Tim Robinson Takes on the Male Loneliness Epidemic in ‘Friendship’

But Craig and Austin strike up a friendship over their shared love for historical artifacts and centuries-old sewer systems. (Speaking of sewer systems: At one point in Friendship, one character has an orgasm that changes their whole worldview while lost inside a sewer system, and… I can’t stop thinking such an experience might change my life too…???) Even just a flicker of attention from Austin, or a single moment of soaking up Austin’s too-cool-for-school vibe, rocks Craig’s world to the extent that he ultimately upends his life, blows up his family, licks a psychedelic toad in the back of a cell phone store, and, by the film’s whirlwind ending, winds up delirious and hallucinating in the back of a police car. So, Friendship is essentially an I Think You Should Leave sketch in narrative feature form. And I loved every second of it.

That said, the film leans fully into the absurd, and searching for deeper meaning in it might be a fool’s errand, but I’m willing to give it a shot. Yes, it’s fantastical and surreal and insane, but in its own way, Friendship is incredibly real. It’s a story about, ahem, friendship, social hierarchy, and how yearning for acceptance can make us all a little nutty. It’s an exploration of how the child-like longing to make it to the proverbial cool kids’ table often enough bubbles up well into adulthood. It’s also a nightmarish portrayal of social anxiety taken to a twisted, hilarious extreme, and men’s tendency to isolate themselves through their own behaviors, then lash out and punish the rest of us.

We know romantic and sexual desire can make anyone spin out, but so, too, can the pursuit of approval from someone you find maddeningly cool. Yearning to fit in can quickly and easily morph into obsession—in Craig’s case, it culminates in holding a room of middle-aged men who rejected him hostage, pointing a gun in their faces, and demanding they ask him “Would You Rather?” questions and sing Ghost Town DJ’s “My Boo” with him. But arguably the biggest twist in Friendship is the revelation that Austin is actually faking a big part of who he is. It’s shocking for Craig, who, himself, has been trying painfully hard to fake a cooler version of himself for Austin. I won’t spoil it, but this reveal is a reminder that everyone, even the coolest person you know, is, on some level, faking something. Adult friendship, the film seemingly suggests, is the purest form of theater.

All of that—longing for friends, social acceptance, and coolness—is pretty gender-neutral. But I maintain that Friendship has a lot to say about the so-called male loneliness epidemic, in particular. That Craig is fundamentally incapable of caring about Tammy for most of the film is a stark contrast to his obsessive need to be liked by Austin. Friendship’s primary goal is very obviously obscene cringe comedy more so than social messaging. Nevertheless, it delivers some of the latter, too. It’s a cartoonish depiction of men prioritizing their relations with other men, their almost bestial hunger for male acceptance, and how tangential and low women are in this hierarchy.

The term “male loneliness epidemic” is largely a meme now, but when conservatives or the free thinkers at the New York Times or the Atlantic seriously cite it, they’re often side-eyeing social progress, romanticizing a past where men were men—happy, dominant, and bro-ing out in gender-segregated workplaces while their wives stayed home with the kids. Back then, men supposedly had a purpose and all was golden. The implication is that today, mean, nasty women in no rush to marry and have kids, who have lives of their own, have taken all that away. But in Friendship, I see Craig as a stand-in for disgruntled men who blame feminism for all their problems. His arc reflects how male loneliness has nothing to do with women being mean, and everything to do with a lot of men being extremely weird and off-putting. In Craig’s case, that weirdness manifests in him eating and then gagging on a bar of soap before a group of fellow middle-aged men in a key scene that turns the film on its head.

Some of this analysis might be me reaching for meaning that doesn’t exist in the confines of a circus-like, 1.5-hour Tim Robinson bit. But art is subjective, and Friendship is nothing if not a work of art. Rife with references to “the new Marvel,” as Craig hilariously calls the latest, indiscernible superhero movie slop, Friendship is many, many things—a romantic ode to sewer systems, a rich exploration of the secret lives of teenage cell phone store employees, an off-the-rails suburban slice of life. But foremost, it’s a tale of the lengths that so many of us would go to fit in, of the crushing madness that can be triggered by social rejection. And it’s a shocking and alarming portrait of how unhinged men’s self-imposed loneliness can make them.