| Choosing
a black homosexual to personify Hollywood seems pretty ingenious
in some way I can’t quite put my finger on. Probably
because Hollywood marginalizes both blacks and fags, whose
inclusion in mainstream fair is often contingent on their
ability to provide comic relief and/or lend a level of keepin’
it real/fashion advice to their protagonistic straight white
brothers and sisters.[1]
So
that Meshach Taylor’s flaming black ‘Hollywood’
reinforces this stereotype while also calling attention to
it via an appropriation, in toto, of the industry
that perpetuates it (not totally unlike the etymological metamorphosis
of nigger into nigga, but a more apropos yet extreme appropriation
would be if Jews started calling each other Nazi as a term
of endearment). Meanwhile Kim Cattrall personifies the post-millennial
indeterminacy of living/mediating and real/simulation as the
titular animate inanimate object. This is in addition to paralleling
Meshach’s Hollywood convention reinforcing/subverting
maneuver, in that she plays a love interest who’s explicitly
a woman but implicitly a man. For anyone with any doubts on
this point I present exhibit A, the title: MANnequin.
But
the movie stars Andrew McCarthy, whose mouth I once heard
described as a ‘puckered cat’s asshole’,[2]
as
a young romantic in the business of literally providing ‘window
dressing’, a euphemism for superficial ornamentation.
Yet the window dressing (Kim Cattrall) is as developed as
any of the other characters,[3]
and
McCarthy treats his creation with such masturbatory care that
it transforms into a flesh and blood Other. Not only is this
plot device a bizarre manifestation of the fantasy and the
fear inherent in onanism, it’s also an inversion of
the male gaze, since it turns an object into a woman instead
of the other way around. Yet this inversion is specific to
our hero McCarthy, explicitly hetero but implicitly homo (Cf.
MANnequin love interest Cattrall — plus, I mean, he
is a window dresser), since anytime a straight hetero (Police
Academy leftover G.W. Bailey) or straight homo (Meschach)
interrupts their romantic cavorting, his inverted gaze is
re-inverted as fleshy muse turns back into a piece of assembled
plastic — so that what looks like true love becomes,
retroactively, via a mediated audience, an elaborate session
of beating off and/or doll fucking.
This
is the most complicated cinengagement with the male gaze since
Silence of the Lambs, except it predates Lambs
by about four years. Jonathan Demme’s Oscar® winner
is all about the devastation caused by the false empathy of
the male gaze, which the villain embodies and which the movie
resists. By comparison, a movie that reinforces this false
empathy is the Brit rom-com Love Actually,[4]
in which
some bummin’ bro is ‘in love’ with a woman
who is not only his best friend’s wife but with whom
he has no interaction whatsoever beyond videotaping her face
in disconcertingly tender close-ups. In both cases (Lambs
and Love), the male gazer is a fucking psycho, the
difference being of course that the latter presupposes our
uncritical empathy with the male as gaze: it expects us to
cheer the validation of that male/gaze by the object itself,
Kiera Knightley, who rewards his declaration of love/psychoness
with a smile and a kiss. Whereas Lambs is pretty
straightforward in its treatment of a psycho as a psycho (that
is, in regards to Buffalo Bill not Hannibal Lecter, whose
effete psychopathology it fetishizes) since the male gaze
here leads him (cross-dressing Bill, not cannibal Lecter)
to think he can literalize his false feelings of empathy by
killing females and donning their skins, thus becoming one
with the women he watches. Within this context is our narrative
Everyman, alleged lesbian Jodie Foster, with whom we bear
the burden of the male gaze as she takes part in everyday
activities like jogging past a group of men, entering an elevator
full of men, assisting a male-dominated autopsy, or facing
off against Best (Male) Actor Lecter (the last example here
is complicated, since Lecter is the one in the cage yet Foster
is the one under the gaze), which burden reaches its apotheosis
at the end as Foster is blinded by Bill’s green-tinted
night vision gaze just inches away.
So
is Andrew McCarthy a fucking psycho? Is his a creative (if
still false) as opposed to destructive empathy, since it brings
Kim Cattrall to life? Or is this positive in fact a negative
since it implies that all women are objects until brought
to life by McCarthy’s solitary gaze and, by implication,
our own? Does Mannequin then deconstruct (by reinforcing)
the great illusion of cinema, that we the audience are somehow
exempt from the all-encompassing cultural male gaze (the huMAN
‘race’) in which we’re all a part? In any
case, there’s no disputing that something fucking out
and truly amazing is happening in the scene in which Hollywood
keeps a group of bumbling policemen at bay with a fire hose.
The sight of a gay black man parodying both the oversexed
black male and the huge black cock spraying cum everywhere
while also enacting an inverse-parody of the Rodney King beatings,
all the while cackling hysterically, is not something that
the site of me and movie companion Franke V. on the couch
eating ice cream could fully comprehend.
_________________________
[1]
Though
the fag accessory was personified with suave hetero charm
by Rupert Everett in both My Best Friend’s Wedding
and The Next Best Thing (accessory to Julia Roberts
and Madonna, respectively); a good example of the perennial
hip-by-black-association is Chenille making sure Julia Styles
enters the club wearing a “slammin’ outfit”
in Save the Last Dance (the cinematic equivalent
of the perfect ham & cheese sandwich, S the LD
is a movie me and BK took solace in every night one summer
stranded in Park City, Utah).
[2]
In
Bernstein, Jonathan 1997: Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age
of Teenage Movies. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
[3]
Two implications: 1) all movie characters are window dressing.
2) so is the audience watching them (this follows the Shakespearean
‘all the world’s a stage’ conceit that fictional
characters are not so much representations of us as they are
representations of our fictional characteristics, i.e. we
are also fictional characters)
[4]
But
some of the other romantic subplots, like the one about prime
minister Hugh Grant and his secretary with the big ass, or
Office alum Martin Freeman and Just Judy, whose subversive
relationship develops from simulated public sex to intimate
actual sex, or Emma Thompson’s pained and disappointed
love for husband Alan Rickman as he toys with and then enacts
the wandering male stereotype, were pretty tight. |