Magic Mike XXL is a more empowering movie for women than most romantic comedies, writes Megan Whelan.
There’s a scene about halfway through Magic Mike where the cheery band of strippers, somewhat down on their luck, and frankly looking like they could all use a shower, meets up with a group of older (middle-aged) women.
There’s a Hollywood script for how this is meant to go. Older women, past a certain age (NSFW) aren’t sexy. They can’t be desirable, and the idea that they might be is the joke. The idea that women over, say, 40 might still like to get busy is, in itself, funny, as generations of romantic comedies would have us believe.
MMXXL takes that idea and flips it on its head. Almost literally, given some of the dance moves.
It takes a gaggle of middle-aged women, and makes them actual characters, not caricatures. The men are men, masculine heterosexual men, but they love women. They care about women.
Another sequence is almost entirely comprised of African-American women, with a handful of black men. Our heroes are the only white faces in the room, and even that doesn’t seem that remarkable.
“The minute the beat dropped on that song,” writes one (anonymous) blogger, “I sat up in my chair–and not just because Strahan was giving his all with that buxom BW who made sure to wear her Spanx under her dress like we ALL do.”
Later, Jada Pinkett Smith's character, Rome, stalks the a stage, asking if everyone has taken their birth control, because we’re about to get into some “grown-ass woman shit”. The audience is comprised of women of all sizes, all body shapes, all types. MMXXL acknowledges, and this may come as a shock, that women are people, who look different ways, and like different things.
Photo: Unknown
I only watched the first Magic Mike recently and I was, it has to be said, underwhelmed. The acting was often awful; the dialogue was cheesy; everything felt a bit cheap and tacky. MMXXL, for a movie about male strippers, somehow manages to avoid being tacky. It’s not subtle, granted, but it’s so joyous, it’s easier to enjoy the bump and grind gymnastics.
Donald Glover, in a brilliant piece of casting, plays a rapping/singing/not quite stripping entertainer. He sings to a shy young woman about how beautiful she is, how the husband she divorced didn’t deserve her, how, given the chance, he’d worship her. When the standard movies served up to women mistake stalking for romance, is it that surprising that almost every woman in the audience seemed to sigh, thinking ‘how come real life’s not like that?’
“Believe it or not, this is an actually good movie—thoroughly entertaining, charming, well-intentioned, big-hearted, and well produced, directed, and acted,” writes Channing Tatum fangirl, and feminist writer, Roxane Gay, “Magic Mike XXL is Oscar worthy, especially for sound design and the shameless exposure of taut male abdominal muscles. I would give this movie all the Oscars and a few extras.”
It’s hard not to love a movie that has its main character, in a scene that has to have been inspired by Flashdance, dance around a workshop, grinding against power tools, before breaking into laughter. A movie that encourages, rather than shames, women’s desires.
It is, at heart, a buddy movie centred around a road trip and its climax. The men bond over failed relationships, bad business decisions, the loss of Mathew McConahey’s character in the previous film, Dallas. They realise ambitions and passions - in a scene before the final performance, they huddle together to ward off nerves, quietly affirming themselves to be “male entertainers”, only to be interrupted by Rome telling them it’s “show time, not bro time”.
“How did a sequel become both simpler and smarter than the film that came before it.” asks Buzzfeed’s Anne Helen Peterson. “I want to attribute it to Channing Tatum, the star and executive producer who’s not only demonstrated his own fluid conception of sexuality, desire, and masculinity, but refuses to take himself seriously.” Maybe, but it also seems to have been made but a group of people who actually know, and like, grown-ass women.