Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike is distinguished from most films about sex work by the fact that the sex workers in question are male. Yet, in other respects it reproduces the usual Hollywood dynamics of sexploitation with a disheartening fidelity. On the one obscenely gesticulating hand, most of the movie’s energy and originality comes from the lascivious performers of those sex worker guys doing sex work. But—per genre diktats—it simultaneously stigmatizes and distances itself from that work, urging the viewer to feel superior to and unimplicated in the spectacle they’re consuming.
The star of both the sex work and the movie is Mike Lane (Channing Tatum), a 30-year-old male stripper in Tampa who dreams, alternately, of getting equity in the strip club and starting a custom-made furniture business. He also does a range of blue-collar side-jobs, on one of which he meets the hapless, dead-broke, but pretty-faced 19-year-old Alex (Alex Pettyfer.) Mike introduces Alex to the world of stripping, and Alex introduces Mike to his earnest sister Brooke (Cody Horn).
The highlight of the film are the stripper performances, which are ridiculous exercises in campy sweat and pec. There are cowboys with assless chaps, umbrella phalluses, military chants ending in regimental torn shirts, Channing Tatum spun like a top on wires from the ceiling before doing a hot robot techno dance, and lots of women screaming, covering their mouths, stuffing money into g-strings, and laughing outrageously as the strippers cosplay various forms of intercourse at various distances. It’s sleazy, distasteful and magnetic, not least because this kind of open objectification of male bodies—for women but also, in Alex’s admiring stare at Mike, for men—is rarely presented so blatantly or enthusiastically on screen.
Unfortunately, next to the spectacle is a much less daring narrative about how sex work is degrading and so to find your soul you need to find a nice straight (in various senses since Mike’s pre-Brooke girlfriend is bisexual) significant other and get out of the business. The dangers of the industry—drugs, shitty bosses, violence by clients, encounters with organized crime—are all depicted with obligatory finger-wagging.
But rather than examining how the cause of a lot of the downsides of the business are tied to stigma, the film indulges in stigma itself. Mike delivers a stuttering, heartfelt speech to Brooke towards the movie’s end in which he insists that he’s not his job, by which he means that his whole life isn’t degraded or worthless because he’s in the sex industry. But the film doesn’t believe him and neither does Brooke, who responds to his passionate and touching insistence on his own dignity by telling him that she doesn’t think even he believes himself—which neatly sidesteps the obvious point that, again, sex workers are relentlessly stigmatized and therefore often feel degraded, not because sex work is inherently evil or disgusting, but because when everyone tells you you’re disgusting, it’s difficult not to think they might be right.
There’s a parallel here with Soderbergh’s first, sex-soaked indie hit, Sex, Lies and Videotape, in which, again, much of the narrative is linked to the protagonist’s kink; he can only orgasm by watching video tapes of women talking to him about their sexual experiences. Again, abandoning the kink, becoming normal, is supposed to be a sign of health. SL&V, though, also spends time showing how fucked up “normality” is, which complicates its moralistic ending. In contrast, Brooke’s relationship with her boring first boyfriend is only shown in flashes, and as far as character development she barely exists except to symbolize the good world that’s not sex work.
Magic Mike feels like terrain that a younger Soderbergh might’ve done great things with. By 2012, though, the director had integrated himself into Hollywood and its expectations to such an extent that he’s only able to show his stuff in flashes. There’s some magic in those stripper performances. But the movie around them is too decked out in moralistic drag to deliver the goods.