Matthew McConaughey – Three Guineas

Image Credit: Lion's Gate and Everest Entertainment — Image Credit: Lion’s Gate and Everest Entertainment

Mud is being marketed as an updated retelling of Huckleberry Finn, but I don’t recall Mark Twain ever expounding the lesson so central to this film: “Boys, bitches will break your heart.” Now, you would probably surmise that a film featuring such a warning would be somewhat less than progressive when it comes to gender, but you would be wrong. Very, very wrong. Jeff Nichols’s coming-of-age tale of a 14-year-old boy assisting a wanted man in his quest to sail away with his one true love would seem to fit in neatly with the spate of recent hero films, featuring helpless women and taciturn men. But Mud subverts this narrative, highlighting the absurdity of the male presumption that his story is, without question, the only story. Mansplaining, it turns out, does not lead to healthy relationships nor happy Hollywood endings—especially not when the explainer in question is Matthew McConaughey.

Although Mud (McConaughey) recites the epic love song of Mud and Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) as though he’s her avenging knight and she’s his innocent queen, the film suggests that he’s leaving out a few, perhaps key, details. And it becomes increasingly clear that the tale Mud is spinning is his story alone. Mud simply assumes that if he loved Juniper from the moment she helped rescue him from a snakebite, she must have signed up for everlasting devotion as well. He assumes that if he wants to forgo showering for months and travel down the Mississippi River on a filthy boat with no money, she will too. These are not excellent assumptions. Continue reading “The Rest of the Story”

Mike Lane (Channing Tatum), the titular figure in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, is perhaps the nicest man I have ever encountered on screen outside of a Hallmark Christmas film. Although I initially found it easier to believe that a half-lizard man was stalking Manhattan’s sewers than that someone with Tatum’s looks could be so kind, I quickly realized that Soderbergh was using this hyper-sweetness against Mike. It’s the initial warning that he’s not your father’s hero. When Mike first saunters across the frame, he is nude. I point this out not simply as an excuse to include this gif but because it’s significant that Mike first exists as mere body. This body underscores his physical masculinity (he does in fact have a Y chromosome—a very, very nice one), but the film calls into question the cultural signification of this flesh. He may be male, but does this make him a man?

Since Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949 and drag queens burst onto the pop cultural scene in the 1990s, people have acknowledged that femininity is something you do, not something you are. As Judith Butler taught generations of gender studies majors, femininity is an act that must be continuously performed in order to have meaning. Masculinity, on the other hand, has mostly remained the default position. Men are assumed to be masculine—unless they act in an obviously feminine manner—and women who are not performing their proper feminine roles are immediately derided as masculine. Masculinity itself is, therefore, taken for granted, the natural gender at odds with feminine artificiality. With the help of a few rip-away pants and leopard thongs, Magic Mike attacks masculinity’s unassailable position by revealing that it is no less a performance than femininity. Indeed, in Magic Mike, masculinity is entirely a performance—one centered on money. Continue reading “Men at Work”