In ’28 Years Later’, Toxic Masculinity Is Infectious
That idea that men are infinitely more terrifying than the mindless, rage-fuelled ‘Infected’ versions of themselves has been baked into the 28 Days Later franchise since its very beginning. In the first film, a group of survivors responds to an army broadcast, only to discover that it wasn’t set up to help them find sanctuary amidst a countrywide, but to trap women into becoming their sex slaves. It’s been just 28 days since the Rage Virus spread, and already, man has succumbed to his most animalistic instincts.
“In the 28 days since infection began, I’ve seen man killing man. In the 28 days before that, I saw man killing man. As far back as I can recall, this is what I’ve seen: man killing man,” says Major Henry West (Christoper Eccleston). Men have always been violent, and while 28 Years Later moves from ravaged cityscapes to lush sprawling fields and forests, all it does is reveal that human nature is the same everywhere. It distills the evils men are capable of into a gripping examination of toxic masculinity, framing its apocalypse-set coming-of-age tale as less about the better future we hope our kids will see than the hellish present they’re being indoctrinated into.
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The theme of lost childhood innocence permeates the film right from an early visual of a blood-spattered television playing Teletubbies, a British children’s programme. A group of kids gathered in front of the screen are attacked by the Infected, slaughtered just like their parents. Then, 28 years later, another parent will equip his child with the means of defending himself, but fail him in a multitude of other ways.
On the island of Lindisfarne, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) pushes his son Spike (Alfie Williams) to grow up too soon, exposing him to horrors no child should ever have to see, beaming with pride at his first successful kill. The village’s coming-of-age ritual includes children aged 13 or 14 being taken to the mainland for their first hunt. At just 12, Spike is far too young to participate, which his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), points out furiously, and a community elder acknowledges as a cautionary aside. Those who go might not return; rows of crosses on the island bear testament to that. “He’s ready,” Jamie insists.
Director Danny Boyle sets scenes of Jamie leading Spike out of the safety of their isolated island community and towards the mainland to a 1915 recording of Rudyard Kipling’s Boer War poem, Boots, used in military training programs to condition captured soldiers to resist torture. Like them, Spike is being primed for war, having grown up in a world where he’s known nothing but. Intercut with scenes of father and son is footage from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), particularly those from the Battle of Agincourt. Masculinity might be rooted in ideas of battle and violence, but, in splicing in this footage, Boyle underlines how it, too, is ultimately just a construct, a performance.
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Over the film, “Good lad!”—a phrase of positive reinforcement Jamie repeatedly gives Spike—takes on increasingly sinister dimensions. It’s first delivered innocuously, in response to Spike having packed the right gear for the wilderness, then finally, to the shaken, terrified child killing a defenseless target at his father’s insistence. “There are strange people on the mainland,” says Jamie, referring to strangers who left an Infected strung upside down with a bag over its head. But what of Jamie himself, who orders his son not to look away, then to shoot, then tells him killing gets easier the more you do it? The island’s community no doubt views itself as civilized, compared to the heedless barbarity of the Infected on the mainland. But it is, after all, a civilization built and sustained on such ritual displays of violence.
Jamie is tough and unfazed, great qualities for a wilderness companion. But when he makes statements about “weirdly” liking the smell of rotting, exposed intestines—as if to burnish his outdoorsman credentials—he couldn’t be a more terrifying person to be trapped in the woods with. Spike feels the weight of his expectations. Following a sequence in which he freezes at the sight of fast-moving Infected and misses his targets, he apologizes, clearly beating himself up about it on the inside. Jamie, perhaps realizing how far he’s pushed his son, rushes to reassure him. He’s not a bad dad; he just has very specific ideas of what it means to be a man.
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Take the scene in which father and son make it safely home, to the large community celebration of Spike’s first kill. Jamie greatly exaggerates his son’s prowess with a bow and arrow. He makes no mention of Spike only being able to shoot an obese, crawling zombie, but fumbling when they’re ambushed by a group of fast-moving Infected and their super-powered Alpha. His embellishment of the day’s events is ostensibly to shield his son from being perceived as ‘weak’, but you get the sense he’s also protecting his own ego. So much of masculinity is image projection, and Spike, while being aware of his father’s mythmaking, also buys into it. He can’t fathom that Jamie is ever scared, or as vulnerable as he feels. How could he, when his father isn’t frank or forthcoming about his feelings?
In nudging his son to grow into a prescribed idea of what a ‘man’ should look like, Jamie also eggs him on to take his first drink, which the child (obviously) can’t handle. Spike doesn’t enjoy the hunt either. It makes him sick, he says. And scared. He’d rather be home with his gravely ill mother. Even before he defies his father and takes her across to the mainland in the hope of finding the doctor who could cure her, it’s obvious that Spike has defined his relationship to masculinity on his own terms. He’s not a hunter, but a protector.
When he pulls a knife on his father—who he’s just discovered has been having an affair—in a burst of emotion is an example of the kind of masculine violence ingrained in him. He answers his father in the only language he’s been taught. But this time, it’s rooted in a fierce protective instinct rather than pure alpha machismo.
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It’s easy to see why Jamie, for whom survival is inextricable from violence, assumes the same of the men around him. His wariness of Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) on the mainland stems from having seen the doctor burning neat rows of dead bodies one day. Jamie can only view it as an act of barbarism, failing to see it as a prudent measure to prevent the spread of the virus. Kelson’s tower of skulls might appear grim, but it turns out to be a labour of love and an acknowledgement of death, each skull placed by hand, each deceased member granted respectful remembrance.
The kind and compassionate Kelson espouses a different way of living than the hermetically sealed-off islanders do. While he reminds Spike to remember that all men must die (“memento mori”), it’s followed by a plea to “remember we must love,” a guide to survival unlike the one he’d been handed back home.
28 Years Later writer Alex Garland has explored themes of toxic masculinity before. In his sci-fi thriller Ex Machina (2014), the tech bro protagonist’s ideal woman is one designed to tend to his every need. In his folk horror Men, a village of men harangue a grieving widow, their identical appearance pointing to the systemic nature of misogyny. This time around, he provides a tender alternative. Jamie might have primed Spike to take lives, but in one of the film’s most moving scenes, it’s Kelson who teaches him to accept loss.
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