Off With Her Head!

Under a certain amount of duress, I’ve come to love Will Ferrell and his goofy machoer-than-thou movies. It was probably the climactic kiss with Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Borat) in Talladega Nights that did it for me. US comedy could sure use some homoerotic boundary-pushing, and Ferrell, who is an odd assortment of manly (hairy chest, 6’ tall, rugged jaw) and effeminate (soft belly, wide eyes), is the guy/elf to do it.

So what could be better (in the sense of a brain-draining night off?) than Ferrell doing SNL on Ice with Jon Heder in Blades of Glory? The trailer, the poster, the title all scream lycra-clad, jockstrapped quasi-porn. And most of the film merrily lives up to that, teetering on its skates along the edge of “acceptable American family comedy” and “all-out fag fest.” Which is groovy – I mean, the more movies that queer the manly male the better.

La la la, I’m merrily enjoying Ferrell’s transformation from leather-clad sex addict with an Aerosmith problem to tutu-wearing spirit-fingering “sensitive” guy, and all it has to say about modern gender and what the blunder-headed macho politics of the US need (this is the guy who played Bush on SNL and – according to some critics – made Bush seem so dumbly likable that people got fooled into voting for him, thinking he was an ineffectual ignoramus/giant inbred puppy). When – cue drum roll or sick bag, as appropriate – the punchline of the “big routine” turns out to be more of a slash line.

I suppose there’s dozens of reasons why a cinema full of people might laugh at a woman skater being beheaded by the blades of her male partner during a move called the Iron Lotus: fear and embarrassment would be two. But I think thoughtlessness is the main one. Chick dead, cue laughter. In the context, I suppose the beheading of an Iraqi insurgent or American peace worker wouldn’t have quite fit – although the skater was North Korean, part of the axis of evil, so maybe that’s part of the yuks?

Yuk indeed. Not only that, but double yuk, because the film had been proceeded by a trailer for a truly lame-looking film called Magicians by utterly lame “comedy” duo Mitchell & Webb of the lamer than lame current PC/Mac ads. Joke of Magicians: the stoogier one (Mitchell? Webb?) flooped up on the guillotine trick. Oops, off with her head. Somehow he finds another assistant to trust him, and decides to do the same trick for the finale of a big magic-off – end trailer on a glinting blade about to descend on a bubbly blonde.

Hilarious, right? Hard to imagine how that routine is still being played for laughs after Jane Campion’s mordant and chilling In the Cut, with a killer who beheads his female victims, and is given to joking (before we know he’s the killer, and I used the word “joking” in the full icky knowledge that he’s not, and that it’s not funny anyway) that, far from requiring a hole, tits and a head, yknow, who needs the head? It’s a savagely horrible joke because it expresses something very deep in the EuroWestern misogynist psyche. Who does need the head (which, when applied to women in the film, is as likely to mean a blow job as the symbol of the intellect)?

Like all Ferrell films, Blades of Glory ends with the sweetly nerdy girl finding true love with a guy who understands her, although in Blades of Glory she has to get her kit off, which I don’t remember being required of Zooey Deschanel in Elf (OK, there’s a shower scene but you don’t see anything). Is the film playing to a more lunkheaded crowd (ie: the not-me demographic) and basically saying that women with heads need not apply? Or is it a projection of deep-seated castration fears that have been activated by Taleban viral videos and incidents at Abu Ghraib? A worrying development either way.

So keep your head about you, ladies, and watch out for them blades.