In the middle of Magic Mike XXL, Richie (Joe Manganiello) is self-actualizing in a gas station parking lot. “I’m not a fucking fireman. I’m a male entertainer.”
Richie is realizing that he is not just his tacky fireman costumes. He is not just a single dude struggling to find love because his penis is so unfathomably large. He is a man who has found his calling. He’s a fucking male entertainer, and he is finally delighted to be so, thanks to the brotherly assistance of his merry band of male strippers pals.
Whenever I watch Magic Mike XXL, I feel painfully aware of what we have lost to the majority irony-poisoned, corporate, nearly monopolized modern cinema complex. I can think of little lately that drips with such unselfconscious earnestness, such sincere fantasy as Magic Mike XXL does.
In Magic Mike XXL, we are offered a glimpse of utopia; a world where female pleasure reigns supreme, where kinda-dumb male strippers with hearts of gold don’t just provide, but love their job.
In the utopia that is Magic Mike XXL, sex workers of all forms are respected. They are not firefighters, they are not sailors. Do not disrespect them by calling them what they are not. They are thong-clad dancers. They are, as a sparkly eyed Matt Bomer and a fedora-d but shirtless Donald Glover, muse, potential healers. Men who listen, who observe your bodily desire, when maybe no one else does.
I feel I cannot describe the plot better than Mark Asch does in his transcendent himbo cinema analysis, “Good Boys”. Asch writes of Magic Mike XXL as “a feel-good musical about bros hugging out their differences, encouraging each other to follow their dreams, and caravanning across the South performing worshipful, uplifting routines for “goddesses.”
In the utopia that is Magic Mike XXL, you do not have to take sexual risk to find these beautiful men to bump and grind on you for dollar bills. They stumble into your girls’ night, your job at the gas station, they appear in your drag bar (and are capable and willing of participating in your voguing competition! Channing Tatum may just do a death drop for your viewing pleasure!).
In the utopia that is Magic Mike XXL, being buff and beautiful is a sacred calling for certain men who are in it for the sincere love of thrusting and writhing and listening to women giddy squeal. Channing Tatum is moved to humping his woodworking table (because in this utopia, each of these men have a secret, bleeding-heart passion beneath all of their thrusting and grinding — carpentry, painting, reiki, artisanal frozen yogurt) when the sweet sounds of “Pony” prove too potent of a sense memory for him.
In the utopia that is Magic Mike XXL, these men and their beautiful bodies are not taken for granted. These men are obvious Adonises, ogled by drag queens and middle-aged women, by pretty blondes and shy store clerks, and they are happy to soak up this ogling. More importantly, these obscenely cut bodies are not utilized for military propaganda-adjacent superhero goop, but instead for the very real and important work of pleasing women.
RS Benedict accurately eviscerated the superhuman, uber-muscular body that is ridiculously becoming the “norm” on our theater screens in her seminal, constantly-cited work “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny”. Perhaps the bodies of Magic Mike XXL is not above her critiques. It is the same kind of body as Thor’s or Captain America’s, after all. But here, at least, everyone is beautiful and everyone is horny, and the obscenely muscular body is utilized for the much more valiant purposes of being petted by hot, drunk mom Andie McDowell.
I do not think we have to constantly eat our solemn, serious vegetable equivalents at the movies. I just don’t think I want the only escapism to be superhero goop. What I realize I want, as I watch “Big Dick” Richie unzip in the gas station, is a fucking entertainer.
