Cross-Dress for Success
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Movies Cross-Dress for Success By John Podhoretz The Birdcage is about a drag queen who hardly ever dresses in drag, believes in family values, and never touches his live-in lover of 20-plus...
...indeed, last summer's drag comedy, To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar!, died at the box office due to the anxiety such a freakshow sight inspires in audiences...
...It's a gambit as clever as the one Bill Clinton has been playing these past few months, and Nichols and May follow theirs to its logical conclusion...
...Love him, only love him, the movie says, even though five minutes in the real-life company of such a person would send any rational soul screaming for the exits...
...But, you see, Jews aren't supposed to marry Gentiles...
...Straight and gay, Jew and Gentile, we can all intermix and intermingle...
...The only consistent target of its animus is a politically conservative U.S...
...Tolerance apparently has its limits...
...Well...
...The Birdcage is so intent on sanitizing the gay life its drag queen wears weird leisure suits straight out of the 1970s unless he is on stage performing in a Miami revue...
...I'm a CRAZY PERSON...
...I don't have to be reasonable," Randall's Unger liked to say...
...It preaches tolerance while having a good laugh at the expense of two mincing, shrieking, weeping male caricatures of women...
...Though the movie is a slavishly faithful remake of the 1977 French hit La Cage aux Folles, still the most popular foreign-language film ever shown in the United States, its tone is entirely different...
...After all, the fetus is going to get it either way, so why not go down with the ship...
...That's what the Bible says...
...These days Hollywood builds movies the way political campaigns build support-by trying to figure out how to appeal to the widest number of people while simultaneously sending knowing winks to core supporters...
...senator who is co-founder of a group called Coalition for Moral Order...
...But it's not a joke...
...its drag queen dresses in women's clothing even when off stage...
...And it concludes with a wedding that inadvertently reveals the lie behind this straight-outta-Hallmark philosophy...
...he's a delightful nut-case and a star to boot, so what can you do with such a man...
...He is Jewish, she Episcopalian...
...And so, in the sight of the entire congregation, they are married by a priest and a rabbi, an explicit parallel to the marriage the movie makes between the world of gays and the world of straights...
...And then the drag queen speaks a line that ought to be another joke...
...Senator," he says, "I meant what I said about family values and the need for a return to morality...
...It's acceptable to dress up in women's clothes and have pornographic statuary around your house, director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May are telling us...
...La Cage is what they used to call a "saucy Gallic romp," a door-slamming farce that celebrates the sybaritic life...
...Nichols and May answer it by making their drag queen an unclos-eted version of the closet case Felix Unger, played by Tony Randall on the 1970s television rendition of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple...
...It preaches understanding but refuses to show us any questionable sexual or physical behavior that might make understanding a bit more difficult...
...indeed, The Birdcage is going to make a lot of money because of its boundless hypocrisy...
...So, too, with Nathan Lane's Albert...
...Movies Cross-Dress for Success By John Podhoretz The Birdcage is about a drag queen who hardly ever dresses in drag, believes in family values, and never touches his live-in lover of 20-plus years...
...They don't make women like that anymore," says the love-smitten senator, and so finds himself speechless when the drag queen removes his wig to reveal the middle-aged homosexual underneath...
...These plot points are essential to the movie's commercial prospects...
...it's quite another thing to oppose abortion and think women should stay at home with their children...
...The movie's message is that we can all just get along if we appreciate and accept each other (unless we're right-wing, but then another drag queen informs us that "Bob Dole is just gorgeous...
...The Birdcage allows the unenlightened to scream with laughter at the outrageous behavior of the drag queen and his equally fey maid (Nathan Lane and Hank Azaria, respectively, who are, it must be said, hilarious), while bowing to 1990s convention by having the tiresome Robin Williams spout liberation-speak every few minutes ("I spent 20 years becoming who I am and I know who I am and I don't need to be anything other than who I am" etc...
...Its most telling moment comes at the film's climax, when the senator discovers that the matronly, ferociously right-wing housewife to whom he feels a strange attraction is actually a man in a dress...
...The two of them have just completed a long conversation over dinner about abortion during which the drag queen wonders why pro-lifers want to kill abortion doctors: "I say kill the mothers...
...Yes...
...American moviegoers show no sign that they feel natural sympathy for a man compelled by a misconceived sense of self to make himself appear to be a woman...
...Robin Williams's son, conceived during a one-night stand 20 years ago, is marrying the senator's daughter...
...The difference between the two films is telling...
...And so we see American liberalism at low ebb not only in the White House but at our multiplex-so bereft of conviction that it can only try to steal the ideas and terminology of its ideological enemies on the right while seeking to congratulate itself for its courage and openness...
...It says some stuff about homosexuality too...
...Nichols and May mean us to take the drag queen seriously...
Vol. 1 • March 1996 • No. 27
