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Far Out Magazine, 2025
Many of us have different sides to our personalities that are only revealed in the company of specific people, with old friends from high school or specific family members influencing us to act in ways that we can barely understand ourselves. Sometimes, spending time with a different group of people can exaggerate a flaw, insecurity, or repressed side of our humour that we haven’t noticed before, creating an unsettling feeling as you ponder what it is about that particular dynamic that cracks open your inner psyche. However, while this is undoubtedly disturbing when you notice it, perhaps the most curious case is when you are completely unaware that this is happening—spending time with people who draw out the very worst in you but being blissfully ignorant of how you change in their presence. It is this dynamic that John Cassavetes examines in his 1970 film Husbands, carefully obliterating the facade of American masculinity through the friendship between three men during a mid-life crisis.
There’s a tonal disconnect at the heart of the film that perfectly encapsulates the devastating nature of the friendship between these men and its purpose as a form of escapism. It begins with a funeral, with the trio being abruptly confronted with the impermanence of life and a person who was not too dissimilar from them, cut short in all his unfinished plans and desires. Despite not being able to articulate this, it rattles the remaining friendship group and encourages them to regress to their younger selves, coping with the tragedy by embarking on a lost weekend of drinking, reminiscing, and joking about the things they used to want to do.
While this would remain as a state of wishful thinking for many, the men then decide to realise these childish fantasies, walking out on their wives and families for a self-indulgent trip to fuel their egos and restore their sense of freedom, tricking themselves into believing that they can do whatever they want and have no responsibilities tying them down. But the more they try to drown their own insecurities and disappointment over how their lives have panned out, the more they dig themselves further into a pit of misery and self-loathing.
What then ensues is painfully difficult to watch, with the trio becoming drunk with delusion and giving themselves over to every fleeting whim and desire: spending money on things they can’t afford, trying to find women to sleep with them, and engaging in childish public behaviour as people observe them with disdain and pity, shocked by their lack of awareness. Through spending time with each other, these men are able to console their collective lack of fulfilment and feeling that they have been emasculated by the mundanity of their lives, trying to reclaim this power by making reckless decisions and tricking themselves into thinking they are free.
While they are somewhat endearing at first, we quickly feel a huge sense of contempt from Cassavetes himself as he examines the dynamic of their friendship and how it enables them to be their worst selves, all while being blissfully unaware of how they truly appear from the outside. It’s exhausting and uncomfortable, with the director exploring how friendships between insecure men are charming when contained but unbearable when out in the open, leading us to cringe at the bonds of brotherhood that cause them to behave so badly. It is brutally condemning, showing how this friendship is only a crutch to cover up their feelings of inadequacy and lack of agency, slowly chipping away at this bravado until it reveals a hollow shell of regret.
Husbands ends in the cold light of day as the men are reunited with their real lives, slowly walking through their front doors and being met with the sound of young children who scramble towards them. It feels like the harshest of hangovers, with all of their vulnerabilities being brought out into the open, returning home like an open wound. It is frank, ugly, and manic, and you realise that their weekend of debauchery will never be enough to heal them of the pressing feeling that life hasn’t turned out the way they hoped it would be; that the company of old friends is just a door to the past and childish fantasy that makes waking life look like a bad dream.
By achieving the pillars of American masculinity—with houses, families, and steady jobs—they have lost their sense of freedom and agency, unable to articulate this frustration because, on the outside, they have achieved everything—there is nothing to complain about. They will never find what they are truly looking for because it doesn’t exist, and all they have is the unspoken knowledge that each of them feels the same, using their bond to try and outrun reality and escape who they have become.