Big Sound Saturdays: Valentine’s Day Blues

 

What’s everyone doing this weekend? I, personally, spent Friday night in The Pit trying to figure out how to make a condensed and an expanded version of blues Valentine’s Day that captures the elation, the bummer, the prickliness, and the hilarity that is this made-up holiday. On Sunday, I’ll play the longer version on the radio and potentially get one of the phone calls I used to get in my New York radio days when I had a V-Day show, a mouth-breather asking if he could pick me up from the studio and take me out to dinner. See what I’m talking about? Alone, together?

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Reel Women: ’60s Sex Comedies

This month’s Reel Women is dedicated to a brief blip in the generic morphology of the romcom known as the sex comedy. Between the large-budget movie musicals of the 1950s that replaced sex with song, and the notoriously bleak cinematic landscape of the 70s in which, it seems, only Woody Allen bothered to produce romcoms (a sign that the genre was, indeed, on the rocks), the sex comedy reigned with the sugary self-assurance of a pre-Nixon world. With an aesthetic that I can only describe as what mid-century Hollywood imagined middle America imagined New York to look like, it brought glamour to middle class sex.

Dedicated to the sexual exploits of the newly urban and distressingly unmarried boomer generation, the sex comedy—like all romcoms—attempted to deal with a lot of anxieties about gender, sexuality and class by marrying them off. Despite its name, the sex comedy is exceptionally chaste. Although its characters talk more explicitly and soberly about sex than almost anywhere else in American cinema before them thanks to the Hays Code, they never actually move beyond a theoretical discussion of the mechanics of premarital sex. Two decades earlier, audiences saw more bed-hopping in the screwball comedy than they would find in these movies. Instead, sex in the sex comedy is tasked with both emblematizing a new politics of gender parity while also providing the occasion to force those politics back into the home, ensconced within a loving and now sexually-fulfilling marriage.

The postwar decades saw a perfect storm of cultural and political agitation around sex and the sexual practices of heteronormative Americans. Both Playboy magazine and Alfred Kinsey’s second and most controversial report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, debuted in 1953. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1962, and it became increasingly clear that the happy housewife was a myth and teens and women were having all kinds of sex despite the Leave It To Beaver-ish representations of family life. The Pill was released in 1961, and individual states began rolling back their abortion bans throughout the 60s, eventually culminating in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973. Freud’s theories on sexuality were so permanently in the water that you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a joke—or a straight-faced observation—about Oedipal desire. In other words, despite our vision of the 1950s as a supremely traditional, family-values oriented time—a nostalgic fantasy manufactured by the TV cowboy in the Reagan White House—it was actually as volatile and anxious about the institution of marriage as we are now.

The sex comedy is a pastiche of mid-century gender politics, a precious remnant from the early days of the Second Wave written from the other side. Metabolizing feminist concerns over professional equality, sexual freedom, and unmarried independence, the sex comedy solves these problems through hetero pairing rather than political activity—or rather, the only political activity in these films is marriage itself. In fact, the heroine is both a straw feminist and a romantic lead, seeking equality with her male professional rival while succumbing to the selfsame as a love interest.

This is how the sex comedy goes: an attractive white woman living in the big city with a burgeoning career but a dour love life develops a personal or professional animosity, erotic in intensity, with a faceless man who has made it his purpose to crack her frigid self-possession through tricks, foul or fair. Once the hero accidentally discovers the luscious body belonging to his competition—in this world, the demure, musical comedy stylings of Doris Day are treated as the most sexually inspiring thing in Manhattan—he is forced to mask his identity in order to seduce her. Disguised as a sensitive, gentile, sexually mild drip, he manipulates the heroine into seducing him until his ploy is revealed and she declares that she will never forgive him. But by then, it’s too late. She has succumbed to his charms and is obliged by the power of her own sexual desire to quietly ignore his betrayal and ride off into the sunset with him.

Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor in Down with Love | Image from fanpop.com

If you’ve seen Down With Love, a loving, beat-for-beat send-up of the genre, you know the rhythm.

Like most romcoms, these films don’t pass the Bechdel test. In fact, in this world, there is only room for one respectable middle-class girl in all of Manhattan. Every other female character is either a middle-aged maid who provides our heroines with the only thing that will pass for girl-talk in these movies, or they are showgirls, actresses, and French women whose apparently casual sexual relationships with the male lead disqualify them from true femininity. It’s almost as if our heroine wins by default of being the only virginal choice left.

Virginity itself is a strangely ambivalent category in these films. Although the heroine’s relative chastity is the very thing that makes her the heroine, it is also a source of shame or contempt. One of the first exchanges between Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Pillow Talk ridicules the barren bedscape of the heroine, Jan:

Brad Allen: Look, I don’t know what’s bothering you, but don’t take your bedroom problems out on me.

Jan Morrow: I have no bedroom problems. There’s nothing in my bedroom that bothers me.

Brad Allen: Ohh, that’s too bad.

Even more notably, the heroine of Sex and the Single Girl spends most of the movie attempting to hide her virginity from the hero whose purpose it is to ruin her business as a sex therapist by revealing her as a romantic novice. The heroine’s fastidiousness about sex in these films is meant to betray an unenlightened prissiness that is unacceptable even in marriage and must be hijinks-ed away before her sexuality is safely ensconced in matrimony.

The sexual politics of Sex and the Single Girl are even more striking because they are directly tied to the real life cultural landscape. Named after the advice book of the same name by Helen Gurley Brown, who would later go on to found Cosmopolitan magazine, it follows the exploits of a woman named Dr. Helen Gurley Brown (Natalie Wood) who writes an advice book called Sex and the Single Girl. Her book, which advises single women to own their desires and have affairs with married men, is a controversial sensation and attracts the attention of a tawdry magazine journalist (Tony Curtis) who wants to write an exposé proving that Dr. Brown has never taken her own advice. Turning the book into a sex comedy means turning Brown herself, an instrumental figure in the Second Wave, into a naive priss in need of a husband. These movies trope feminism in order to reify tradition, celebrating the new sexual freedoms afforded to white middle-class women at the same time that they seek to put them in their place.

Meanwhile, male sexual dysfunction is a crucial plot device. In their attempts to seduce the heroine, the heroes of these films always adopt an impotent, sexually unassuming persona. Through a series of phone calls in Pillow Talk, Brad convinces Jan that the sensitive cowboy he is pretending to be is gay—“there are some men who…how shall I put this? Well they’re very fond of their mother. They like to share bits of gossip. Collect recipes.” This conversation is made all the more cruel by the fact that Rock Hudson was gay in real life. And Tony Curtis’s Bob shows up to Dr. Brown’s office as an impotent patient in need of therapy in Sex and the Single Girl. It seems that without an impotent straw man, the empowered straw feminist is neither empowered nor, finally, transformed into a wife.

These films seem to want to turn masculine vulnerability into a farce—it becomes simply a role played by a cocky alpha—in order to protect masculinity from true vulnerability. The type of vulnerability, say, made possible by a feminist politics. Although the trajectory of the sex comedy is from career woman to wife through the crucible of normative sexuality, it must get there by queering the masculine. A recurring gag throughout Pillow Talk involves Brad hiding from Jan in the office of an obstetrician where he distractedly attempts to make an appointment and convinces the doctor that he is, miraculously, a pregnant man. The last shot of Pillow Talk is not of the happy couple, but of Brad being dragged into the doctor’s office after cheerfully declaring that he’s “going to have a baby!” He may have gotten the girl and returned to his alpha persona, but, the movie seems to say, he is still a little queer.

Magic Mike XXL: Pleasure in the Crowd [Movie Review]

Two women go to a matinee showing of Magic Mike XXL.

[Spoilers ahead, though it’s hard to spoil a movie that cares so little about its plot. Knowing the narrative trajectory shouldn’t ruin anybody’s experience of this movie.]

What we were expecting:

EL: The first Magic Mike was a movie about capitalism masquerading as a movie about abs, and I was really convinced that the sequel would dump the capitalism and hit heavy on the abs. And, for the most part, it did just that. The burlesque set pieces were spectacular, and the drama over money and entrepreneurial ambition was kept to a minimum. What was unexpected was the amount of time the movie dedicated to sitting with male friendship—just letting us watch while men talked to each other. Not in high intensity, the-bomb’s-about-to-blow situations, but during the conversations that happen when six men go on a nostalgic road trip together. I was also preparing for some great female gaze moments, which did not disappoint, and I was thankful that we weren’t forced to endure much of a romance plot. When you go to see a strip show, you don’t want to think about your stripper’s girlfriend, and the same holds true in a movie about strippers.

KS: I hadn’t seen the first movie so I had no idea what to expect. I think I was hoping for a dance movie/ female gaze romp and on that account I was not disappointed. For me, the movie reflects its knowledge of the assumed audience demographic (straight women, maybe middle-aged), but I was pleasantly surprised in the various ways this was manifested: the way the men talked to and about women, moments of sheer gratuitous fun (bonus points for showing pleasure on everyone’s faces!), and the diversity in the mass of women who made up the audience. Actually, the movie’s efforts to engulf viewers in its fantasy was one of my favorite parts—we could have easily been a part of the audience at the stripper convention which is conveniently held on July 4th weekend…

Things we liked:

EL: It was strange to me how little women signified in this movie. The love plot was pretty understated, and for the most part women only really showed up as audience members in the strip shows. This mostly worked for me. I liked that the way the movie catered to female desire wasn’t through our identification with a single romantic lead but through the anonymous crowds of women at the shows.

Image @magicmikemovie / Twitter

KS: Yeah, I was not so into the understated love plot, especially at the moment when Mike pulls his romantic interest onto the stage, breaking the fantasy demarcated by the performance space. It’s significant that in all of the other performances, female desire is embodied by a collective of individual, nameless women. Even though individual women and individual narratives of disenchantment with men and sexuality pepper the movie, ultimately women experience pleasure and gratification together. Adding a named, romantic interest spoils that fantasy—the performance becomes about one woman rather than all women.

EL: Right. Or by watching each other being done-to on the stage of the strip show. Like when Mike pulls his love interest on stage, the real pleasure is all of the women in the audience getting to watch and identify with her physical contact with his body. The woman on stage is the proxy body for all of the women’s desires in the room, which is why the romance plot doesn’t work so well. The strip show is not interested in individual pleasure, but in the collective pleasure made possible by the spectacle of simulated sex.

KS: The romantic plot enables the blurring between the real world of Mike Lane and the performance world of Magic Mike which is a line continually transversed throughout the film. One interesting claim Mike made while he was trying to convince the crew to write new dances is that their repertoire did not reflect them as anything other than stereotypical male entertainers (i.e., none of them were actually firefighters in real life). Thus, for Mike, performance should be connected in some way with reality in order to be authentic. While this certainly lays the ground for the romantic subplot and enables some pretty nifty final dances, it seems like a sketchy claim to me. I suppose the insistence on the reality/performance connection could also be read as a way that men’s fulfillment [albeit psychological] works its way back into a film about female pleasure: the men need to be fulfilled by their performance and that it not possible through providing pleasure alone.

EL: Yeah, the way authenticity works in the performance is really weird. Because pleasure is also strangely inauthentic. Like none of the audience women actually get to have sex with the performers, and none of the performers actually desire the women in the audience, and yet that is the only kind of pleasure that seems to be authentic in the movie. The other, more individual and more traditionally authentic pleasures like actual sex are almost always disappointing. One of the strippers bemoans how his sexual encounters are always frustrating because of a problem related to his dick, and a group of middle-aged women confess that their sex lives with their husbands are less than fantastic even as a genuinely erotic encounter for one of them involves getting a lap-dance and simulated oral sex from one of the strippers.

KS: Also, as flamboyantly performative as the dances are, in some ways they purport to affect healing in the real lives of women as individuals (even though the pleasure is experienced via the collective). In the example of the group of middle-aged women, the erotic experience Ken provides is meant to empower the woman to voice her sexual desires to her husband. The performative healing takes effects only in the world outside of the performance space.

EL: Exactly, like supposedly inauthentic collective pleasure can be genuinely healing. There are multiple moments when the male strippers “heal” women by involving them in performances. Each time, the payoff of the performance was that the woman smiles or laughs rather than gets off. (We don’t want to spoil the gas station scene, but it was one of the highlights.)

KS: And another thing, as the men make it to Rome’s club and see Donald Glover’s (Andre) rap/dance combo, they realize that they can offer more of their authentic, non-stage-name selves in their performance. (Andre identifies primarily as a musician who works at Rome’s club preparing for his EP to drop). From this angle, combined with Mike’s ideas about changing the group’s  routines, we can read the men’s insistence on authenticity as a way to insist that they are more than bodies.

EL: Yeah. It’s like the trajectory of the movie for the male performers is to transcend their embodiedness—or to include their “authentic” selves in their performances—while the trajectory of the movie for the women is to become a mass or crowd. This isn’t a bad thing for me. I liked that women become less individuated—and therefore less objectified—while the men have to negotiate how their individuality makes them vulnerable to objectification.

KS: Also, as a sidenote, we have only talked about straight women’s desire because the film almost exclusively portrays heterosexual desire. The closest thing to queerness we get is a scene featuring drag queens, which doesn’t necessarily mean gay.

EL: To finish up, let’s talk about the only thing both of us had a real problem with, which was the way the movie uses race. The men go to a black strip club run by Jada Pinkett Smith where, it seems, the black strippers teach them how to dance—you know, the new, black way. At one point, Ken says that Donald Glover’s rap performance has “revolutionized” male burlesque.

KS: This is a really common trope—throwback to D2: The Mighty Ducks (totally dating myself here) where Team USA isn’t playing well enough, so they go down to the hood to play streetball with the black kids in order to learn how to play “real hockey”. Thankfully though, Magic Mike XXL didn’t fall into the trap of locating black authenticity in “the hood”.

EL: Overall, I really liked this movie. The bromance was great, and the beefcake was well done.

KS:  Served with buns and cheese.

Weekly Dance Break: Sausage (Lil Mama)

Eggs, Bacon, SAUSAGE! Lil Mama’s still got the moves. And some pretty on point advice about safe sex.

Aaaand we couldn’t mention Lil Mama without throwback to this jam, which sounds just as good and dance-worthy in 2015 as it did four years ago.

Big Sound Saturdays: Blues Innuendo (Where’s His Hot Dog?)

The innuendo song has a particular infectious, indefatigable kind of cool when performed, and mastered, by a woman. Where contemporary popular music tends towards the explicit—there are precedents in the blues for that, too (see Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘Em Dry”)—the blues (country, vaudeville, minstrelsy, and hokum) scenes were once overrun by cloying gestures and near-overt sexual propositions. And for every Blind Boy Fuller crooning for “pig meat,” there was a Lil Johnson, Bessie Smith, and Georgia White craving “hot nuts.”

From “jelly roll” and “sugar” to train rides and elevator shafts, innuendo singers are fanciful and strange, hilarious and, occasionally, heart-rending. Keeping it light and jive-y, Leola B. and Kid Wesley Wilson’s 1929 “Uncle Joe” tropes the call-and-response chit-chat common to early American slapstick theater that becomes an even weirder, sexier repartee between the classic vaudeville duet Butterbeans and Susie, whose song-fight is especially biting in “Elevator Papa, Switchboard Mama.” A peripatetic love song about a man who just can’t please his woman, Butter bemoans Susie’s “bad connection:” “You’s one operator that’s hard to get. I worked at your receiver til I’m all upset!,” to which, “What! Before you use your lever, you should close the door! With me, you always get stuck between the floors.”

Just as common as praise for the “candy man,” “hot nuts,” and the “handy man” (let it be known, Ethel Waters’ “My Handy Man” is a literal catalogue of innuendos)—is their refutation. Instead of repudiating their sexuality, blueswomen reaffirm it by trashing their male counterparts. When, in 1931, Bo Carter asks to “put my banana in your fruit basket,” Memphis Minnie responds to him three years later that she “don’t want that thing / I wouldn’t have it hangin’ around my floor” in “Banana Man Blues.” In the classic “Mama Don’t Allow,” we’re never really sure what Mama “wants,” but it’s clear that it’s her call being responded to, not vice versa. I admit that it’s cheating to throw female impersonator, vaudevillian costume designer, and classic blues accompanist Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon into the female innuendo mix, but playing a woman playing a man into “her” clutches is irresistible. This genre bends and bends but never really breaks.

Off-kilter misconnections and oft-strained puns characterize most of these tunes, but there’s an underbelly whose mere proximity to all these light-hearted vaudevillian skits implicates the “genre” in a bigger, and darker, female sexuality. Take, for example, Lillian Glinn’s morphologic and devilish “Packing House Blues:”

A bucket of blood, a butcher knife is what I crave

A bucket of blood, a butcher knife is what I crave

Let me work in your packing house,

Daddy while I am your slave.

Sexuality and murder come, explicitly, together, where the pleasure of penetration and of “petite mort” both assume the cloak of death without being subsumed by it and toying, for better or for worse, with a history of domination where the “slave” isn’t usually the one yielding the knife.

Susan Bordo does well to remind us that one signal of racism is the cultural construction of black women as “more bodily than the white ‘races’,” and Deborah McDowell answers that the body is “a malleable plastic surface” and “a battleground.” In the innuendo song, I see these blueswomen refusing re-inscription from the outside and refiguring themselves powerfully from within. These songs don’t have to be protest songs, but they do undeniably celebrate and subvert sexuality, be it with the cloying horn of the Candy Man or the strange, buoyant sadness of the Tuba Lady Blues.