Summer of Passion on Arte
If the scenes of female stripping are neat, their counterparts on the guys side have often been a pretext for pandering. Soderbergh’s film stands out by digging into the discipline’s playful and ridiculous narcissism.
From the end of the 2000s, Steven Soderbergh was busy filming bodies in all their states. Body for sale in Girlfriend Experience (2009), sick of a virus on a global scale in Contagion (2011), strained by the effort of the action film in Trapped (2011) or in the operating room in the series The Knick (2014-2015). Magic Mike will be the biggest commercial success of this momentum (167 million dollars in overall receipts for a budget of 7 million, two sequels, an adaptation in musical comedy and another in reality show). An evidence, in appearance, that could be summed up in two words (“Channing” and “Tatum”). And, if you want to dig a little deeper, the clever mix of romantic comedy, dance and documentary on the vital, playful and ridiculous narcissism of the striptease (“Fuck that mirror all the way”orders troop guru Matthew McConaughey to a rookie).
Pretext for the joke
On this last point, the unvarnished sense of lived experience of the film, of course, owes everything to Tatum’s past as a stripper when he was 18 (a small CV detail that he shares with his colleagues Chris Pratt and Javier Bardem). And yet, the history of cinema demonstrates that male stripping on the big screen has always tended to embarrass – both the viewer and the characters who get naked. No need to explain why films can be built around strippers with all the possible variations: Elizabeth Berkley as an upstart in Showgirls (1995) by Paul Verhoeven, robotic Demi Moore in Striptease (1996) by Andrew Bergman, Salma Hayek vampire in one night in hell (1996) by Robert Rodriguez, Natalie Portman in a pink wig in Closer (2005) by Mike Nichols, striking Asia Argento in Go Go Tales (2007) by Abel Ferrara, Jennifer Lopez as a con artist in Queens (2019) by Lorene Scafaria… We take care of the details, the soundtrack, the slightest nipple pasty and swaying: we take it all very seriously.
On the guys side, it’s never assumed, it’s often a pretext for pandering, for the shirt that is turned around like a towel, for the unveiling of excruciatingly ugly underpants. In American Pie (1999) by Paul Weitz, it is one of the many humiliations in the way of the cross of the protagonist, Jim, to lose his virginity (in addition, his friends can see it on a webcam). In A wind of madness (1999) by Bronwen Hughes, an all-red Ben Affleck has to perform in a gay bar to collect money to buy a used car. The choppy editing and leaning camera do nothing to make poor Ben sexy, as stiff as Barbie’s Ken. You have to go to a dream sequence to find a good male striptease scene: in the musical All the gold from heaven (1981) by Herbert Ross, against a backdrop of the crisis of the 1930s, where it is the great Christopher Walken who removes almost everything. Something to remember that the actor is an excellent dancer (remember him aerial clip of Weapon of Choice by Spike Jonze for Fatboy Slim), keeping his underwear swag on jazz, changing us from yet another You Can Leave Your Hat on in accompaniment. Jake Gyllenhaal defends himself as well as a trooper waddling with a thong-cap-of-Santa-Christmas in Jarhead (2005) by Sam Mendes, but we are still left with the crispy bonus, which tells us little about the soul of these one-day Chippendales.
Forced to undress
Until Magic Mikethe British The Full Monty (1997) by Peter Cattaneo had remained the film synonymous with male striptease par excellence. No doubt because the two films share the same socio-economic soil, where fragile men lose their means and their purchasing power. The unemployed workers of The Full Monty, forced to get undressed to, among other things, settle alimony, have the same end-of-month pangs as Channing Tatum’s Mike, who dreams of setting up his furniture craft business, or his protege Adam, who wants everything right now. “Tatum would be a Marlon Brando to Soderbergh, period A tramway named desire and On the quays d’Elia Kazanwrites Pauline Guedj in her book Steven Soderbergh, Fluid anatomy (1). Spokesperson of an America little seen in the cinema, whose muscular bodies are marked by the experience of time and the difficulty of physical work. Suddenly, as in Showgirlsin the way Mike dreams of success while being exploited by his clients and his boss, it is of course capitalism that we shed with melancholy.
To see on Arte
Sunday July 10 “Magic Mike”, the comedy that immerses us in the middle of male striptease with Channing Tatum, followed by “Patrick Swayze, actor and dancer by passion”, a portrait rich in archives thirteen years after his death. Finally, “Time of my life – Dirty Dancing on both sides of the wall” looks back at the story surrounding the release of this cult film in Germany and France.
(1) Editions Playlist Society