Post by StevePulaski on Nov 11, 2015 18:00:18 GMT -5
White Chicks (2004)
Directed by: Keenen Ivory Wayans
Shawn and Marlon Wayans pose as white chicks in White Chicks.
Rating: ★
Directed by: Keenen Ivory Wayans
Shawn and Marlon Wayans pose as white chicks in White Chicks.
Rating: ★
NOTE: For an assignment in my film class, I had to connect the film White Chicks to Laura Mulvey and bell hooks' (though that commentary is omitted here) ideas of gender and race (why, in the sea of amazing, relevant, and unsung films about gender and race we had to watch an inept film with no enlightening commentary on either topics whatsoever is beyond me, but I digress). Needless to say, this didn't go over particularly well with me, as I strained to find cogent ideas to connect.
I find it difficult to try and align the plot and slapstick humor of Keenen Ivory Wayans’ film White Chicks with Laura Mulvey’s ideas about gender and the role of women in film largely because I think any social commentary found in this particular film wasn’t on the forefront of the minds who made this film. This is a film that is meant to do one thing, and like most Wayans’ productions, that is to retaliate against conventions and stereotypes by using said conventions and stereotypes. The Wayans work to make films that exploit the wide-variety of clichés used in modern film, yet their films – such as this, Dance Flick, and the two Haunted House films – all abide by the common tropes of the films they’re parodying, so their films feel less like acts of rebellion but more like surrender to filmmaking principles.
The film is a brutally unpleasant slog through the ins and outs of buddy-cop clichés and tired racial and sex humor that relies on the idea that African-American males are well-endowed and all white females are privileged and simply stumbled their way into wealth. The film revolves around Kevin and Marcus Copeland (Shawn and Marlon Wayans), two disgraced FBI agents who have just flubbed another serious drug bust. Their deputy (Frankie Faison) gives them one last chance at redeeming themselves by making them protect two young, ditsy billionaires named Brittany and Tiffany Wilson (Maitland Ward and Anne Dudek) from a rumored kidnapping plot.
When the Wilson sisters refuse to leave their hotel room after getting minor cuts on their face, both Kevin and Marcus impersonate the two sisters in whiteface, and are plunged into a beauty pageant alongside acquaintances of the sisters. Both Kevin and Marcus can't reveal their true identities to Brittany and Tiffany's competitors, nor can Marcus tell his wife (Faune A. Chambers) exactly what he is doing, so the two lumber around in drag as they try to navigate the ins and outs of this business while trying to save their jobs.
White Chicks would be infuriatingly racist, sexist, and stereotypical if it wasn't such a narrow-minded and stupid film, so hellbent on pinpointing every charmless and laughless racial and sexual stereotype out rather than attempting to do anything with it. Where's the commentary on the hyper-sexualization of women in American film? Where do we exactly identify and take note of how, whilst in drag, Kevin and Marcus gawk at other women, but hate being gawked at as women by other men? Where's the commentary on the perception of race, or at least the satirical side of this screenplay? It's like a potential-ridden screenplay was gutted and left for dead because too many uptight suits got their hands on it and robbed it of all creativity, but perhaps that's the creative process of Shawn and Marlon Wayans. How else do you explain how it took six people to write a film predicated off of jokes about stereotypes and bathroom activity?
Doing my best to connect White Chicks with Mulvey’s ideas of phallocentrism, Mulvey’s argument is the idea that women couldn’t truly enjoy or connect with Hollywood filmmaking because of the camera lens being (a) objectively male and (b) part of a patriarchal structure. Mulvey views Hollywood films as films that further male ideology and principles by giving males the power in their films (to which Mulvey states the power of the male comes from the penis and the male’s possession of a penis). Women in Hollywood films, however, lack the power essential in the process of asserting themselves and transcending the bounds of character, to which Mulvey states comes from the fact that women do not have penises, therefore, they lack power. As a result, a power struggle between the genders is initiated and one of the central conflicts comes from females wanting to "castrate" the male, in a sense, and take the power away from them and assume it for themselves. This, in turn, is the male’s greatest fear and one of the biggest unspoken conflicts in Hollywood films, so says Mulvey.
One idea of Mulvey’s White Chicks carries throughout its plot is the idea that women exist in films for visual pleasure (what Mulvey calls to-be-looked-at-ness). With that, women are viewed in a scopophiliac sense, which resorts to viewing women as objects rather than individual characters with individualized ideas. Almost every white female character in White Chicks is an object representative of fetishized beauty, with characters lacking any discernible ounce of authenticity. So much of the film occurs in a beauty pageant, or involves women trying to achieve unrealistic states of beauty by way of tight outfits, breast implants, and materialistic possessions, that the objectification of women in the film runs rampant because there is no way to view these female characters other than by way of their measurements and their love for material things.
Finally, returning to the idea I alluded to earlier about male gaze – where the camera lens assumes a de facto masculine perspective – White Chicks does abide by that idea as well. Even though most of the characters we meet in the film are females, the two lead characters are males disguised as females, which leads to the idea that even if you can paint the focus in a different light, you cannot escape the idea of male gaze because it’s a default in the world of cinema. White Chicks is essentially the male gaze playing dressup, much like its male characters in the film.
White Chicks is an unforgivably awful film; the kind where one wouldn't be so stupid as to take a few days off from comedy upon seeing it and witnessing joke-after-joke fall prey to conventionality and trainwreck delivery. The film is as obnoxious as it is unfunny, with characters and stereotypes - particularly the seriously ridiculous and one-note Terry Crews character - mistaken for any kind of significance in narrative or thematic urgency. I guess having Shawn, Marlon, and director/co-writer/co-producer Keenen Ivory Wayans giving some kind of worth to this material would've been too much to ask. We could've seen how racial and sexual prejudice and tendencies are communicated in many varying shades of gray, in a film called "White Chicks" nonetheless.
Starring: Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Frankie Faison, Faune A. Chambers, Maitland Ward, and Anne Dudek. Directed by: Keenen Ivory Wayans.