Movies About Sticking It to the Man

Stories of the rich and powerful getting their comeuppance never truly get old, especially when those delivering the just desserts rise from the ranks of the powerless. We all want to feel liberated from authority or “The Man.” We daydream about heedlessly telling the Big Kahunas in our lives where to stick their rules. As Peter Fonda’s character puts it in the classic shoestring-budget 1966 biker flick The Wild Angels, “We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man!” Sadly, most of us are very much answerable to The Man — and even if we never get the chance to actually tell our bosses and people in power where to shove it, we can know what that feels like in the MOVIES. Presented for your vicarious pleasure: my personal Top 10 Movies About Sticking It to The Man.

Scripts from this Article

Cool Hand Luke

M*A*S*H

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Gandhi

Amadeus

Fight Club

Django Unchained

The Big Short

BlackKKlansman

Promising Young Woman

Cool Hand Luke (1967)

It’s easy to forget what a truly weird movie Cool Hand Luke is: the not-subtle Christian imagery, the anti-Vietnam allegories, the Satanic, eyeless warden spouting insincere pop-psychology (“What we have here is a failure to communicate”). But its trippy, late-’60s weirdness and its reflexive attitude of “up the establishment” is what makes it so good. You can feel how much this film detests in its bones the entire concept of imprisonment. Despite its hipness — and its amazing car wash scene (as memorably filmed as the shower scene from Psycho, it took 3 days to shoot) — what really sticks about Luke is its emotional power. It’s hard not to agree that prison in general and chain gangs specifically are generally bad things as the end credits roll. Every character in this story is won over by Luke, except anyone who actually counts. Newman’s career, always hit-and-miss, stayed hit-and-miss after Cool Hand Luke, but the hits (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, Slap Shot, Absence of Malice, The Verdict) got bigger and his performances even better.

Read More: Character introductions in Cool Hand Luke

M*A*S*H (1970)

It reportedly bothered director Robert Altman that the hit TV sitcom adapted from his film was such a smash that it somewhat overshadowed his movie, and that’s a shame because M*A*S*H might be a great filmmaker’s best work (I know I’m supposed to think it’s Nashville but I prefer M*A*S*H). For everything that went wrong (Altman’s transitions could have been better executed so those cutaways to the hilarious camp PA announcements were allegedly born to paper them over), almost too much more went right. The casting, the trademark Altman overlapping dialogue that doesn’t always work in every film but is perfect here, the careful attenuation between goofy slapstick and bleakly dark satire, and mostly the shaggy, shoulder-shrugging “get bent” attitude toward U.S. Army rules, regulations and traditions, add up to a film that’s somehow zany and laugh-out-loud funny yet deeply disturbing — and cathartic. It’s rare to find a thinly-veiled, darkly smart indictment of war such a hoot. Did the U.S. Army ever fully recover from this and Stripes?

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

One thing these ’70s Man-sticking titles all have in common is a certain giddy glee and joie de vivre that their characters exhibit while thumbing their noses at the rule-makers. That quality kind of gets lost after this era, but nowhere is it more freak-flag-waving, manic fun than in Jack Nicholson’s performance as Randle McMurphy, who fully revels in leading his fellow asylum patients in full rebellion against their soul-crushing, by-the-book overlord Nurse Ratched. It’s not just the pill-pushing nurse to whom McMurphy is giving the raspberry, however, it’s all authority in general. That works out about as well for him as it usually does in real life. The first movie in four decades to win all five of the major Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay).

Gandhi (1982)

Humble, homespun-wearing and whisper-voiced, Mohandas Gandhi didn’t seem the sort of “To the barricades!” leader that could topple an empire, but he rallied his people and against every imaginable odd, ejected the English from India at its height of haughty, smug power. Shakespearean actor Ben Kingsley amazes in the role, so fully embodying the historical figure that he’s playing, it’s still sometimes difficult decades later to distinguish who’s who in photographs. Of course, “Gandhi” the public figure was, as all politicians are, somewhat of a pose, and this 8-time Oscar winner doesn’t gloss over that fact while coming down firmly on the side of Team Gandhi.

Ghandi (1982)

Career-making performance, big-star cameos (Candice Bergen! Martin Sheen!) and 8 Academy Awards aside, it’s the story and the character that are riveting here. Lavishly mounted by director Richard Attenborough, it’s not the sweeping vistas of crowded train stations that linger — it’s unforgettable moments like striking salt miners lining up without protest, a half-dozen abreast, to be clubbed into unconsciousness by the police. A little, soft-spoken man whose strategy of non-violence so shamed and upended a global power that he would occasionally be arrested for merely showing up somewhere, it’s astonishing this was a real person or that any of this actually happened.

Read More: Richard Attenborough Dies at 90

Amadeus (1984)

Arrogant, spoiled, brash, often clueless, dirty-minded, foul-mouthed and immensely talented, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is depicted in this classic biography as reveling in his ability to push the boundaries of good taste, flaunting his excesses and his anti-big shot behavior. He’s a rock star long before rock, and the powers that be react to that about as well as they will to rock and roll in 200 years. The Man is embodied here by fellow composer Antonio Salieri, alternately marveling at the heavenly gifts of the famed child-composer he comes to think of as “The Creature” while simultaneously appalled, baffled and increasingly homicidally enraged at the ungodly offensiveness of the actual person. “Wolfie” takes umbrage with society’s rules, its false piety, and its inane hierarchies, but power does what power will do: forces of authority inevitably array themselves to allow Salieri to crush his rival, body and soul. In the end, Salieri and his ilk know very well whose reputation will triumph.

Read More: Amadeus When Elements Collide

Fight Club (1999)

A box office disappointment when it was first released, director David Fincher’s arch, bitter, pitch-black adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel is so dark that many miss how funny it actually is. Maybe the most anti-consumerist movie ever made by a movie studio, there’s a lot more to Fight Club than its “cut up your credit cards and blow up gas stations” vibe, though that’s there too. The story’s skeptical, cynical tone barely masks a deeply profound sense of loss over the feeling of being human in a dehumanizing culture.

Fight Club (1999)

The members of Fight Club are admonished not to talk about Fight Club, but I’m not sure they would even if it wasn’t a secret: how to explain to your dead-eyed boss or “hey neighbor” that an epic beating has made you feel alive for the first time in your life? Fight Club has a lot to say about where we’re at and while Ikea may not be quite the herald of dystopia, it’s made out to be here. And, we get the point. Our work-hard, buy-now, think-later society may have some growing up to do. All that said, this now-cult-classic isn’t about teaching us Important Lessons, or even dazzling us with its narrative twists (there are a few). Surprisingly, everyone involved in what we’re seeing on screen seems to enjoying an absolutely merry romp. There’s a loose, rollicking sense of fun that the best “down with the one-percent” movies share. Plus, you know, Brad Pitt with his shirt off a lot.

Read More: Screenwriting Wisdom from Fight Club Writer Jim Uhls

Django Unchained (2012)

The story of a former slave who rescues his wife from an antebellum Southern plantation while opening up the world’s biggest can of righteous whupass, Quentin Tarantino’s revenge Western is just some good, not-clean, anti-racist ultraviolence that doesn’t even need to have the quality of performances that it gets from Jamie Foxx (best thing he’s ever done), Leonardo DiCaprio (literally launched a thousand memes here) and Samuel L. Jackson (completely forgot all about Nick Fury, who the hell’s Nick Fury?). As wishful, revisionist history goes, Django is enthralling even as it hits disturbingly too close to home. As a movie, its antagonists are a reminder of what villains should be: odious, vile excuses for human beings whose deaths enrich humanity. As a Western, it’s big-screen popcorn fun, somehow, tossing off references to spaghetti Westerns and Bonanza alike (Django’s jacket is a replica of Little Joe Cartwright’s). I would strongly advise anyone and everyone to not even try to make a movie like this, it’s an almost impossible high-wire act. But like all great “upending the power structure” movies, nobody’s going to tell this one, or its hero, or its filmmakers, what to do.

Read More: 5 Point Breakdown of Django Unchained

The Big Short (2015) 

The investors who are the “heroes” of The Big Short don’t just thumb their noses at the system: they actually are part of the system, although more in the category of “little guys” relative to the global banks and brokerage houses. Having no illusions about their place in the financial world or about how Big Money really operates, the characters played by Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell and Christian Bale turn their knowledge against the system to game it and win an epic payday when they realize that the housing market is teetering on the brink of collapse… all the while wondering, for good reason, if being “The Man-adjacent” and betting it all on Americans losing everything makes them part of the problem.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Provocative and political, released exactly a year after the incendiary, white supremacist Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, BlacKkKlansman is a tense, topical but also shockingly funny return to form for director Spike Lee, who reminds cinephiles who made Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X. Denzel Washington’s son John David Washington stars as real-life ’70s Colorado cop Ron Stallworth, who “infiltrates” the KKK by phone, pretending to be white, almost as a half-gag out of boredom — until he uncovers a terrorist plot and realizes that he’ll eventually have to show up to meet his new “compatriots” in person and recruits his nonchalant Jewish colleague Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to act in “whiteface” as the “real” Ron. A romance with a committed activist only complicates Ron’s life and career further, as do departmental racism, bombs, more undercover work and a bizarre, burgeoning phone relationship with Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Everyone is either against Stallworth, or kind of against him, which he accepts with an equanimity born of long experience with prejudice. People die in BlacKkKlansman and the stakes are real — but it is half a comedy, with a sense of humor about the exasperating ridiculousness of racism that makes its punches land harder. A hit with critics and audiences, it’s still underrated.

Read More: Best Movies About the Civil Rights Movement

Promising Young Woman (2020)

The quixotic quest of heartbroken, traumatized barista Cassie (Carey Mulligan) to exact revenge on the breed of straight men who prey on vulnerable women masked as “nice guys” goes from distubingly ill-advised, to outright dangerous, to utterly shocking. The final act of Promising Young Woman is as hard and painful to watch as any A24 art-horror opus, yet it’s also a subtly, sickly humorous satire of “gotta get laid” bromances of an earlier era. Women who cover up and enable violence against other women are not left off Cassie’s menu — but her trail of payback is upended when she meets a “nice guy” (Bo Burnham) of her own. Or does she? The male gaze and the cinema that has enabled it get thoroughly pummeled in this Best Original Screenplay Oscar winner from first-time writer/director Emerald Fennell, produced by Margot Robie’s LuckyChap Entertainment in a sort of bitter-pill, “eff the patriarchy” prequel to Barbie (in which Fennell cameos as the pregnant Midge).

Honorable Mentions

Literally almost the entire “Blaxploitation” genre, PLUS Spartacus (1960), Network (1976), Blue Collar (1978), 9 to 5 (1980), Malcolm X (1992), Hard Candy (2005), The Help (2011), Parasite (2019) and Barbie (2023). If I had opened this list up to films not made in the U.S. or fantasy movies like Joker (2019) and V for Vendetta (2006), you’d be reading this article for ten years.

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Karl Williams is a screenwriting instructor at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona, blogs about screenwriting, and co-hosts the screenwriting advice podcast Get Your Story Straight.