FILM
REVIEW America's naked
capitalism Magic Mike by
Steven Soderbergh (June 29, 2012)
Reviewed
by Dinesh Sharma
Steven Soderbergh's
latest film Magic Mike starts out as a
fantastic rite de passage about the
"vampire nights" of male strippers in Tampa,
Florida, but turns into a "hard" commentary on the
state of US capitalism, where young men coming
into the labor force have to stumble on dark
alternative career paths to get ahead in life.
When a media critic invited me to attend
the preview a few weeks ago, I didn't know what to
expect. The name Magic Mike suggested a
movie about magic, Michael Jordan and basketball,
something like Space Jam, perhaps?
Not really. While the men in this film are
sporty and appear very fit, they are not athletes
in any traditional sport. Rather they are men
stuck in various stages of liminal existence,
between forces of dark and light, fragmentation
and community, trying to find a way forward with
hard economic times, broken families, and drug and
alcohol abuse.
If you admire
Michelangelo's David as the masterpiece of
masculinity - with six-pack abs and tight gluteus
maximus - you will be amply rewarded by a fare of
taut, chiseled and high-strung men, who
professionally take their clothes off while
leaving the women swooning with their hot,
throbbing and slick moves.
Joining a
male-striptease club, Xquisite, offers these
budding adults "the fine arts of partying, picking
up women, and making easy money", as the main
character Magic Mike reveals (played by Channing
Tatum). However, the flashy delights of the
male-striptease business are like delicious rock
candy, very enjoyable to look at, but hard and
brittle to bite into.
The film does not
possess a deep narrative; rather it is a
validation of the old business dictum "desperate
times call for desperate measures". When Magic
Mike finally gets tired of servicing his clients,
he realizes his life is on a dead-end trajectory
especially as he ages and with dangerous brushes
with the law. Interestingly, Tatum, who has made
something of an autobiographical film, struggled
as a stripper when he started out as an actor.
The story is pushed forward by the
relationship between Magic Mike and a new recruit,
The Kid (Alex Pettyfer), whom he takes under his
wing. The two enjoy life through drug-induced sex
parties and the selling of illicit drugs until
they run into legal trouble. His underling
overdoses and has to be rehabilitated, which
brings their intoxicated nights to a sudden and
crashing end.
When Magic Mike is excluded
from the profit-sharing scheme by his boss Dallas
(Matthew McConaughey) for the expansion of the
nightclub to Miami, he decides to forgo the
striptease business and settles down. How
successful are his forays into mainstream American
life? The audience is left guessing.
When
he attempts to get a loan to start a business, he
is repeatedly rejected because of poor credit. He
presents bundles of hard cash as collateral from
his late-night gigs, which the bank suspects is
laundered money and refuses to give him a loan to
start his custom furniture business. The only sign
of grace is a girlfriend, Brooke (Cody Horn), who
is willing to take him in if he changes his
lifestyle.
After one of his regular shows,
Brooke asks Magic Mike, what are you,
"entrepreneur stripper, or stripper entrepreneur?"
"Either one," he replies.
The business of
male striptease became an industry in the early to
late 1970s, with the rise of clubs like
Chippendales, partly driven by cultural changes
brought on by the feminist movement and powerful
women's lobby. The traditional voyeuristic gaze,
where men watched women disrobe, has now been
subverted to balance the old power equation. With
the AIDS crisis, through the 1980s, the
male-striptease business seems to have declined
significantly.
Thus Soderbergh's
blockbuster film suggests more than a random
linkage between the hard economic times displayed
in the film and the confluence of the women's and
LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transvestite)
lobbies, vying for greater sexual power in the
boardroom and the bedroom, coupled with the
explosive growth of the billion-dollar pornography
industry. All these underlying cultural trends
make this film America's Full Monty, and it
came second in the box-office returns during the
June 29 weekend.
If this film is a
celebration of a new kind of American masculinity
after the drawdown from the two long wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, as suggested by several burlesque
numbers with men in military uniforms,
paramilitary gear and fatigue set to dance-club
music - "it's raining men", "feels like the first
time", "victim of society" - then this transformed
masculinity seems cut adrift, experimental, fluid
and groping hard for a new way forward after the
2008 recession, the collapse of housing market and
the banking crisis.
While the character of
Dallas represents the prototype of an American
male, with swagger, loud Southern slang, cowboy
hat and boots, and leather thongs to match, Magic
Mike, the main lead, is the perpetual "pretty boy"
next door, who is struggling with life's
commitments.
"So if you could wake up and
do what makes you happiest every morning?" asks
Brooke, "money aside, what would you do?"
"I would be on a beach somewhere and make
things every single day," replies Magic Mike.
"Really?"
"Yeah, really."
"Tables and chairs?"
"Yeah,
anything, custom, one-off kind stuff, not
knock-offs ... Why do you think I am stripping,
and doing all kinds of stuff ... I have saved 13
grand to start a business ... As soon as the banks
start making competitive rates for loans ..."
The movie is an apt metaphor for American
men's struggle for an identity in the midst of
shifting gender roles at home and the workplace,
high unemployment and anemic growth, and the
global threats to dominance.
You're not
just stripping for money, explains Dallas to the
young recruit The Kid in an evangelical tone while
teaching him the sexy dance moves. "You're
fulfilling every woman's wildest fantasies. You're
the husband they never had. You're that dreamboat
guy that never came along ...
"You're the
liberation. Own it," says Dallas as he trains The
Kid to move harder, back and forth.
At the
end, the movie hints that Magic Mike has found
real intimacy with Brooke when he agrees to have
breakfast with her during the "non-vampire" or
daylight hours, but the fate of The Kid continues
on the same path in search of "partying, women and
easy money".
Dinesh Sharma is
the author of <A
HREF="http://www.amazon.com/Barack-Obama-Hawaii-Indonesia-President/dp/0313385335/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341555482&sr=8-1&keywords=barack+obama+in+indonesia>Barack
Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The Making of a
Global President, which was rated as one of
the Top 10 Black History Books for 2012. His next
edited book, Psychoanalysis, Culture and
Religion, is due to be published with Oxford
Press.
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