💾 Archived View for welovedyou.xyz › janwen › musi › 062423m.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:31:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-07-10)
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I had no idea this existed! Basic plot synopsis: a laid-off steelworker in Sheffield has to come up with enough money to maintain joint custody of his kid, and stumbles upon the potentially lucrative venture of stripping. And the stripping really isn't joked at in and of itself! We watch a bunch of burnt out dudes rediscover meaningful connection by getting over themselves. There's interesting stuff in there about dance being a more humane form of work? Like, their old line boss sort of learns to bond with them more genuinely because he is no longer artificially above them, and they sort of rediscover the good memories of co-operating and doing a good job together but without the horrible danger.
It's also a film about men learning to love themselves specifically by becoming acquainted with the desires of actual straight women and getting out of their heads about masculine expectations, which is kind of insane. Speaking of which
sanguine LOVES this movie. She's watched it many times. In her words, they fake us out in the first 20 minutes to make us think there's going to be a plot, then they give up and decide to celebrate male stripping as a profession for the length of a film. sanguine was excited to watch it with me, also because in her words, "I 'get men' more than [she does]."
Yep. This movie sure did give me some feelings about men. largely because they just spend the majority of the movie being incredibly nice and supportive of each other and also extremely respectful towards women. much like i was surprised by the dignity afforded the schlubby guys in Monty, i was surprised by the dignity afforded the female clients in this movie. I guess it makes sense, given the target audience. But wow. I guess it says a lot about me and/or society that female desire on film is so novel to me.
The dancing in this film is extremely impressive. like. these are really talented performers. And it's a great spectacle and it's pretty hot and made me wish I was small and could get thrown around by a large man in an aesthetic and sweaty fashion. Curiously, actual sex hardly even entered into the fantasy. Like, to me a kind of teasing this profound is basically coitus already. I've had "real" sex that was way less appealing than what the everywoman clients in this movie got. But also at a certain point the polish itself started to wear on me. All these men have practically the same body. They never fuck up on stage. The stakes of the narrative really fall away before the totalizing sex appeal of the stripping itself, which might seem like a naive complaint, since it's "pornography", but god dammit, porn benefits from a plot which is not so deeply isolated from "the porn parts". The men evaporate into images in the absence of humanity to ground them.
It made me think that this must have been what those beach party movies from the 60s were like. 2 hours of nothing but Good Vibes. Donald Glover's character has a shockingly frank line where he says that the women they perform for "are lied to and not listened to by men all day, and we show up specifically to treat them well. It's like we're healers." Which I think may be true to an extent, but it's very self-congratulatory for a big budget film lmao
As has been the case for some of our double features as of late, the edible kicked in towards the middle of this one. sanguine and I melted our brains down in each others'arms and quickly forgot about men.
i was gonna suggest "femboy magic mike" as a movie with more appeal in my circles but i remembered that's basically ouran host club