Michael White, writer/actor for Chuck and Buck, 2001 (writer School of Rock, The White Lotus)
Michael White: With Chuck and Buck I do think one of the biggest taboos, at least in America, is still men relating with other men in an honest, vulnerable way. It’s something you rarely see in anything, and I just find it amusing. It’s not keeping pace with the reality of life. Men, in this day and age, are expressing their more vulnerable side. I don’t live the life of an action hero, so, in terms of my own life, those movies don’t really speak to me other than as wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Stephen Applebaum: I’ve been writing about Fight Club, and that seems to me a very old way of looking at male relationships: men relating through violence.
White: Fight Club is a perfect example of what the media … I think that it’s more acceptable to show two guys wailing on each other as a way of connecting, because then it has all the undercurrent of homoeroticism but, OK, in the end you’re both punching bags. But, you know, to call a spade like in Chuck and Buck, where one character says, ‘Do you remember when we were actually a partnership?’ I get all coiled up over something like Fight Club, because I think it’s feeding on the adolescent notion that as you turn into adolescence, you can’t relate in a real way to men. You have to freak out over two men relating. In Fight Club that whole sentiment is turned into a pathology. It’s interesting, but I think it’s a sad reality that a lot of guys think.”
I thought it was interesting that most sympathetic characters in the film were the women: they were the most nurturing or the most understanding.
Well, it goes back to the whole Fight Club thing. I just thought it would be interesting. I thought it would be interesting to have Buck on, like, this mysoginist rant, in a way. He’s writing this play about a woman who’s a witch, and he becomes friends with this actor who’s a total, full on mysoginist, but the women in the movie totally undermine their argument. They’re the most campassionate. But it’s also interesting to write a movie in which the men are conflicted and have all these, like, tortured relationships to themselves, to each other, and to their sexuality – because they can’t really, honestly, communicate about it. And I think is more true in life, too, women, certainly here in America, have an easier time relating, so they have much more equanimity when it comes to issues of this kind. The theatre manager, she sees it all going on and she understands; she’s not freaked out. I think that plays into the whole Fight Club thing: guys just have more difficulty accepting their own vulnerabilities and needs for each other in male relationships.
Continued: https://www.netribution.co.uk/features/interviews/2001/michael_white/1.html