Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Turning Your Brain On At The Movies - Part 3
The Transporter (2002)
Written by: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen
Directed By: Cory Yuen, Louis Leterrier
What the film thinks it is about: Ex-army hardman now lives a quiet life in the south of France, doing high risk ‘transporting’ jobs, consisting mostly of driving his black BMW very fast, for the thrill and for the money. His world is turned upside down when he is asked to transport a package that turns out to be a beautiful woman attempting to stop her father illegally trafficking people. He breaks all of his rules in order to save the woman and the 400 migrants suffocating in a storage container, leading to much fighting and explosions.
What it is really about: One of the more enduringly popular examples of film studies in geek circles is the idea that 80’s action movies are really, really gay. The hallmarks of these films were large muscular men, usually bare-chested, often oiled, shooting other men with very large guns. Character arcs focused on male bonding and brotherhood, and women were usually whores, wives-killed-in-the-first-act or untrustworthy seductresses. Sometimes the men would wrestle instead of using very big guns. Sometime they would use very big knives.
Essentially:
Hero = gay
The big baddy = the hero’s lover
Any weapon = the hero’s cock.
Fighting = sex (gay)
The Transporter, starring Jason Statham, took this one step further by taking most of the ingredients of the 80’s action movie and then making them actually gay, most notably in the ‘bus depot’ scene where an unnecessarily topless Jason wrestles with half a dozen men while covered in motor oil.
2006’s The Transporter 2 took the idea even further still by setting the action in the day-glo Miami, having Jason turn down the advances of an amorous house-wife repeatedly with lines like “no, not me”, having the one overtly sexualised woman, who spends most of the running time only wearing lingerie, be a despicable psychopath, and having Jason fight half a dozen men with a large hose.
It is easy to see why this idea is popular: the very broad, uncomplicated nature of 80's action films, as well as the complete lack of thought that often went in to making them, makes constructing a subtext for them something almost any idiot can do. Constructing a subtext the film-makers didn’t intend makes you feel really, really clever (see here, and here) and gives you a, mostly illusory, sense of superiority over them. Constructing a gay subtext from a very masculine film allows you to undermine the impossible paradigms of manhood, to be iconoclastic, rebellious and individual. It also allows you to say Arnold Schwarzenegger is gay.
And it’s here that the problem with the gay subtext shows itself. It’s too easy, too obvious and it allies itself a little too conveniently with most men’s latent homophobia. The basis of the mockery of these films is making fun of gays.
This is a symptom not so much of actual gay-hating but more of a general immaturity and suspended pre-adolescence. It’s in this that a far more fruitful reading of these films can be found.
The fetishising of weaponry makes them glorified toys, the predominance of male-bonding reflects the homosociality of 10 year olds, and the distrust of female sexuality is reflective of the fears a 10 year old has when faced with his own dawning sexuality, with all the complications and humiliations that entails.
These are playground games of movies, where simplistic scenarios of masculinity are played out and practiced, full of fighting, winning and destruction-as-solution. The pumped up physiques of the 80’s action stars are not the fantasy image of a gay man, but of the cartoonish ideal masculine form of a powerless 10 year old boy.
These are the little boy equivalents of all the princess fantasies (The Princess Diaries, The Ice Princess and Pretty Woman) aimed at little girls. They are not homosexual but, instead, pre-sexual fantasies.
Even The Transporter - an 80’s action film made after the fact, in full, gleeful knowledge of the genre’s gay reputation and willing to play those aspects to their full daffy potential - still reads best when seen as a story about a little boy.
The Transporter lives alone and lavishes all his attention on his amazing car, which is fitted out with cool gadgets like switchable number plates and secret access codes. He is a master of fighting, is an expert in weapons and has an almost preternatural ability to know what is going to happen next.
His is the fantasy of a little boy dreaming of being strong, being capable, being respected, being free of his parents and having the very best toys. No commitments, no emotional ties and no homework.
The Transporter has very firm rules that he lives by – no names, no questions, never look in the package, never break a deal - that stops him getting involved. Then he looks into a package he is transporting, it turns out to be a woman in the shape of Shu Qi, and everything goes to hell. His car gets blown up, then his house gets blown up and then he gets arrested, all while lots of bad people try and punch him to death.
The real, adult world is messy and confusing, there are no obvious ways to ‘win’ and there are these terrible things called emotions that you have to learn how to deal with. No wonder a kid would prefer those clear, simple rules that make everything safe and dependable. No wonder a kid would be terrified of the uncertainty and vulnerability that the ‘other’ – the woman – would bring.
By the end of the film, The Transporter has accepted this new world of emotional ties and dismissed his old values – best shown by him having to drive increasingly crappy cars, something that would have symbolised failure and humiliation before. He saves the day, saves the migrants, gets the girl (well, it’s a bit vague on that, but they do have sex about halfway through the film) and lives happily ever after, now he has finally become a man.
By themselves, films as little boy power fantasies are no bad thing. Many stories are about the act of growing up, of entering sexuality, of accepting responsibility and so on. Most superhero stories use superpowers as a metaphor for the changes adolescants go through while entering adulthood. 2005’s Fantastic Four was absolutely about turning from child to teenager. When the Four fall out towards the end of the movie they argue like impulsive ten year olds. This is because they are.
But once comic book movies get beyond that story of growing up, they tend to lose their way. After the origin story you've just got a lot of recycled punching. See the later entries in most superhero franchises (and pray that Spiderman 3 is awesome). See also the often painful attempts to make superhero tales 'adult'.
It is this that is the ultimate criticism of those 80's action movis. The protagonists stomp through their films like Godzillas, unstoppable and unbeatable. They are supermen without origin stories, without the ability to grow up, and stuck in this perpetual pre-adolescance of a fighty-punch-bang world.
The Transporter 2, which dumps all the 'growing up' subtext in favour of endless, ostentatiously absurd action, is showing up the stupidity of action-hero as super-hero. When they are made indestructible from the outset, there's nowhere for the film to go but towards ever more impossible feats of heroism with ridiculous, and sometimes camp, results.
An evil doctor asks the transporter at one point if he thinks he is superman. Then the transporter jumps out of a forth storey window to catch the vials of antidote that the evil doctor just threw out of it. Then the transporter fights on-coming traffic and wins.
Internet reactions to The Transporter 2 have been mixed. Some have dismissed it as being too silly and unbelievable, and that assumed belief in the believability of action heroes gives us a good idea of where these people are developmentally. Others have embraced it for its glorious over-the-topness.
And here's the final part of the 80's action movie equation: enjoying them ironically. The Transporter 2 is a knowing comedy just as The Transporter is, at times, knowingly homoerotic, but the problem with too much arch-knowingness is that, at some point, it becomes indistinguishable from that which it is pastiching. Equally, what is the difference between constantly ironically watching 80's action movies (or any other 'bad' movie) and simply constantly watching them? Finally, what is the difference between mocking these films for being gay and just mocking gays? If you do it all the time, you actions start to speak louder than your attitude.
The Transporter films are fun, but they still fall into this problem of irony. They are not particularly great films, fall into the 'just another fight scene' malaise of most other action movies, and their subversive agenda to free up the sexuality of the genre and undermine its cliches amount to little more than 'some of this action stuff is a bit gay, isn't it?'.
They can have fun with the gay stuff if they like, but they are still just 80's action films, and the ones they actually made back in the 80's often didn't interrupt the carnage with so much as a text.
With any game of movie-interpretation, the interpretation will usually say more about the interpreter than the movie itself. Ironically watching 80's action movies (or ironically making them) does not mean you are a secret homosexual/fascist/psychopath. It means you like really bad movies.
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Brilliant.
Awesomely gay, sir.
Nicely done.
If only I could marry a woman named Andrew, who writes like you.