Alfonso Cuarón Puts Toxic Masculinity to the Test in Disclaimer

The following story contains light spoilers through episode 3 of Disclaimer.

ALFONSO CUARÓN’S FIRST foray into television, the Apple TV+ thriller Disclaimer, based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Renee Wright, is a powerhouse vehicle for both its director—allowing him to both play with different points of view and build an expansive, visually-stunning world filled with fleshed-out characters—and its stars, with indelible performances coming from stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, and Louis Partridge.

The set-up is simple enough: Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) is an acclaimed journalist and documentary filmmaker living a seemingly perfect life with her adoring husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) and their surly son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). But when a mysterious novel finds its way into her life, she realizes the story tells a long-harbored secret of hers that no one else has ever known—and now she must deal with the consequences of people potentially learning of something she thought was buried away in her past.

The show explores themes Cuarón has long explored in his previous work: family relationships, untold narratives, and, above all else, the idea of how masculinity can wind up harming both men themselves, and the women around them.

Discussions of masculinity come up frequently in the Mexican filmmaker’s work—first in his 2001 coming-of-age film Y T Mamá También starring Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal. That modern classic finds the pair as class disparate best friends Tenoch and Julio, who take a road trip with Luisa (Maribel Verdu), a woman who agrees to join when she discovers that her husband has cheated on her. The trio bond while talking about relationships and sexual experiences, and the overzealous sexuality of both Tenoch and Julio seems to be hiding an attraction they can’t speak about.

Cuarón’s 2006 dystopian film Children of Men, starring Clive Owen, finds a world where humans have been infertile for two decades and have brought society to the brink of collapse. Owen’s Theo, a former activist turned cynical government worker, is tasked to help stowaway the first pregnant woman in the world Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) via a money offer from his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore). Theo taps into his caretaking of Kee, and what he could contribute to a new society, in the wake of the loss of his son with Julian.

And 2018’s Roma, which won Cuarón his second Best Director Oscar (he first won for the space thriller Gravity), is a semi-autobiographical film that follows a Mixteco housekeeper, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) for an upper middle class Mexican family in the early ’70s. Cleo bonds with Sofia (Marina de Tavira) the mother of the family, about the indiscretions the men in their lives have caused them. Both of the men in question refuse to take responsibility for their actions that have irrevocably damaged the women’s lives.

Cuarón takes another look into the ways toxic masculinity can harm both men and the women around them in Disclaimer—a topic he was more than ready to discuss with Men’s Health over Zoom. The 62-year-old director got into it, bespectacled, talking passionately with his hands, about exploring masculinity in his previous work, the men of Disclaimer, and the harm of toxic masculinity.

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MEN’S HEALTH: There are so many interesting male characters in Disclaimer made especially interesting in the ways that they interact with Catherine. What were you looking to say and discuss in terms of masculinity?

ALFONSO CUARÓN: It’s a story where the main character is a woman, and at the end, the audience is confronted not only with a big reveal, but their own judgment. All the other characters around Catherine are silencing her; she’s constantly trying to speak and explain herself. Now, the truth she’s sitting on is difficult to articulate, so she needed time. She needed help; the help of an affectionate relationship that would be supportive. The audience is in a way silencing Catherine with their own judgment [about her secret].

MH: The men in the show have put Catherine in these very black and white boxes. She’s only seen as a mother to her son. By Robert, she’s seen as a sort of trophy, to a degree. And then she’s a villain to Stephen. Why did you want the men in her life to interact with her like that?

AC: Everybody interacts with her like that. And there are some attitudes that go across the board. I’ll give you an example: Catherine is also judged as a mother. And that’s the thing about the judgment of people towards mothers, even of other women towards mothers—motherhood is something way more complex than just an amazing virtue. It’s an everyday full-time job.

What people don’t want to accept is that mothers are people too. They’re humans. It’s not just that the label creates a certain kind of shield for all the other problems in the world, or a superpower that comes with that. There’s a point in the show where she’s judged, and the part of the judgment is not only about her past actions in terms of a relationship, or the perceived relationship, but her perceived negligence as a mother. Even Catherine herself is constantly questioning if she’s a good mother.

MH: That dichotomy doesn’t go the same way; Robert technically left her alone on that trip to go deal with business. The ways the men interact with each other is really interesting, especially when we learn more about her son, Nicholas.

AC: That secret kept in the past [has allowed] Catherine to get through her life, and she’s now completely covered it with a new narrative—the narrative of this successful working woman who is doing all these very important documentaries. In reality, any narrative covered by another narrative still remains underneath. And this is going to project itself in many different ways, one of which is the difficult relationship she has with her own son.

But the other thing that is going to unleash is how other narratives are broken. Suddenly, the supportive husband who’s always trying to accommodate the conflicted relationship between the mother and the son, you start seeing who he really is. In those two, there’s immense male insecurity. That’s the basis of all the behavior of the men: great male insecurity, jealousy, and easy fits of anger. And then you see that father who is so cordial with everything, in reality, the only reason he had been such a conciliator between the family, and having a great relationship with Nicholas, is because he’s doing it for the benefit of hurting her.

He’s putting in evidence how bad a mother she is. He’s putting her down, because his insecurities cannot stand this woman with a past he fantasizes about. It’s clear that it’s not the first time he fantasizes about the past of his wife, but now he thinks he has evidence.

By the same token, Nicholas is also having an amazing relationship with his father for the sake of hurting his mother. All these layers that are broken. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nicholas would’ve been a follower of Andrew Tate.

MH: There are definitely interesting parallels between the families of Catherine, Robert, and Nicholas, and then Stephen, Nancy, and Jonathan—especially in the ways they interact with their sons.

AC: That’s something Cate and I talked about—the mirror image between two families. One family has a certain dynamic that comes out of emotional repression between each other; that’s Catherine, Robert, and Nicholas. The other one is dictated by a sense of grief that comes from Stephen, because it’s blaming his life on actions that happened 20 years ago, in which Catherine is the perpetrator. He has created a narrative, not unlike Catherine, to get by, in which he had the perfect family. In reality, you start revealing that it’s far from that.

MH: You’ve always explored interesting themes about masculinity in your work. I just revisited Y Tu Mamá También, and you really see the ways in which those two characters bury themselves in sexual machismo to protect themselves, or to lie to themselves. In Children of Men you look at similar masculinity-focused themes. How does Disclaimer fit?

AC: Now that you said it, even Roma is about that. You can see in the scene of getting the car into the garage—it’s all about that. When you do something you don’t think about, but it clearly is that, it would be worth working with a shrink to figure out why it is springing out. It’s something around that toxic masculinity.

There was an advisor [on the show] for all the trauma—a journalist called Lydia Cacho. She’s a Mexican journalist who has to live in Spain because of the threats to her life. She wrote a book; what she’s focused on now, Ellos Hablan, is a chronicle of men describing their experiences sometimes as being part of the abuser. To see how all of that comes from social male behavior in which they’re oppressed as well.

So, when characters like Andrew Tate come, he’s not inventing anything. He’s just awakening something that is there.