me walking onstage at an academic conference: [taps microphone] Is this thing on? Oh, good. Hi. Hello. I just wanted to say that if Magic Mike is about exploring the intoxication, danger, and ultimate moral degradation wrought by American capitalism, personified in the form of Dallas (named to evoke a certain particularly masculine and individualist form of Americanness), who presents as seductive and flattering but is ultimately revealed to be mercenary, self-interested, manipulative, dishonest, and avaricious, then Magic Mike XXL, it made me a new person, is about the importance of imagining a joyful and egalitarian space beyond the reaches of capitalism. Magic Mike XXL opens with Tarzan saying, Dallas is gone, and although we learn that this was a joke and Dallas, like any successful corporate empire, is merely busy expanding his enterprise overseas, the movie encourages us to consider the value of living, if only temporarily, as if Dallas is gone, that is to say, as if the strictures that bound us into roles for which we were not suited and which we did not enjoy performing (e.g., the fireman routine, bestowed upon—this is crucial as an example of the cruelty of the ownership class—someone who in fact is afraid of fire) have evaporated, replaced by a fundamentally different organizing force (symbolized by foreign-named and female Rome and Paris), and we are now free to imagine ourselves and our relationships as they might be if created wholly of our own design (e.g. maybe we want to erotically dance in celebration of our admiration for romantic commitment and our free-spirited intensity in the moment of sexual consummation instead of being a fireman). The fact that it is functionally a sports movie with no stakes further points to the film’s desire to undermine the artificial elevation of competition in American culture, suggesting that the humanly designed possibility of “loss” could, in a post-patriarchal utopia—
andulkaphoto
dailybridgerton
stormborns
yousharknotpass
