Magic Mike XXL [Media Notes 159]

As I watched Magic Mike XXL on Netflix the other night I realized that I’d seen it when it first came out in theaters, 2015. I don’t know what I thought about it then, but this time, I know: WTF?

I know almost nothing about the world of male strippers. Oh, I’ve seen them show up on TV shows and movies now and then. You know, a policeman or fireman shows up somewhere, a party perhaps, with a boom box. They put it down, and start dancing, wiggling their hips in and out and around and around and zip! Off comes their pants and we’re down to a gyrating jockstrap on legs. But what they’re like in clubs, clubs frequented by women, or how a troop of them perform, I haven’t a clue.

Thus I don’t know how to calibrate this movie. Is it a complete made-up fantasy? Probably not. But I don’t know where the reality is. That’s my problem.

The story is simple. A troop of male strippers from Tampa had disbanded three years ago. They decided to get back together so they can perform at a male stripping convention in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The movie follows them on the road and at the convention where, of course, they are triumphant.

Of course they have adventures, the kind of adventures you’d expect from a troop of male strippers for whom stripping is very important, (almost) existentially so, which I can understand. I am after all a musician, with a great deal of performing experience. Playing music, fully clothed, on stage in a concert hall, in a bar, or club, is different from stripping. But when you get deep into the psychological core of what’s going it, it’s not as different as you might think.

On the performing surface, that’s a lot different. A lot. Musicians generally don’t grab members of the audience, sit them down on stage, dance in front of them, and then pick them up and toss them over their head. Do male strippers actually do that? Perhaps they do, perhaps they do. The ones in this movie certainly did.

Here’s my favorite sequence from the movie, as described in the Wikipedia entry:

Arriving at a mansion, Tito tells them he knows the girl who lives there, and she is expecting them. Walking in, they are greeted by her mother Nancy and her friends, all middle-aged women. Nancy's teasing initially makes them feel awkward, but as the night progresses, the mood lightens. Mike meets Zoe again, and she tells him about how another photographer, under the guise of needing an assistant, tried to have an extramarital affair with her. Mike urges her to regain her smile at the convention.

After sleeping with Richie, Nancy lets them drive her ex-husband's car to Myrtle Beach.

Now I’ve never been in that situation, a mansion, a half-dozen middle-aged women feeling neglected, wine, music, and talk. Nancy, owner of the mansion, and Richie, one of the strippers, I get that.

It’s when we get to the convention that I get lost. The guys do have some kind of act worked out – though they abandoned their policeman’s and fireman’s uniforms along the way and have different costumes – and the act is elaborate enough that an emcee is required.

Each guy gets his turn on the stage. And the women are yelling and screaming. And each guy – I think it was each guy, but maybe not, it doesn’t matter – brings a woman up and dances to, for, and with her, with a suitable ration of athletic tossing and turning.

What I’m having trouble with is all the “queen” rhetoric being offered up by the emcee (who is a woman). I don’t remember any specific lines but something like “the queen that you are” seems typical. These guys are performing for women. Fine. And the emcee is saying that they are queens. I don’t know what that’s about.

Oh, yes, there was a game show on TV called Queen for a Day. The contestants each had fallen on hard times. The audience picked the one who’d fallen the hardest, and she’d get prizes, and the losers would get lesser prizes. At the end the host would sign-off: “This is Jack Bailey, wishing we could make every woman a queen, for every single day!” This was harmless entertainment.

But males strippers dancing for female Queens, that’s a bit different I’d like to think. In that context the queen rhetoric feels forced and a bit phony. It’s like no one really believes it, but we’re putting on a show.

Well, William Shakespeare knew how to put on a show. Here’s how he described Cleopatra:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

–Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, Scene 2

I would like to think that, when he wrote those lines, Shakespeare had a real woman in mind, perhaps his wife, but who knows, we know so little about him. And, in turn, we know relatively little about Antony and Cleopatra. We know that they were real people and that they had an affair. Beyond that, their feelings and desires, hopes and fears, about those we can only conjecture.

Shakespeare was in the same position. He may have set his play in ancient Egypt and Rome and told his story about real people. But the feelings and desires he gave to them, their hopes and fears, their dreams and motivations, they were his own and of his time.

I would like to think that the hopes, dreams, and attitudes in those six lines about Cleopatra, I would like to think that they are of our time as well. Perhaps we learned them through Shakespeare. But I don’t feel those attitudes in the queen rhetoric of Magic Mike XXL. That rhetoric is but a pale simulacrum of what Shakespeare conveyed without using the word “queen” at all. Am I asking too much of this movie? Probably. But I didn’t write the word “queen” into the script all those times. I can’t help but think that the presence of the word betrays the absence of the feeling, not simply there in the club and on stage – which is only an act. No, the feeling is absent from that world. That’s what bothers me.