Magic Mike (2012)

While one day we may call 2012 the year of Channing Tatum, it is clear that the film Magic Mike is definitely a part of director Steven Soderbergh's interest in the pornography industry, though in this case from the standpoint of an objectified male body. Since his breakthrough with Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Soderbergh has kept a hand in this particular area of entertainment--most clearly with his thinly-veiled near biopic with porn actress Sasha Grey, The Girlfriend Experience (2009), which manages simultaneously to be a metaphor for rough economic times, an expose of the porn industry's cross-over appeal, and a frustratingly unsuccessful film that neatly splits critics. His new film covers some of the same ground and makes clear that the male stripping industry has a lot more in common with the female and male porn industry than one might realize--especially in terms of the fluidity of sexual identity. The film opens with our star rising from a threesome with the woman he thinks is his girlfriend (Joanna, played by Olivia Munn). They both refer to the woman on Tatum's bed, who remains asleep with her face buried in the bed's sheets. It is clear from this comment and others that the girlfriend, whom Tatum's character ultimately has a sentimentally old-fashioned romantic attachment, is more interested in him as bait for the women they bed together than him--or, at any rate, does not feel for him as strongly as he does for her and ultimately drops him after she graduates with her psych degree. Tatum's character, meanwhile, is attached to an ingenue (Adam, played by Alex Pettyfer) whom he recruits and introduces to the male stripping industry but whom he meets initially through the manly industry of home roofing. It turns out that this is one of several business industries to which Tatum is connected--stripping is supposed to be a means to an end, in this case, to have his own furniture design business. He cannot overcome his own credit score, however, and finds himself in a complex attempt to outrun his past, which is catching up with him in the form of his own body's aging--something pointed out to him by the literal embodiment of the future.