Hollywood’s Gay Sensibility

‘I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry’ and ‘Hairspray’ recycle well-worn formulas, proving Hollywood is locked in the ‘celluloid closet.’

By: Elise Nakhnikian
(Jerry Stiller, John Travolta and Nikki Blonsky star in the movie musical Hairspray.)
   Gay marriage may have worked as a wedge issue in the 2004 election, but that tactic must be on its way out. With nearly half (46 percent) of Americans now saying they support gay marriage and 40 percent reporting that they have a close friend or family member who’s gay, homosexuality isn’t just out of the closet; it’s out the door and roaring down the highway in the family minivan.
   TV is, as usual, keeping pace, giving us a range of hugely popular gay stars. For people like Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres, sexual orientation seems largely irrelevant, neither helping nor hurting their mass appeal, while for father figure Tim Gunn of Project Runway and Queer Eye’s Fab Five, their gayness is essential to their fabulousness.
   But Hollywood is still locked in "the celluloid closet," as critic Vito Russo named it in a 1985 book. In I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and the remake of Hairspray that’s in theaters now, the studios still prefer to recycle well-worn formulas or play ever so slightly new variations on old stereotypes.
   Chuck and Larry is ostensibly about being gay and Hairspray is not, yet Hairspray is the one with a gay sensibility — or, as Russo defines it, "the simple recognition of difference, the sudden understanding that something was altered or not what it should be… the sense of longing… the unspoken, forbidden feelings that were always present, always denied."
   The brainchild of John Waters, the thoroughly out and formerly outrageous King of Camp, Hairspray started in 1988 as a film, then became a 2003 Tony award-winning Broadway musical before becoming a movie again. In all its permutations, it has remained extremely likeable, buzzing with hopeful energy and delighted with its own daring, like a mischievous 9-year-old.
   It’s also distinctly retro, a honey-colored re-imagining of Baltimore circa 1962, when the tightly controlled hairdos and attitudes of the ’50s were beginning to loosen up. Waters pays bemused yet loving tribute to the ratted and conked hairstyles, ritualized dance moves, and early rock and R&B sounds — not to mention the rats, drunks and flashers — of his beloved Baltimore in this candy-colored, rose-tinted people-can’t-we-all-get-along? fantasy.
   The unlikely star of the show is a charismatic, chubby ball of teenage spunk and funk named Tracy Turnblad (played here by Nikki Blonsky and in the original by Ricki Lake, who cameos in this version as a talent scout). Tracy dreams of dancing on the Corny Collins Show, the local TV station’s version of American Bandstand. She also dreams of integrating the show, which currently features only white kids — except once a month on Negro Day.
   In the time-honored Hollywood tradition of making a heterosexual hero stand in for a gay one, Waters presumably created the tubby Tracy as a surrogate for his own young self. Being gay must have set Waters outside the center of the action just as being large does to Tracy, making both invisible to a dreamboat like Tracy’s crush, Link (Zac Efron). Their outsider status also helps both to see and admire the black kids at school, whose dance moves are so much smoother and more sophisticated than their own stiff gyrations — though you’d have to be blind not to appreciate the amazing moves of the charismatic Elijah Kelley, whose role as Seaweed will be the start of a long and illustrious career if there’s a god in movie heaven.
   Unlike most of Water’s earlier movies, Hairspray includes no cold-blooded killings, dog poop picnics, or other acts aimed at shocking straight viewers. This is a kinder, gentler movie, the work of a gracefully aging man who has moved from the fringes of mainstream pop culture into its sweet center over the course of his long career.
   Hairspray is still imbued with that recognition of difference that Russo describes. It’s also brimming with delightful oddities, like the fact that Tracy’s mom is played by a man (the divinely imperious Divine in the original movie and a sweetly simpering John Travolta here), but the most subversive thing about it is the way old-fashioned virtues like optimism, persistence, loyalty, talent, respect and an insistence on justice ultimately triumph over things like greed, money, power and beauty. The answer, this movie says, is blowing in the wind. "It’s changing out there," Tracy tells her mom. "People who are different, their time is coming."
   I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is as cynical as Hairspray is ingenuous. It’s also just as retro, but this story dredges up a different side of the early ’60s, evoking the boys’ club created by Hugh Hefner. Rather than celebrate the underdog and revel in people’s differences, it celebrates male privilege, treats women like sex toys and mocks people who are different.
   The plot is standard buddy-movie with a twist: Chuck (Adam Sandler) and Larry (Kevin James), both New York City firefighters, are longtime partners and fast friends. In fact, they’re so close that when the recently widowed Larry needs to remarry so his kids would be covered if he should die, the only person he can trust for the job is Chuck.
   Much of the movie is devoted to making it crystal clear that the two are not gay — God forbid! Nonetheless, a new city law extending benefits to gay "domestic partners" gives them a loophole: If they can just pretend that they’re an item, Larry’s kids will be taken care of. Chuck, a compulsive womanizer and a self-involved jerk, is flat-out horrified by the suggestion, but he ultimately goes along with it.
   Chuck and Larry tries to wring laughs from the mere thought of two men having sex, from their — and their fellow firefighters’ — disgust at the notion, and from Chuck’s horror at being taken for the "woman" in their relationship. Meanwhile, it spins out one stereotype after another, leering and sneering all the way. There are inflatable sex dolls and real women who look like them, a morbidly obese man whose fat is played for giggles, and an "Asian" played by Rob Schneider, complete with oversized glasses and teeth, in a role that should have been retired forever when Mickey Rooney hung up his buck teeth after shooting Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
   All is meant to be forgiven when our boys declare their true-blue (and truly hetero) love for one another in the obligatory courtroom scene — especially after poor, game Dan Aykroyd, playing their captain, marches out to declare that their charade has made everyone in the firehouse a better person. Watching them, he declares, has somehow taught everyone that sexual orientation has "absolutely nothing to do with who we are as people."
   Nice speech, Dan, but I don’t think so. The real truth of this movie was spoken by the hot lawyer Chuck falls for, in a tacked-on romance that feels as phony as everything else in this tin of canned ham. "Gays and lesbians," she said, "have not been fighting for this right (to marriage) for 40 years to be made a mockery of."
   Amen to that, sister.
I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry rated PG-13 for crude sexual content throughout, nudity, language and drug references; Hairspray rated PG for language, some suggestive content and momentary teen smoking.