TONY D'AMATO IS WEARY. The world does not hold for him the same joys it once promised. He is aging, alone, and now, worst of all, the football team he's coached for most of his adult life is falling apart and about to be taken away from him.

"I've sweated blood for these men," he rages, bloodied but unbowed. "I've given up my wife and my children."

What is distressing about Any Given Sunday, the latest Oliver Stone behemoth, is the ultimate notion that what D'Amato has given up -- which is, essentially, life and love -- pales in comparison to The Game. The director who gained fame by revealing the horrors of Vietnam is now pouring all his energies into exalting the primal splendor of pigskin. Though blessed with some undeniable technical gifts, Stone has been in full-tilt operatic mode since 1994's Natural Born Killers, clobbering his audiences with over-the-the-top drama designed to elicit the desired response. Not a moment in Sunday roars by without Stone linking D'Amato's woes to the ongoing struggle of the male species in general; clips of Ben-Hur are thrown into a scene like bare-knuckled punches. Many screen heroes have been consumed by their passions or celebrated for their machismo, but few have been as righteously deified for coaching professional football. D'Amato is, as Stone makes abundantly clear, a Man's Man.

The last few years of 20th-century popular culture have seen the culmination of a movement in the (supposedly) collective American male psyche. Men, it posits, are the browbeaten receptacles of a nation that refuses them any identity. Calls for justice and equality from women and gay men are now increasingly viewed as strident, misguided efforts to remove a man's ability to Be A Man. Wanton male lust, violence, and ignorance are not only healthy; they form a valid political viewpoint.

It's a mindset that originally fluttered from the chubby hands of crafty, discontented conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, but is currently used to deliver not-so-coded messages from even those who associate with the Left. "Femi-nazi," a word Rush Limbaugh used to equate the goals of feminism with societal devastation, has become a popular way for liberals to denote their levelheadedness (as in, "Well, I'm no femi-nazi, but"). Bill Maher, the cheeky host of TV's Politically Incorrect, has established himself as the vanguard of a sort of disaffected, Hugh Hefner liberal -- someone who doesn't care what anyone does, so long as it doesn't keep him from getting a good piece of ass. Fond of cutting down the Christian Right with a smirking swiftness, Maher nevertheless spends an inordinate amount of time harkening back to the days when the lines between men and women were less honest but more clear. He likes his men unemotional and his women fairly reserved, and, with tongue only slightly in cheek, curiously bemoans everything from the "extinction" of the sullen, uncommunicative father figure (who, at last check, was doing just fine) to the unfair treatment of the Tailhook soldiers (who, in Maher's view, shouldn't be held to the standards of other American citizens, i.e. women).

This new pronouncement of male identity has even brought Pulitzer Prize-winning feminist writer Susan Faludi into the fray. In her latest book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, the Backlash author casts a sympathetic eye toward a generation troubled at finding that the "frontier, the enemy, the institutions of brotherhood, the women in need of protection -- all the elements of the old formula for attaining manhood had vanished." Far from an apologia for bad behavior, the book contends that men have been "stiffed" by the same standards and false institutional goals that trapped women into preconceived roles; Faludi is sympathetic toward men who, in her view, have been kept from evolving in more progressive ways.

According to Any Given Sunday and much of the other recent Hollywood fare, however, men don't need sympathy. They don't even need to evolve; they need to get back to the way things were, which includes being apart from (or on top of) women. Stone's opus casts Cameron Diaz as Christina, the stone-cold manager of an NFL team and a '90s version of the bitch-on-wheels television programmer played by Faye Dunaway in Network. Diaz is set up as an intruder on a holy circle jerk from moment one, and spends the rest of the movie clawing at anyone in her way and generally defaming the good name of football, which is the sanctified arena of good old-fashioned testosterone. The director himself appears as a sportscaster, joyously describing Jamie Foxx's rule-breaking quarterback as "a warrior poet," adding, "Welcome to the 21st century!" While Sunday is hard at work equating sportsmen with Hercules and envisioning the team as an extended male dynasty, Christina is actually told to "start over; start a family." It's as though Stone has suddenly become a Promise Keeper, and tossing a hot number like Diaz into the NFL is a keen way to instruct the youth market on what can go awry when men don't hold up their part of the bargain. In case there were any way to miss the message that Christina is fouling up the natural order of things, Stone hauls in Charlton Heston, of all people, in a cameo as a sports commissioner, to grumble about her, "I honestly believe that woman would eat her young." Here's a guy whose gleaming chompers have doubtlessly devoured several small children, yet half a snarl from Cameron Diaz throws him for a loop.

Diaz is just the icing on the cake; Sunday is cluttered with bitches, whores, and all-around ballbreakers. Women have apparently overstepped their universally accepted boundaries, Ă  la Maher's philosophy, and Stone is, quite literally, leveling the playing field. You start to wonder just how ironic Stone is being when Showgirls' Elizabeth Berkeley shows up as a prostitute in a black wig. Ann-Margret appears as Christina's drunken fluff of a mother, with two pissing poodles and red, talon-like fingernails that Stone closes in on as though they were once responsible for childhood trauma. The most ludicrous turn by far comes from Lauren Holly as the grasping wife of aging quarterback Dennis Quaid, a woman who practically beheads her husband when he suggests it's time he quit the game. When women are this controlling, the movie seems to say, who can blame men for their exclusive huddles? By the film's climax, Diaz is jumping and giggling and holding one of her mother's poodles, and the whole thing ends with her thanking Pacino for softening her heart (she then receives her comeuppance when Pacino announces he's moving to another team, with star quarterback Foxx in tow). The women here are fooling with a game they'll never really understand -- and we're not just talking football.

Stone's flamboyant masculinity is so unintentionally campy that it isn't half as pernicious as David Fincher's slick plea to allow men their brutish extravagances. Even with skilled performances, dense design, and wry bits of dark humor, Fincher's Fight Club, the story of a schizophrenic loser who starts a terrorist cult founded on barroom brawling, can't come up with anything but venom to add to a gender-related discussion. "We're a generation of men raised by women," Brad Pitt sighs from a bathtub, as Edward Norton sits idly by. "I'm wondering if another woman is what we really need." Before all else, Fight Club should go down in history as the first movie ever to think a person needs anything, if he already has Brad Pitt in his bathtub. The film so insistently yearns for a return to a time when homosexuality was simply the American male's dark, secret heart that it's a wonder "conversion therapy" advocates haven't used it to spice up their propaganda. It provides a disturbingly safe way for straight men to fetishize an actor without having to consider that they may be among the rest of the planet's citizens in actually finding him desirable. Though the movie is the best opportunity yet to worship at the altar of shirtless Pitt's washboard abdomen (his pants hover enticingly around his pelvic bone), Fight Club pretends that Pitt's main appeal lies in his explosive defiance of society's rules. It's his violence that's attractive, see, so it's okay to drool: All men are turned on by violence. Fincher, who directed Madonna's "Vogue" and "Express Yourself" videos (both of which drip with eroticized male dancers), knows his way around homoeroticism, yet here presents it as a mysterious source of anger, as something to work through on your grueling journey back to Helena Bonham Carter. In a supporting bit as an angelic blond boy and a competitor for Pitt's "fatherly" attentions, Jared Leto receives the film's most vicious beating from Edward Norton, who pummels him almost to death. Though most members of the "fight club" look like surly Calvin Klein models, it should be noted that Leto's ridiculous, iconic beauty is the most threatening. The gathered brawlers are shocked by Norton's savagery, and Pitt walks away from it in disapproval, but the implied revulsion comes from the random jealous outburst, not the spilling of blood.

More perplexing is Fight Club's wild assertion that the United States has degenerated into a whining nation filled with weak, mild-mannered men. Despite cutting, if easy, swipes at our deadening consumer culture -- Norton, who is excellent, plays a workaday insomniac deluged by infomercials and IKEA purchases -- much of the indelicate comic relief concerns society's metaphorical castration of the male. Meat Loaf makes his first appearance at a testicular-cancer therapy group playing Bob, the estrogen-laden, former weight lifter cursed with breasts (or "Bitch Tits," as source novelist Chuck Palahniuk has deigned them). Fincher places an American flag in the background and has the therapy group indulge in mandatory hugs, with Bob smothering Norton in his beefy arms and weeping (none too subtly), "We're still men." Fincher and Palahniuk pound movie-goers with the fact that, ha ha, a crying soul with breasts is not, in fact, a man, and Fight Club proceeds to swagger into adolescent visions of scrappy mirth and mayhem. It all leads to a revelatory "fight club" that, as echoed in Stone's sports arena, allows its denizens to feel like "a God for 10 minutes" by beating the living daylights out of their fellow men. The club is supposed to be a hip symbol of how beaten down men already are, and how much their natural energies are left stifled and feminized, waiting for release. In what country, you might be tempted to ask, are Fincher and Palahniuk living? The day we can walk safely down a street at night, that sports arenas and nightclubs aren't routinely disrupted by hostile arguments, that the neighbor across the hall isn't being carted off for socking his wife -- that's the day when it might not be absurd to suggest that men have been lying low for too long. Fight Club bristles under the delusion that, as long as they don't take it too far, men should have license to act like children, lest we become a nation of ominous passivity.

This idea has been a draw even for far superior films. If American Beauty is a great film, and it very well may be, it has a trumpeting, brassy greatness that calls attention to itself; it's a mass-market art film. Alan Ball's script, though full of quirky, haunting wonder and a kind of ornamented grace, still consistently takes the easy road, using the appeal of a footloose male to draw crowds. Kevin Spacey plays a family man who, after years of being cowed by routine and rejected by his yuppie wife and solemn daughter, is reborn after getting high with the neighborhood pot dealer and developing a crush on a teenaged cheerleader. Beauty's much-touted revelations of suburban angst, and some of its lovelier Zen-like sentiments, pop out at you because they are comfortably couched in the logic of a middle-aged man. What man doesn't covet his daughter's cheerleader friends, the film asks, and the irreverence feels refreshingly daring.

Without a superlative cast (Annette Bening does miraculous things with the two-dimensional role of Spacey's wife) and the lush visual sense of Broadway director Sam Mendes, American Beauty would not seem quite so fresh. Many of its conceits are cartoonish riffs on the austere supper-table angst of Robert Redford's Ordinary People; and using a lecherous, anti-heroic Spacey as an instrument into an audience's consciousness is sociologically a bit of a clever cop-out. Unlike Ang Lee's similarly themed (and, interestingly, underseen) 1997 effort, The Ice Storm, which sailed out over chilly suburban seas without giving you anything for ballast, American Beauty doesn't really have the guts to hold everybody complicit in their own downfall. Spacey's macho lust and freewheeling conspicuous consumption (returning to the glorious throes of youth, he purchases a shiny, red car) are seen as natural extensions of a man whom a decaying society has not allowed to truly break free. Bening's charades, however, are pathetic; without any irony, the movie mocks her sexual escapades and upward mobility, and rails at her for feeling protective of an expensive couch. It's too easy to suggest that the upset in gender roles has caused the fissures in suburbia. The Ice Storm ends powerfully with patriarch Kevin Kline collapsing in a heap of helpless sobs over the steering wheel of the family car, his bemused clan appearing as frozen, distant onlookers. American Beauty kills Spacey off, but rewards us with his divine epiphany, one that he achieves because, basically, he's chosen not to sleep with his daughter's friend upon learning that she is a virgin. The matter would've been more complex if he'd realized that the girl was innocent no matter how many boys she'd supposedly bedded; Beauty would rather have us notice Spacey's dying, nostalgic memory of Bening as a happy young wife and his daughter as a little girl in a princess costume. The reminiscence has an undeniably touching force, but have things ever really been that simple? Is joy for men really only rooted in a return to past glories?

About this time a year ago, an embarrassing critical debate waged over the merits of Steven Spielberg's World War II epic Saving Private Ryan versus Terence Malick's take on the subject, The Thin Red Line. Finding the Malick piece too difficult, the public went around clapping one another on the back over Ryan, ignoring the self-congratulation with which it played and the cringing sentiment that fueled its heroics. Suddenly, criticizing Ryan was un-American, as if raising an eyebrow over the work was kicking down every white cross in our nation's burial ground. Saving Private Ryan was a sympathy-card sentiment about male sacrifice, while The Thin Red Line, with true daring, not only made men ponder the depths of their own sorrows, but held them accountable for the way that unaddressed sadness has affected the world they helped create. Malick's vision dared to include a vulnerable sense of male fear, of dangerous anguish. His take on violence shames something like Fight Club. Malick hoped that an audience willing to listen could find its own thoughts; he wasn't gilding men's own bravado and offering it up to them as Art.

There have been films that take the same chance, and curiously, almost all of them have underperformed at the box office despite critical praise. Even with wild acclaim, the upside-down look at masculinity that was Being John Malkovich, Boys Don't Cry, and Three Kings made hardly a ripple beside the raging waters of Stone's flick. It's easy to scoff at public taste, but to understand movies is to know that their popularity is often a reflection of our anxieties. Through some needful confusion in our emotional landscape (brought on, in part, by small but crucial successes in gay and women's liberation), we've reached a point in society at which we are incapable of defining ourselves as concretely as we'd like. We can no longer find solace in believing that though the world may be changing, we certainly are not. We look to popular entertainment to assuage the fear that flows out of uncertainty. When a football film gives Oliver Stone his highest-ever opening weekend, it's time to pay close attention to the things that tell us how to be who we are.