You might be a douchebag.In the new comedy “How To Tell You’re a Douchebag,” debuting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on April 23, a womanizing blogger navigates Brooklyn’s new-fashioned, sexually liberated dating scene. Many young people can identify, at least in part, with the character’s less-than-savory behavior, says the movie’s writer and director, and the film can help them to curb their douchey activities.
“As momentarily ashamed as someone might be, it never gets too dark or pedantic, but I think quietly everyone has that moment when they say ‘Oh f—, I’ve treated someone like that,’ ” Tahir Jetter said. “Both men and women have said the movie made them more aware of when they’ve been less than considerate with people, so it’s refreshing to hear that.”
The film’s main character, Ray Livingstone, chronicles his chauvinistic dating adventures a cringeworthy blog titled “Occasionally Dating Black Women,” which Jetter created in reality, filling it with blog posts such as “If You’re Such a Feminist, Why I Gotta Pay,” and “Therapy Is For Wusses.”
Livingstone thinks he deserves it all — until he meets a woman who does “have it all,” who shuts him down by pointing out his douche-ness. A seemingly irrational romance blooms, until his Don Juan-like past catches up with him.
Jetter, who defected to Los Angeles earlier this year after eight years in Brooklyn, wrote the script after a fizzled romantic pursuit spurred him to examine his own shortcomings.
“I thought that it was kind of important to memorialize this point in my life of being a total asshole,” he said. “I felt like I was having a watershed moment in how to evaluate my behavior.”
He also analyzed the Brooklyn dating scene, which is ground zero for 21st century-style romance, he said — heavily influenced by social media, free-spirited, and distinctly non-traditional.
“In the age of social media, because we have so much access to people — really a never-ending catalogue of people and interactions to engage in — it feels a little less precious to meet someone,” he said. “The sort of cultural morals of the past — if we sleep together, then we stay together — aren’t really there anymore.”
The film is showing at Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the “New Voices In Black Cinema” series, and he hopes the film will help spur conversations about unhealthy dating habits in the black community.
And yes, there are a lot of douchebags in Brooklyn, but the borough has it better than Jetter’s new home across the country, he said.
“In New York you have a certain intellectual douche, a cultural douche,” he said, while in Los Angeles “there’s a more narcissistic douche that roams ubiquitously here.”
“How To Tell You’re a Douchebag” at the Peter Jay Sharp Building at BAM [30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, www.bam.org, (718) 636–4100]. April 23 at 7 pm. $14.
