In defense of Magic Mike

The scene that ends the first act of Magic Mike layers irony on so thick it's hard to remember what your expectations were in the first place. The eponymous character should be the embodiment of power. He is a lantern-jawed, tall, symmetrically-featured, white, straight, male, 30-something mesomorph who has all of his hair. From his mouth comes charming banter in unaccented English. On him are a suit and a tie and an expensive wristwatch. The setting is a private office in a bank. 

The cleaners ruined my favorite shirt!

But he is sitting on the wrong side of the table. Not lender, but borrower. He needs a loan to start a custom furniture company. His various day and night jobs - mobile auto detailing, roofing, and, most spectacularly, on weekends, headlining a male stripper troupe billed as "the cock-rocking kings of Tampa" - don't cut it anymore. He has ambition, but he needs a lender to realize it.

So he begs. The woman sitting behind the desk bends the slightest to his appeal - in the manner of the successful pick-up artist he is, he flatters her with individualized attention, and presumably because his sweaty testicles emanate invisible spores smelling of evolutionary supremacy, she responds  ("That is a really nice necklace!" he says, to which she responds with flustered self-molestation) - but his Magic Mike ethos fails to persuade her logos and she says that his all-cash income doesn't give him the credit score he needs to secure a loan. The audience can barely watch as he becomes first desperate, then angry, powerless even when holding a comically large stack of bills, telling the banker, "Distressed? Does this look distressed? I read the news, lady, and the only thing that's distressed is y'all."  Nobody wants to see a straight white man lose. Pathos wins. 

In Louis C.K.'s bit about white male privilege, he says, "If you're a straight white man in this country and you're not the president, then you've failed."  Perhaps my understanding of power is primitive, but when I take my change back from the cashiers at the organic co-operative market/cafe/vaginal suppository shop in my gentrified hipster neighborhood, sometimes I want to ask, "Did you learn this at Vassar?"  (Spare me, for one moment, the homily. Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had, blah blah blah I know.) 

What makes Louis C.K. funny is what makes Magic Mike feel so topsy turvy. The movie asks its viewers to suspend disbelief of this fantasy of disempowerment. 

That it succeeds makes the ticket worth its price.

Because you find yourself rooting for this guy . . .

Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings.

. . . even when your mind knows Channing Tatum doesn't need your help at all.  But you still care, because we have all felt infantilized and disempowered in that way, where you are a god in an arena you suspect doesn't really matter - lord of the stage at a stripper bar, owner of the stiffest fauxhawk at a queer dance party, head of your household, most upvoted commenter on YouTube, seventh most-shared meme on Facebook, huge in Japan - but a loser when it comes to the rest of the world. Outside of the party this fauxhawk is just a silly crown on an androgynous thirty-something clown who has to walk the lonely half mile home with a cheap liquor headache. Outside Club Xquisite, Magic Mike is just Mike, no magic.

Another irony that is pleasurable to watch is the inversion of the normal chiasmus. We have two simultaneous narratives, one character's rise and another's downfall. A desultory musclebound youth everyone calls the Kid attaches himself to Magic Mike. The younger adores the elder. "I want you to be, like, my best friend," he says after a night of drugs, sex, and swimming in Tampa bay shitwater. The Kid's star is on the rise. He starts out a violent, apathetic college dropout who can't talk to girls and ends an equity partner in a Miami business venture who can, as he says, "fuck anybody I want to fuck."  On the other hand, Magic Mike is nearing the end of his dancing career (he is approaching the age where his stripper acrobatics could herniate discs), he has lost six years of savings to angry drug dealers, his fuck buddy stops returning his calls, and a preening narcissist named Dallas (Matthew McConaughey, playing himself) tells him he is cold product. 

Shining, shimmering, splendid.

But here is the thing: Magic Mike's is the upward narrative. The Kid's fame and fortune foretell his fall. Redemption in this movie comes with traditional values! 

I have managed to get through this post without talking about the most obvious reason to go see this movie: MAN FLESH.  Copius, chiseled man flesh, forty feet high in high definition. Moving athletically, squeezing here, thrusting there. R. accused me of watching this movie because of my "undying thirst for gyrating meatheads." Which he then described with this picture, of shawarma:

The epilogue: when dancers retire, they can feed a village.

Mea culpa. Yes, the visuals will titillate generations of straight women and gay men. But don't hate the movie because it's beautiful. It's also pretty on the inside.

After the movie, M. looked over and asked, "Are you straight now?"

Yes, yes I am.