Rémy Verlyck is the managing director of the
think tank Familles Durables, founded at the heart of the health crisis in 2021, whose goal is to think about the daily challenges of the 19 million families in France to better support them.
Awarded at Cannes in 2022 and in the running for the Oscars in 2023, the cinematographic work of the young Belgian director Lukas Dhont "Close", delicately evokes the problem of male adolescent psychology, faced with the toxic cultural injunctions to which boys end up conform.
And both against their will and against their basic human needs, which are social ties and friendship.
The result is a culture of masculinity too often marked by the inability to communicate, loneliness, violence, depression and a greater tendency to commit suicide among men.
If the issue of the mental health of young boys is fundamental for schools and families, then it is neither more nor less than a question of social cohesion and the future of our society.
Why Friendship Heartaches Can Hurt Us So Much
"Close" recounts the evolution of the fusional friendship of two young boys, Léo and Rémi, at the time of their transition to adolescence: when they arrive at college, the weight of hurtful comments, the condemnation of affection and intimacy, as well as the injunction to conformity calls into question their friendship, which nevertheless has its roots in the innocence of their most tender childhood.
“
Are you a couple?
one of their classmates asks the 13-year-old friends.
The resulting development will lead one of them, Rémi, to suicide, plunging their two families into misunderstanding and pain.
A subtlety should be underlined: this is not just another film about the violence of bullying at school, nor about the discovery of the sexual attractions that mark the end of childhood.
“Close” depicts the entry of children into a sexualized adolescent culture, generating self-definition anxieties at this crucial moment of personal construction.
The director said he also wanted to illustrate the damage caused by the lack of father-son communication, of which he himself claims to be the product.
If the fathers are generally absent from the film, the scene of the collapse of Rémi's father during a dinner reveals the extreme violence of the drama experienced by the family.
As they grow older, adolescent boys express growing distrust of their male peers, causing these friendships to shatter.
Remy Verlyck
If the director reveals to us the emotional scars of his adolescence that we still feel painful, he was also inspired by the work of Niobe Way, of New York University.
Professor of applied psychology and director of a doctoral program in developmental psychology, Niobe Way has more than 35 years of study of human connections.
In the scholarly article
Boys' Friendships in Adolescence
published in the
Journal of Research on Adolescence
, then in 2013 in his book
Deep Secrets – Boys Friendships and the Crisis of Connection
(Big Secrets, Boys' Friendships, and the Crisis of Connection), Niobe Way discusses the results of her own two-decade study in the United States of "Black, Latino, Asian, and European- Americans,” using feminist research methods.
The scientist declared in 2010 that if we had then for fifteen years, thanks to feminist qualitative research, acquired a finer understanding of the relational realities in adolescent girls from socio-economically and culturally diverse backgrounds, the same thing could not be said of teenage boys, motivating the start of his work.
From the results of her research, she identifies three major trends.
First, the importance for young boys of having the opportunity to share secrets with close friends.
Second, the importance of these close friendships for boys' mental health.
Third, the loss of those close male friendships as boys move through late adolescence, despite the desire to keep them going.
As they get older, teenage boys express growing distrust of their male peers, causing those friendships to shatter, she says.
However, they express a desire for strong friendships and remember having had them at a younger age.
“
Using feminist research methods with boys has brought to light previously rarely identified processes
“, relates Niobe Way.
Rejoicing in the interest aroused for her subject by the film “Close”, Niobe Way recently underlined in an interview published on the YouTube platform the vital need for American – and therefore Western – culture to reintegrate and value the friendly dimension, affective, platonic, in the education of boys, in order to go beyond the standard of solitary and depressive masculinity.
"
There will be violent consequences to raising social animals in an unsocial way.
Violence, suicides and mental health problems, loneliness, isolation, sexual assaults, (…) come from the fact that we raise our children to go against their nature.
(…) The solution lies in accepting that it is more of a cultural problem than an individual one.
It's not the problem of boys and men, girls and women, or all the groups that are usually condemned (…), the problem is how we have built our culture so that the attention be judged as inferior, and make a lot of money superior.
»
Let us learn from Lukas Dhont's film and the work of Niobe Way the fundamental need to restore value to male friendships, but also to the communication between fathers and their sons.
Remy Verlyck
The Ministry of Health reports that France has one of the highest suicide rates in Europe.
“
Suicide represents in France more than 9,200 deaths per year, i.e. three times more deaths than road accidents, the number of suicide attempts in total is estimated at 200,000.
It primarily concerns men, with a suicide rate of 19.4 per 100,000 inhabitants, against only 6.0 among women.
“
Every year suicide is responsible for the death of nearly 400 teenagers in France, which makes it the second leading cause of death for this age group.
»
A study published in July 2022 by the student mutual LMDE reported a clear increase in suicidal thoughts in the student population: 36% of them admit to having had suicidal thoughts, a figure up six points compared to 2019 The same year, a group of 700 child and adolescent care professionals sounded the alarm on "
the disintegration of care structures (which) prevents caregivers from exercising their function as the last bastion against the suicidal temptations of young people. , whose massive increase is attested.
The professionals recall the link already established between the weakness of the social fabric and suicide and identify the professional and personal stress of parents in a situation of isolation as being part of the context of fragility leading to the suicide of young people.
“
The weakness of the social fabric (family support and social integration) is a major prognostic factor in suicidal problems.
Its fragility in France, as well as the feeling of isolation of young people, were already well identified in sociological analyzes of suicide.
»
Read alsoTeen depression: how to detect it?
To broaden the subject, it would be interesting to question the links between exposure to pornographic and sexist violence, which occurs earlier and earlier, the emotional imbalance it roots, the crisis of loneliness and the depression caused by the gradual disappearance of male friendships between childhood and adulthood.
We can also reflect on the link between this regretted loneliness with the attraction that many adolescents and young men feel for male solidarity, which they hope to find in mafia, separatist and terrorist enterprises in France and in foreign theaters of war.
"Man is a social animal"
, said Aristotle, but
"when he is not known, man is a wolf for man"
, added Plautus on the other side of the Adriatic.
Let us learn from Lukas Dhont's film and the work of Niobe Way the fundamental need to restore value to male friendships, but also to the communication between fathers and their sons, in order to allow a society less individualistic and sick with loneliness, where would be encouraging sporting, cultural, associative, charitable commitments among adolescents, or youth movements such as scouting.