“I've just invented a sketch of a decent, sensitive guy…”
“Maybe I’m not nice, you know?”
He’s not like other guys, He’s a nice guy.
“Sorry, I’m not like a gross guy trying to hit on you or anything.”
If we look at the Nice Guy onscreen,
we can break down the qualities that define him.
He’s a hopeless romantic.
“I brought you these and a poem I wrote for you.”
The nice guy can be found obsessively pining after a girl,
making grand gestures or jumping way ahead in planning
the future of a relationship.
“I have FOUND the future Mrs. Ted Mosby.”
But much to his chagrin, he’s often pegged as friend material
instead of as a true boyfriend contender.
“You waited too long to make your move and now you’re in the friendzone.”
This obsessive lover-boy lives in his head.
“Well, You know, You're not always one to face things.”
and frequently struggles to act on his feelings.
“You could just ask her out.”
“Don't be stupid.”
But the central irony of the nice guy is that he’s not actually that nice.
“Women never go for the nice guy.”
“Please.
Men say that, but you get to know some of these men
who complain the most, you find out they're not as nice
as they like to think they are.”
He may be the polar opposite
of the stereotypical male commitment-phobe,
but his supposed romantic streak is really just projecting a fantasy
onto the woman he likes.
“They do the thing where they put you on a pedestal
and they dote on you even though you’ve never expressed any interest.”
He talks about how girls go for the wrong type of guys,
“He’s going to use your ass and throw you away.”
but this rhetoric is usually just an empty cover for wishing
HE had the ladies man’s confidence and mojo.
[Paolo speaking Italian]
[Ross pretending to speak Italian]
And while he isn’t intimidating or threatening on the surface,
the unrequited love he’s too scared to pursue can lead to a toxic build up
of resentment or bitterness.
“I don't handle rejection well.
Funny, considering all the
practice I've had, huh?”
The wisdom in our culture has long been that
nice guys finish last.
So how did we end up with a whole subgroup
of male characters who are trying really hard to be seen as Nice?
Here’s our take on the Nice Guy: what’s behind his niceness,
why he’s his own worst enemy and why -- even if some of these
guys are frauds, the real thing CAN still exist.
This video is brought to you by Audible.
The best audiobook service out there with the largest selection
of audio books on the planet.
Click the link in our description
audible.com/thetake or text “The take” to 500-500
to start listening with a 30 day Audible trial.
You’ll get to choose one audio book
and two Audible originals absolutely free.
Start listening today!
The Nice Guy himself hasn’t necessarily changed
all that much over time,
but in recent years there have been HUGE shifts
in the way viewers look at him.
For most of history, the male character who
relentlessly pursued his love object
regardless of whether she was sure about him
was portrayed as charming and sweet.
“It's a pity you don't have as much charm as persistence.”
“But I have.
You've only seen the aggressive side of me.”
“What do you say, c’mon?”
(Laughs) "Alright you win."
In Fred Astaire movies like Top Hat and The Gay Divorcee,
the male lead’s intense infatuation with and pursuit
of a woman he doesn’t know well is presented as normal,
because he’s so in love.
“Peekaboo.”
“Stop this cab at once.”
One of the most definitive examples of the Nice Guy trope is Duckie
in 1986’s Pretty in Pink.
“He’s a really nice guy.”
He harbors an unrequited crush on his best friend Andie,
and most of the time is an obnoxious pest,
constantly badgering her for attention.
“6:15.
Duckie Dale again.
Call me, OK?
Andie, where are you?
This is the Duck.
Give me a call, OK?
Uh, it's 6:28…”
Duckie consistently overlooks what Andie wants,
instead thinking he knows what’s best.
“I won't take no for an answer.”
“Try, please.”
When he finds out that she’s interested in dating rich guy Blane
he tries to shame her out of her crush.
“You can't do this and, and-and respect yourself.”
“Well, I'll make that decision, all right?”
So ultimately, Duckie’s kindness is contingent on a woman living her life
on his terms.
“So-so when you get your heart splattered all over hell
and you’re feeling really low, and dirty,
don't look to me to help pump you back up
‘cause ‘cause maybe for
the first time in your life, I won't be there.”
But in spite of all this bad behavior, the original movie ending that
writer John Hughes wanted brought Andie and Duckie together at the prom.
Test audiences booed this conclusion, suggesting that our culture already
had a lower tolerance for the nice guy than filmmakers may have thought.
“Listen, may I admire you again today?”
90’s and 2000’s shows featured nice guy characters
pining for their dream woman,
but struggling to express this in a healthy way.
Take Brian Krakow on My So-Called Life --
when he’s jealous about Angela’s relationship
with dreamboat Jordan Catalano,
he starts a spiteful rumor that the two had sex.
“Her and Jordan?”
“At Brian's house.”
“Oh my God.”
“Can you believe it?
Right in the front yard.
Brian watched the entire thing
through his kitchen window.”
Ross Gellar on Friends and Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother
begin their respective series wanting to find “the one” as soon as possible.
“I’m done being single.”
“I don't want to be single, okay?
I just- I just want to be married again.”
Both men fixate on a woman they feel is perfect,
developing an out-of-control infatuation even though she’s
not quite on the same page.
“I don't want to get married right now, maybe ever.”
After Ross wins his “lobster” Rachel,
things go sour when she starts establishing
a new independent identity and career, leading him to act out
in jealous, controlling ways.
“Can't a guy send a barbershop quartet to his girlfriend's office anymore?”
“It was like you were marking your territory.
I mean, you might as well have just come in
and peed all around my desk.”
When these shows were on the air, we were still meant to sympathize
with Ross and Ted, and root for them to get the girl.
So in many of these cases, it’s only in looking back
that some viewers start to find the nice guy’s behavior creepy.
“Now, if only I knew her schedule, I could arrange a chance encounter.”
“That's great, Ted.
You'll be the most casual staIker ever.”
More recently, though, our culture has turned on
this character type, even coining the term
“nice guy syndrome”
to describe the wolf in sheep’s clothing
who performs niceness with ulterior motives.
“You pretend to be nice and that's worse.”
It follows that modern “nice guys” onscreen are viewed through a more
critical, self-aware lens.
“Everyone says he's a really nice guy.”
“Good point.”
“That's exactly the problem.
Because he's so nice, people don't wanna think
he's capable of awful things so they let him off the hook.”
If you look back, you can find subtle critiques
of the Nice Guy scattered throughout film history.
In 1951’s A Place in the Sun, our seemingly nice hero wants
to be with Elizabeth Taylor’s rich beautiful Angela so badly
that he plots to murder his poor pregnant girlfriend
to get her out of the way.
"...and there was a moment when you might have saved her.
Who were you thinking of, just in that moment?
In your heart was murder, George."
In 1958’s Vertigo, the apparently harmless Scottie
(played by Jimmy Stewart, subverting his own Nice Guy persona)
is so fixated on the idea of a perfect, non-existent woman
that he obsessively controls an actual girlfriend.
“The color of your hair.”
“Oh, no.”
“Judy, please.
lt can't matter to you.”
and inadvertently causes her death.
In 1965’s Repulsion, an exploration of female fear of men
nice guy Colin aggressively pursues Carol,
even though she doesn’t engage with him.
“Are you playing hard to get?”
When she won’t open her apartment door to see him,
Colin breaks it down
justifying this threatening, violent behavior
as an expression of his romantic passion.
“I had to see you that’s all.”
But when it comes to our modern skepticism of the Nice Guy,
the tide started to turn with 2009’s 500 Days of Summer
which was meant to be a deconstruction of the trope.
The story looks at how the idealistic Tom projects
onto his dream girl Summer, ignoring all the times
she tells him that she’s not looking for love.
“I just don't feel comfortable being anyone's girlfriend.”
“I just don't want a relationship.”
“Well, you're not the only one
that gets a say in this!
I do too!
And I say we're a couple, goddamn it!”
Director Marc Webb said,
“The movie is very intentionally told from the perspective of the guy,
and we wanted to identify his shortcomings.
He wasn’t observing the inner life
of the Summer character.
He projected on her… we think of that as romantic,
but really it’s just intellectual laziness.”
“It’s Tom’s fault.
I think that if you really
pay attention, Tom’s not listening to Summer.
When you hear something that doesn’t fit into
what you wanted to hear,
you still have to update your thinking.”
Still, the movie’s intended message
didn’t stop many viewers from seeing Summer
(who herself is a deconstruction
of the manic pixie dream girl trope)
as the villain who coldly breaks Tom’s heart.
This popular misreading reveals that,
at the time 500 Days came out,
culture was still biased in favor of the nice guy.
That same year, Inglourious Basterds
gave us Frederick Zoller
who presents himself as a polite, smitten suitor.
(In French) “It’s been a pleasure chatting with
a fellow cinema lover.”
But the film subverts this -- because this guy is a literal Nazi
who snaps when Shoshanna turns him down one too many times.
(In French) “Frederick, you hurt me.”
“Well it’s nice to know you can feel something,
even if it’s just physical pain.”
Love, Simon’s antagonist Martin also sees himself
as a nice guy, though no one else does.
He cruelly blackmails Simon.
“He told me that if I didn't help him
get with Abby, he'd out me.”
But when his romantic grand gesture
for his crush Abby bombs, he does out Simon after all.
“We should all probably be talking about this
instead of Martin Addison's homecoming debacle
which was actually kind of sweet, and romantic,
if you think about it.”
Netflix’s You is the darkest subversion
of the trope yet.
Bookstore manager Joe creates a perfect nice guy image to win Beck.
“I mean, you're a Nice Guy with the ‘You are remarkable’ stuff.”
but he’s actually stalking her, tailoring his personality
to what he knows about her,
and killing off anyone who poses a threat
to their relationship.
“Everything I do, I do to protect you, Beck.”
2020’s Promising Young Woman offers a full-on revenge fantasy,
in which vigilante Cassie targets fake nice guys
she knows will try to take advantage of her.
“I go to a club, I act like I’m too drunk to stand.
And every week, a nice guy comes over
to see if I’m okay.”
“You okay?”
Thus the movie’s takeaway is similar to You:
these men who tell themselves they’re protecting a woman
from the bad people out there are really the ones
she needs protection FROM.
“You are the bad thing.
You are the thing that
you should have killed.”
“I’m a nice guy.”
“Are you?”
Ultimately, the nice guy has evolved from
the underdog romantic into the villain of our times.
“I used to think it was something else.
That you wanted me to be yours.
That you wanted to possess me,
but no this is so much simpler than that.
You hate yourself.”
This shift in popular opinion
is largely due to the Me, Too movement
and a growing awareness of the nuances of male entitlement.
As Rebecca Pahle writes for Mashable,
“You used to be able to shrug aside the Nice Guy’s
more stalker-y tendencies— so the media they appeared in told us
because they were just so damn harmless.
What can a socially awkward nerd really do?
The answer, we now realize, is ‘a lot.’”
“If it's 'creepy' to use the internet,
military satellites, and robot aircraft
to find a house full of gorgeous
young models so I can drop in on them unexpectedly,
then fine, I'm 'creepy.'”
“I'm a nice guy.
'Cause I tell ya if you say no, I'm gonna be there every day
at the coffee shop having breakfast
until you say yes to me.”
The nice guy is largely defined by his romantic side.
But this character’s infatuation frequently
takes the woman’s desires out of the equation.
“I just don't think of you that way.”
“Well, try.
I'll wait.”
Romantics like Ross, Ted, Tom and Duckie
are so single-minded and sure they’ve found
their soulmates that they don’t pause to consider
whether their love object feels the same.
“I'd like to marry her.”
So ultimately, the nice guy needs to accept
that you can’t will someone into feeling what you feel
“You can love Andie, but that doesn't mean
she’s gonna love you back.
What I'm trying to say is you can't make it happen.”
Downton Abbey offers one of the most interesting
cases of this phenomenon:
Daisy never feels anything remotely romantic
for kind, gentle William yet she’s pressured
into marrying him to make him happy.
“You always said I wouldn't have to marry him
when it came to it.”
“Daisy, he's dying.
What difference does it make?”
Nice guy stories tend to send the troubling
message that a man’s relentless persistence
will reward him with the woman in the end.
“I mean, sometimes persistence pays off.
I said ‘yes’ eventually.”
This is reflective of a culture where “no”
is often interpreted to mean “convince me.”
“What could she mean when she says no?
I don't know, it is totally cryptic.”
“This is far from over.”
On How I Met Your Mother, Ted’s whole guiding philosophy
is that you should never back off and move on,
even when it’s completely inappropriate
(like when the woman you love is engaged to your friend).
[Enthusiastically] “And when you love someone,
you just, you don't stop, ever.
Even when people roll their eyes or call you crazy.
Even then.
Especially then!
You just -- you don't give up!”
The nice guy is the kind of person
who bemoans that chivalry is dead.
“We're a couple of nice guys which stopped being
a desirable character trait about half a century ago.”
But this passion for respecting women may not be all that it appears.
“Sometimes, I swear, I'm the only real feminist you know.”
“I’m wearing this shirt and you won’t even let me nut?!”
The nice guy often makes romance into a moral issue,
so that if a girl doesn’t like him,
she must just not like being treated well.
“She rejected romance, honesty and respect.”
He expects the woman to be interested in him
because of his inner goodness, or because he’s so in love with her.
But this idea is hypocritical because the nice guy
is usually drawn to his crush at least in part
out of physical attraction…
he’s not exactly looking around for an awkward girl on his level
of the social hierarchy and falling for her just because
of the intensity of her feelings.
Finally, this character type often builds up a fantasy
of his love interest that
isn’t representative of who she really is.
“I guess I'm no longer the virgin queen of Dawson Leery's
hand-held fantasies.”
You emphasizes how the nice guy lives in his head
through Joe’s creepy narration.
“A proposal: why don't we spend the day
together tomorrow, just you and me?”
The way his internal monologue refers to Beck
as “you” makes it seem as if he’s carrying on
a conversation with her… except that, of course,
she’s not really a part of it.
So in many of these cases,
as in Vertigo’s early subversion of the trope,
the nice guy is in love with a phantom.
And as soon as the woman shatters that illusion
and asserts her individuality it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy.
“Either, she’s an evil, emotionless, miserable
human being or she’s a robot.”
The nice guy may feel victimized by more confident
men or beautiful women.
“Why is it pretty girls think they can treat people like crap
and get away with it?”
“Centuries of reinforcement.”
But the truth is that he is his own worst enemy.
The character frequently dims his own light through self-sabotage.
“You're deliberately flunking your courses so that you
can stay in high school…
You run yourself down.
Why do you do that?”
In the finale of My So-Called Life,
Brian writes a romantic letter to Angela for Jordan
to pass off as his own, Cyrano de Bergerac-style,
and she’s blown away by its heartfelt contents.
“It’s, like, the most incredible letter I’ve ever gotten.”
Show creator Winnie Holzman said, “it wasn’t the Brian that
was walking around in life who wrote that letter.
He went to this really deep place inside himself,
and he wrote from there.
That’s what spoke to Angela.”
Holzman’s words reveal how Brian has done himself
a serious disservice by not showing Angela his true self
before this point.
Even then, he’s hiding behind Jordan.
“You’re using him too, to like
express your true feelings toward Angela.”
And when Angela directly confronts Brian
to ask if he wrote the letter, and it’s implied that she’s
developing feelings for him too, he still won’t take credit for it.
“I have to know, because--”
“Know what?
There’s nothing to know.”
The Perks of Being a Wallflower makes a similar point
in the way Charlie sells himself short by not pursuing his crush, Sam.
“Then why didn't you ever ask me out?”
“I just didn't think that you wanted that.”
“Well, what did you want?”
On 13 Reasons Why, Clay never musters the courage
to tell his classmate Hannah how he feels about her.
The show implies that there’s a chance
it could have helped Hannah to know someone cared.
“Why didn't you say this to me when I was alive?”
which gets at the point that it’s not just HIMSELF
the Nice Guy hurts by withdrawing.
“You can’t just just sit there and put everybody's
lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love.”
And because he’s not able to express himself,
he may be lacking in emotional intelligence
or empathy for those around him.
“You don't understand people, Krakow.”
The nice guy has a tendency to take
a passive role in his own life.
“The pity thing?
Not good.
If you want crappy things to stop happening to you,
then stop accepting crap and demand something more.”
But by being so self-protective and risk-averse,
he lets his feelings fester into self-loathing
and ensures that he doesn’t get any closer
to what he really wants.
“She probably wouldn't go out with me, anyway,
but how do l know that for sure, if l don't ever ask?”
So the nice guy needs to develop the courage
to face the possibility that his feelings aren’t reciprocated
and in confronting this fear, discover that he can
survive rejection and move on.
“If she laughs, she laughs.
And if she doesn't love me,
she doesn't love me, but if I don't find out…”
In Pretty in Pink once Duckie gets over
his infatuation with Andie, we discover that this guy
IS genuinely sweet.
“You look stunning.
Really.
It's-it’s breathtaking.”
And encouraging his friend to follow her heart.
“If you don't go to him now, I'm never gonna take you
to another prom ever again, you hear me?”
makes Duckie feel good, too.
So what does a true nice guy look like in our modern world
and how does he differ from the faux nice guy?
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’s true Nice Guy Peter Kavinsky
is that total unicorn who, besides possessing
the expected love interest qualities of good looks and self-assurance,
is unusually romantic and thoughtful.
“I even packed the snacks.
I asked Kitty where to find
those yogurt drinks you like so much.”
“The Korean grocery store is all the way across town.”
“I know.”
Rather than falling in love with an idea of Lara Jean,
he takes the time to listen and get to know who she really is.
“You’re a good listener.”
Peter respects his partner’s desires and boundaries
“I don’t want to rush you.”
And he treats her not
as the subject of his adoration
but as an active participant in the relationship.
“If you want me to read that, then you need to give that to me.”
On Parks and Recreation, real Nice Guy Ben Wyatt
supports his partner’s aspirations 100%.
“I love how independent my wife is.”
championing her instead of trying to control or limit her
out of fear she’ll slip away from him.
“Indiana native, supremely qualified, and she wrote that she wanted to be
governor in her kindergarten dream journal.”
These modern examples of true Nice Guys
call back to authentic ones of the past, too.
Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey
in It’s a Wonderful Life is the quintessential Nice Man
audiences love because he cares about others,
has a sense of community, and makes sacrifices to help people.
“I got two thousand dollars.
Here's two thousand dollars.
This'll tide us over until the bank reopens.
Alright Tom, how much do you need?”
Tom Hanks has made a career of playing actual Nice Guys,
and in movies like Splash,
that coincided very naturally with getting the girl he loves.
So really, it’s always been great to be a Nice Guy,
and it still is.
What differentiates a real nice guy
from the knock-off version is simply authenticity.
The faux nice guy’s grand gestures can come off
as cringeworthy and even manipulative.
“You'll receive Cliff Notes versions of his thesis length
emails listing the things he sees in you that no one else sees.”
Or he may expect a prize for acting like a decent person.
“I went to a lot of trouble to solve your dress problem,
and I think I at least deserve to see it on you.”
But while fake niceness abounds in our world,
true kindness sets you apart like a diamond in the rough…
and in the end, real nice guys finish first.
“I need you to know that I like you, Peter Kavinsky.
And not in a fake way.”
This video is brought to you by Audible, the audiobook service
that offers an unmatched selection of audiobooks
and access to exclusive content.
Audible members get to choose 3 titles every month.
One audio book and two audible originals
that you can’t find anywhere else.
And your unused credits roll over to the next month.
Plus you own your audio books
so you can go back and listen anytime,
even if you cancel your membership.
One audiobook you can check out right now on Audible
is Malcolm and Me, Ishamel Reed’s reflection
on the legacy of Malcolm X, who he met
in a life changing interview in 1960.
Start growing your digital library with Audible today.
Just click the link in our description below,
audible.com/thetake or text “The take” to 500-500
to try it out now.