Zoolander Is a Goddamn Delight
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
As a film actor David Bowie had the curious quality of being at once perversely discriminating and bizarrely undiscriminating. A man of impeccable if sometimes perplexing taste, Bowie collaborated with such auteurs of note as D.A Pennebaker, Nicolas Roeg, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Jim Henson, Nagisa Ōshima, Julien Temple, John Landis, Tony Scott, Ben Stiller and David Lynch.
Yet Bowie also lent his otherworldly presence to such marginal, forgotten oddities as Bandslam, August, Mr. Rice’s Secret, B.U.S.T.ED, Gunslinger’s Revenge, The Linguini Incident and Just a Gigolo for reasons he undoubtedly took to the grave. Maybe he liked the director. Maybe he liked the script. Maybe he was bored.
With Bowie the actor you never knew. The IMDB trivia for Zoolander includes the factoid "Ben Stiller wrote David Bowie's scene as judge of the walk-off into the script without knowing for sure whether he would agree to it.”
That’s not surprising. Bowie was a towering, intimidating figure who inspired awe and reverence. It was certainly not a given that he would grace a silly male model comedy like Zoolander with his majestic presence.
Bowie ultimately said yes to the crucial if brief role of a walk-off judge in Zoolander. In the process, Bowie helped turn a goofy romp adapted from a character created for the VH-1 Fashion Awards into one of the preeminent cult comedies of the past twenty-five years.
A wacky comedy like Zoolander or UHF does not need to be impeccably structured to be a major cult movie. It does not need to be tonally consistent. It does not need to be a film of quality or highbrow distinction.
No, in order to catch on big time as a cult movie a comedy has to be funny but it also has to possess an ineffable X factor that causes it to increase in popularity and visibility over time.
A cult movie needs to possess characters, scenes, moments, catchphrases or dialogue that linger in the public mind and take up precious real estate in the collective consciousness. It needs elements audiences remember long after they’ve forgotten the more respectable films that win awards and garner critical accolades but fade over time and are forgotten.
It does not hurt to have the kind of elements you can slap on a novelty tee-shirt and sell on the Jersey boardwalk. It also helps if a cult movie’s charms can easily and successfully be conveyed through Gif form. Zoolander is about as gif-friendly as movies get, which helps explain its enduring popularity and appeal.
Zoolander is full of tee-shirt worthy and tee shirt ready elements, including Bowie’s big cameo as a man who takes fashion very seriously.
As a movie about fame and celebrity from a second-generation celebrity, Zoolander doesn’t just boast appearances from some famous people; it seemingly boasts cameos from everyone, including, unfortunately, the current resident of the White House.
Zoolander is about the stupidity and absurdity and ego of celebrity so it obviously needed micro-appearances from the odious likes of Donald Trump and Paris Hilton to be authentic.
Stiller, who also co-wrote the script with Drake Sather and John Hamburg and directs, stars as Derek Zoolander, a gorgeous idiot who has risen to the apex of the male modeling field despite an I.Q hovering somewhere in the double digits.
Zoolander opens with its sexily simian titular character at the very top of his field but his position is threatened by the unstoppable rise of Hansel (Owen Wilson), a laid-back hippie stoner who has seemingly stumbled lazily into being a top super-model in the same way the actor playing him seemed to have accidentally become a massive movie star and box-office name without really trying.
For Hansel, stupidity is a form of Zen, a state of grace. He’s a long-haired, freewheeling nature boy gliding blissfully through a charmed life as God’s own idiot. Hansel has everything and he hasn’t had to work for any of it.
But Zoolander has more to worry about than losing his position as the top male model; the sinister cabal that furtively runs the fashion industry and has been behind a slew of political assassinations needs someone almost incomprehensibly dumb to brainwash into assassinating the popular, populist President of Malaysia before his stance against child labor can have a deleterious effect on their whole industry.
Zoolander possesses exactly the kind of weak, suggestible brain that lends itself to brainwashing. So he is recruited to kill the Malaysian leader during fashion week after being triggered by “Relax”, the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song that appears no less than three times on the film’s painfully 2001 soundtrack. There’s the original, of course, as well as a Powerman 5000 cover with a rap break from Danny Boy, the other white guy from House of Pain, and, of course, a version by Limp Bizkit.
Re-watching Zoolander is like main-lining 2001, in no small part because its gleeful idiocy is an anarchic, unintentional rebuke to the somber self-seriousness of post 9/11 American life, a curious and fragile era when we, as a culture, legitimately pondered whether we would ever be able to laugh again, even as Zoolander was cursed to live its theatrical life in the long, cold shadow of the attack on the Twin Towers.
Roger Ebert invoked that tragedy when he infamously wrote of the beloved cult comedy, “There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world. As this week's Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer "Zoolander," a comedy about a plot to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia because of his opposition to child labor. You might want to read that sentence twice. The logic: Child labor is necessary to the economic health of the fashion industry, and so its opponents must be eliminated. Ben Stiller stars as Derek Zoolander, a moronic male model who is brainwashed to perform the murder.”
Emotions ran hot in the white-hot aftermath of 9/11 but it’s worth noting that the satirical targets of Zoolander are not children working in sweatshops or progressive Malaysian leaders or the country of Malaysia but rather a cruel, selfish and narcissistic fashion industry, celebrity culture and our deification of youth and beauty above all else.
Zoolander is brainwashed in a glorious bit of pop art surrealism designed by Rob Schrab into seeing an objectively evil and wrong practice like child labor in a positive way, as an issue of children’s “right to work” rather than something that is being forced upon them by cruel adults and unscrupulous businesses.
When we want to make something we all know is terrible seem good we tend to posit it as a matter of “rights” or “freedom”, whether it’s Conservatives positing discriminating against the LGTBQ community as a matter of religious freedom or anti-quarantine activists angrily insisting that they have a constitutional, inalienable right to risk infecting everyone they encounter with COVID-19 rather than wear a mask.
Zoolander juxtaposes the bright and fizzy with bracing darkness, most notably in a glorious set-piece where Zoolander and his entourage of male model mates head to Starbucks’s for a Mocha orange cappuccino in a montage sequence set to Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.”
Alas, the good times come to a halt when the guys spontaneously decide to engage in an impromptu gasoline fight that takes a tragic turn when one of the good-looking half-wits lights up and everyone other than Zoolander goes up in flames. To die an unfathomably painful and agonizing death at the height of your youth, beauty and earning potential at the end of a montage sequence set to “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” is a special kind of hell.
Hansel and Zoolander may be impossibly good looking idiots with the maturity level of preschoolers yet Stiller and Wilson make them improbably sympathetic. We end up not only liking but loving these gorgeous dunces. Wilson in particular adds an incongruous element of soulfulness and heart that makes Hansel so much more than just a one-joke cartoon.
Zoolander and Hansel’s ferocious competition reaches a glorious apex with an iconic “Walk off” judged by Bowie with an incongruous seriousness that makes everything funnier. In a movie full of famous people, Bowie is far and away the biggest and best get, followed by Billy Zane of course.
Not every element of Zoolander has aged well. Slurs used to disparage trans women and the mentally challenged are employed with shocking callousness and a pair of gags border on blackface: if they don’t technically qualify as blackface (and they definitely might), they’re blackface-ish. In one, Zoolander shocks his gruff coal miner family by emerging from a day in the mines with a face literally as black as coal. In the other, Hansel and Zoolander disguise themselves as a Hispanic and black man respectively to sneak inside a building undetected.
Thankfully Wilson and Stiller do not slather on brown make-up for the scene; the gag, such as it is, is that they look disconcertingly realistic as men of color because they’re being played by Hispanic and black actors respectively. Yet there’s a shot of Hansel and Zoolander with their make-up nearly off that indisputably establishes that these white men chose to put on dark make-up in order to impersonate people of color.
If the makers of Zoolander were able to digitally remove the Twin Towers from the background of scenes there’s no reason they couldn’t go back and edit out four seconds worth of slurs as well.
Re-watching Zoolander from the vantage point of 2020 I found myself laughing a lot even as I was continuously reminded of real-life tragedies tangentially but unmistakably related to Stiller’s cult classic.
The specter of 9/11 casts a long shadow over Zoolander which opened a mere seventeen days after the attacks, but Stiller’s freewheeling fashion world satire has an equally intense, equally unfortunate relationship with three of the biggest tragedies of 2016, the worst year this side of 2020.
There’s Donald Trump’s cameo, of course, as well as the shocking death of David Bowie and finally the screamingly unnecessary, regrettable existence of Zoolander No. 2. I hated Zoolander No. 2 so much it made me retroactively like Zoolander less but in a real reversal, I now feel like Zoolander No. 2 is so terrible it actually makes Zoolander seem even better by comparison.
Zoolander is the perfect cult comedy in no small part because it is so ferociously imperfect. It’s unmistakably a product of its time that has aged in fascinating and weird and sometimes unfortunate ways but it remains as funny as ever, if not funnier.
Buy the 516 page Sincere Movie Cash-In Edition of The Weird Accordion to Al AND get a free coloring book for just 20 dollars, shipping and taxes included, at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Cynical Movie Cash-in Edition free!
Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 12.00, shipping, handling and taxes included, 23 bucks for two books, domestic only at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace