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Their designated victim is Christine, winsome and delicate, her eyes signaling sweet intensity and a ladylike itch for passionate release. In her presence Chad is darling; he has the shy-guy, sensitive-man patter down pat. He convinces Christine, and perhaps the audience, that he is falling for her. To Howard, though, he says he despises Christine (he even makes fun of the way she reads lips) and her entire sex. "Women--nice ones or the most frigid of the race; it doesn't matter in the end--inside, they're all the same. Meat and gristle and hatred, just simmering. And I for one have had it with their s___."
Says LaBute, a Mormon married to a family therapist: "I was drawn to the idea of a lover's triangle and to the theme of betrayal, which I find a very intimate, devastating thing. The template was Restoration comedy; I love that kind of gamesmanship, the verbal wit." Chad's surname is Piercewell, its rapier malice nicely echoing Congrevean namesmanship. "I saw a parallel from the 1690s in the 1990s in the tendency not to fight with fists but instead to tear and devastate with words." That's Chad's forte. With just a flick of a phrase, he can devastate his boss, an intern or the woman who's come to love him.
Few will be rooting for Chad, but he does have a way about him: the purring amorality, the artist's attention to detail, the born salesman's blinding self-assurance. He is, in short, a perfect Chad--a winner at any cost. Howard is perfect only as Chad's opposite and victim. All the women he loves dump him. But who wouldn't? His devotion is a pillow that doesn't comfort but smothers; he's forever tripping over his big dopey heart. His clumsy pursuit of Christine will have the decent guys in the audience replaying their dankest romantic humiliations. Says LaBute: "I despise the things about him that are most like me." Chad is the super-Nazi, Howard the "good German."
Chad is also a prototype and a throwback: the streamlined 1997 model of caveman. He's not a sexist so much as he's an inhumanist, for he is contemptuous of other guys as well. "Working in the company of men," he says of his colleagues, "they still want their mommies to wipe their bottoms every time they go potty." By taking the title from this harangue, LaBute clarifies his intentions. The true arena of this extreme game is business, not sex, and the person Chad wants to screw, so to speak, is not the secretary but his old friend and current boss. Christine is just a means to Howard's end.
"You got the balls for this?" Chad asks a young black intern whom he orders to pull down his pants in the film's most humiliating scene. "You need the big brass ones for the task... That's what business is all about: who's sporting the nastiest sac of venom, and who's willing to use it." Ultimately there are two kinds of men: predator and prey. A few millenniums of civilization have refined man's hunter instinct; we now see a subtle but lethal damage that man can inflict on the competition. Male or female, for business or pleasure--doesn't really matter.