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MOVIES — Cracking the Male Fantasy Movie |
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Written by asap
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Thursday, 20 July 2006 |
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 When preparing to write about the Male Fantasy Movie, it’s important to consult the experts.
Of course, if Hugh Hefner and Dr. Phil are unavailable, you can always e-mail your guy friends and ask them about their ultimate MFM. These friends will likely confirm your hunch that men are pretty easy to please during their trips to celluloid land.
I’ll let Aaron Smith speak for the many friends of mine who responded in detail to my query. Aaron offered this quintessential MFM:
“Violent anime demon tentacle porn, featuring in-the-flesh celebs in their first on-screen nude roles. The demons would be cartoonish, but the actresses would be ’real.’ I think this would be a good role for Jessica Simpson.”
See? Straightforward. As Frank O’Hara (himself an ardent lover of the cinema, though not your typical red-blooded hetero American male) wrote in his great poem, “Meditations in an Emergency,” “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”
Or, demon tentacle porn starring the lovely Ms. Simpson.
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 The MFM usually falls into one of several categories, with similar themes appearing in each. Many, especially if they are comedies, such as “My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” which opens this Friday and boasts a deranged, superhuman Uma Thurman as G-Girl, go for broke, borrowing from a number of these categories.
At its heart, “My Super Ex” is a Careful What You Wish For MFM along the lines of “Fatal Attraction,” in which a regular guy (Luke Wilson) lands an outrageously desirable woman, only to have her set about dismantling his life. Thurman’s G-Girl (who, as the movie goes on, begins to sport stringy curls a la 1980s Glenn Close) even boils his goldfish.
It’s PG-13, so the sex and violence aren’t particularly gratuitous or interesting, despite a hyped up cat fight between Thurman and Anna Faris. But the film manages to give nods to numerous other male fantasy elements, from its tenuous link to the comic book trend, to the Underdog Who Gets the Girl Already Dating a Gorgeous and Successful Man movie.
 It even includes a Great Tickets to a Sporting Event Moment, though this cosmetic detail shouldn’t be confused with the classic Sports Triumph movie, in which the hero overcomes incredible odds to bring his team to glory. Think Robert Redford in “The Natural.” A twist on this is the Return From Disgrace movie, like “Field of Dreams,” which saw an Iowa corn farmer giving the infamous Chicago “Black” Sox a chance to play again. If you put sports in it, they will buy tickets. It also doesn’t hurt to throw in a curmudgeonly but gentle-hearted black male sidekick, almost as ubiquitous as the tough-love black nurse in chick flicks, as perfected by Whoopi Goldberg in movies such as “Girl, Interrupted.”
The Sports Triumph movie might be considered a sub-genre of the Man Against X category, whether x is Uma Thurman, the wilderness, the mutant baddie bent on destroying the earth or the erudite European mastermind bent on acquiring whatever it is that European masterminds like those seen in “Die Hard” desire.
Speaking of Bruce Willis, it is key that the hero be an everyman, so that male moviegoers digging into their extra large popcorn can claim a kinship with the movie star currently saving the world or seducing the vixen. The American public demands myriad and not-so-subtle appeals to the male ego.
Take Wilson’s character in “My Super Ex.” Matt’s smart and sensitive (a nod to the ladies in the audience, important for MFMs seeking to do double duty as chick flicks) but not particularly in shape, not particularly brave and, by his own admission, “a very forgettable person.”
Yet Matt joins the mile-high club — sans plane — with the ravishingly beautiful G-Girl. So what if she turns out to be insanely needy and sensitive -- it still grants Matt the Holy Grail of bragging rights with his sex-obsessed buddy Vaughn (the fabulous Dwight Schrute).
And here we see another ingredient of the guy flick (notably absent in the Charismatic Loner category): Camaraderie, in the form of fart jokes and loyal, less-handsome sidekicks. The stories men tell are just as important, if not more, than the facts on which they are loosely based; Matt was terrified having sex up in the sky, and he wasn’t particularly thrilled when she broke his bed, but he dreamed about telling Vaughn of his new conquest, a fantasy within a fantasy.
In the dream -- before G-Girl shows up with a chain saw, that is — Matt’s serious reservations about his new girlfriend don’t matter, nor does the fact that he felt completely emasculated while being flown about and manhandled. He gets to top Vaughn, who has been lording over him the no-doubt invented tale of having slept with a Victoria’s Secret model.
Of course, in a chick flick, the guy should never have bragging rights as his goal; Superman would never kiss and tell after taking Lois Lane on a nighttime flight: he’s main focus is keeping her perfectly protected (and why, at its heart, this summer’s “Superman Returns” is a chick flick). In this way, the chick flick is every bit as delusional as the MFM. But least guys get special effects to go along with that delusion.
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Claudia La Rocco is an AP writer in New York. She hates chick flicks.
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