; we can submit our impulses, urges, and drives to the more comprehensive, meaningful, and life-affirming pursuit of creative problem solving and transformational growth; and we can offer ourselves to others in ways that move toward collaboration, mutuality, and intimacy.

However adaptive these responses may have been in a less than ideal childhood, the rigid responses to Identity, Autonomy, and Attachment these grown men are stuck in has become maladaptive and are driven by one thing. In a word, fear. The fear that they are Wrong (that the very particular thing that they are is a mistake of nature and should not even exist and take up space in the world), the fear of Failure (uncertain outcomes) (to be exposed as inadequate to the demands of staying alive and thriving), and the fear of Conflict (which always poses the risk of either losing the other or losing one’s self). And thus, we have a history filled with sports teams, companies and corporations, bars, pornography, gangs, concentration camps, gay-pride parades, the all male priesthood, dictatorships, prisons, strip clubs and drag clubs, armies, the Boy Scouts, the mafia, and motorcycle clubs, to list a few of the many containers men create to puff themselves up, gratify their desires, and hide from women.

To get to the other container for masculinity, the organic, more flexible, and more fertile container, the container that the Kathys and Karens and Gretas and Joannes (JKR) and Eves of the world hold the potential of being, the container that will take them all the way to the fullest expression and maturity of their masculinity, men will need to replace the rigid responses of Dominance, Deference, and Detachment with responses that are far more risky, far more demanding, and far more rewarding. Only when they follow where faith, hope, and love would lead them, will they find their way to themselves and to the Other. A man does not need to become fearless to walk that road, but he will need to find his courage to do so.

The New Guys and the Identity Politics of our Times

Please don’t misunderstand me. We need people in the world who, like Johny are not afraid to narrow their options and risk uncertain outcomes by taking intentional action; who, like Benny, are not afraid to leave the group and explore and create a whole array of unconventional and better solutions to societal problems; and who, like the Joiners, are not afraid to submit themselves at times to the foresight, competence, and even directives of another for the sake of a bigger picture. We need men in the world with these capabilities. And we need men and women with these capabilities in our politics.

The problems arise when the Johnnies of the world don’t just decide what action is right for them to take, but think it is their job, their right even, to also choose for everyone else as well, and that the rest of us owe them our compliance. It becomes problematic when the Bennys of the world leave every option open and never discriminate between or commit to the options that are better in the long term and on the whole, feeling themselves to be entitled to the accommodations others must make to allow them that sphere of unlimited possibility and momentary whim. And it becomes problematic when The Joiners are so invested in carrying water for their team, that they are blind to every red flag, ignore every stop light, and are deaf to the sirens until it is too late and the whole dang bus has crashed in the gutter. And yet, unfortunately, it is exactly these three maladaptive identities that have come to dominate our two political parties. This is the identity politics I have been watching from afar as it drunkenly swerves back and forth between these two lanes which are both headed toward a cliff.

The Prestige Seekers

On the left hand, we have a political container trying to corral all the Detached identities of the world, those who double down on their “exceptional” and eccentric and minority identities, know no line or taboo they won’t cross to feel alive and special and accommodated, and who would rather carry a sign and march in the rain than dig in to the real vulnerability, hard work, and generosity with their neighbor (nearest and dearest) which true community entails. Nevertheless, this container has raised its rainbow umbrella and asked all of these disparate and contradictory interests and ever more extreme Prestige Seekers to gather under it into an unintelligible alphabet soup pretending to be an efficacious, functional community.

The Preeminence Seekers

On the right hand, we have a well oiled, homogenous, loud formation of two wheelers barreling down Main street. Forging this political container has been easier, since they have only needed to find a Johny eager to Dominate and then to line up lock-step behind him. For anyone like myself who has, with good reason, become disillusioned with, or indeed aghast at, the intemperate interests holding court under the rainbow umbrella, it is tempting to want a strong Johny to come and squash the more entitled agendas within it. Indeed, the pivotal scene for Benny before he leaves, shows just how seductive this kind of dominate identity can be. The lights are low, Johny moves ever closer, leaning in, whispering, flattering, enticing him… not to a sexual encounter, as the Vulture review had wished for, but for Benny to give Johny his power, to give him his allegiance, to submit his agency to securing and continuing Johny’s identity project: to be a preeminent and powerful container of Masculinity. History shows us just how alluring Johny’s offer is to all of us, but most especially to men. These all male containers offer them a place to simultaneously express and hide their masculinity, a place to feel invulnerable, a place free from the limitations and discomfort women’s otherness places on them, a place to feel Right in the world.

I am tempted too. There are days I want nothing more than to have some strong wind of fate blow down the ignoble straw houses built over the last couple of decades under the rainbow umbrella. But putting our faith in such a big, strong Wolf will come at a high cost, as history has also shown us more times than it is humanly possible to record. For the Wolf will blow down the straw house as we might want, but he will not stop huffing and puffing until he has blown our whole American house down with it, quite literally becoming The Vandal of our democracy. After that, he will blow down the next house, and the next, and the next until there are no houses left but his own institutionalized Preeminence.

The Piety Seekers

That our two political parties have become overrun and controlled by these two maladaptive identity types, the Prestige Seekers and the Preeminence Seekers, is dystopian enough, but what threatens to turn our current political volatility into an absolute nightmare are, in fact, the Joiners. It is this third attachment type which amplify these other two identities with its own maladaptive one. Because they seek foremost the permission and approbation of those they perceive as being preeminent or prestigious, they refuse to engage in the internal and external conflict necessary to become the buffer for bad ideas and bad actors on their own teams. A compulsive need to be seen favorably by others, but especially by those that carry more weight in their eyes, those higher in status and in a wider, outer circle of relationships, leads to a suppression of their intuitive misgivings, cognitive dissonance, justifications, and eventually, a complete denial of reality. The need to prove themselves, to themselves and to others, to be Good – either a good, compliant soldier for their king and savior, Johny, or an admirable advocate for the downtrodden, multitude of mini-minorities, Benny, means that they are unwilling to rock whatever boat they happen to be sitting in. I call this group, found in abundance on both political teams, the Piety Seekers.

The Johny Come Lately

If it had not yet become clear to what end the political system built on this dynamic between the Prestige seekers, the Preeminence seekers, and Piety seekers will lead us in America, the creator of The Bikeriders foreshadows it as his film comes to an end. After Benny has left both Kathy and The Vandals, the group continues to grow and outpace Johny’s control, not only in size, but also in the overall makeup of the newer members. The Joiners are no longer a grab-bag of almost likable, eccentric characters who may look scary in a group but who, at the end of the day, know when enough is enough. The “new guys,” as Kathy keeps referring to them, are neither likable nor know any such restraint. Returning from Vietnam completely disassociated not just from society but also from themselves, they have fallen into drugs, into violence, and into sexual predation, and have brought all of this with them into the container of The Vandals.

And of course, not everyone attracted to the biker club is content on being merely a member. Earlier in the movie, in a scene which portrays his violent and sadistic nature, we are introduced to another dominant identity who, having witnessed The Vandals ride by in all of their glory, becomes intent on joining the club. But Johny, smelling his ambition ten miles against the wind, sends him away. Years later the kid comes back to challenge Johny’s position, and in a scene that leaves the viewer feeling sucker punched, we are left knowing what we should have known all along. This container, created by a man seeking to feel invulnerable, free, and preeminent for men who were avoiding the challenges that the iron triangle of identity, autonomy, and relationship posed on them, was bound to devolve into a hellscape of unbridled masculine self-assertion, indulgence, and cruelty. However amiable and well intentioned the characters inhabiting these three rigid attachment styles were in the beginning, and however cool the co-dependent container they formed together appeared, it was only a matter of time that it would become a platform for something far more pernicious.

Benny is slouched over a beer alone at a bar, when he receives the news of Johny’s death. And as if he has understood it to be a premonition of his own fate should he remain in his self-imposed exile, doing his best to hide from the limitations, the cost, and the accountability that real life in real relationships pose, we later see him silently return to Kathy.

It is Not Good for Men to Be Alone Together

Nichols does not spell out for us what kind of container Kathy will be for Benny now that he has returned to her, and we must imagine for ourselves what it will become from the few clues we are given from Kathy’s narrative arch and from the final scene of the movie. Has Kathy merely accepted Benny’s silent return without any assurances of transformative change? Has she consigned herself to being nothing more than the one who makes him sandwiches? Has Benny, with clenched teeth, only made more concessions to his identity and autonomy in order to escape the self-imposed isolation he had come back from? Have they each simply resigned themselves to a stagnant compromise of co-dependence? It would certainly be possible to read the ending that way.

But given that earlier in the narrative, Kathy herself had found the self-respect and courage to speak up and stand up for her own needs, to set clear expectations of Benny, and to imagine something bigger than the both of them that they might create together, though it cost her losing the very one she felt she needed, I’d like to believe that she herself has traded in her own rigid attachment style for the more fertile responses of faith, hope, and love. I would like to believe that Benny, having been given the space and time to weigh what was most important to him, realized that Kathy was more precious to him than his absolute freedom. I would like to believe that he made an intentional choice to return and to create something with her that would sustain and contain the both of them. However, the movie is left open ended. Upon returning to Kathy and until the very end of the movie, Benny still has said next to nothing, and it is a coin toss until the very end. For me, the look they share in the final scene and the smile Benny gives her in the last frame of the film, lets me hope that he might just yet muster the courage to become her equal.