The Village People Musical Can't Stop the Music is a Vulgar Trash at its Campy Best
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 of today, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place is officially five years old. We made it! Everyone said we sucked and would fail instantly. I was doxxed! Enraged haters fire-bombed my home because they couldn’t stand all of the typos on the site.
But did I give up? No, I did not. I just kept on grinding, confident that if I invested my heart and soul and all of my time and energy into this labor of love eventually I would make just enough money to get by.
It’s a big day so I wanted to write about something important to me, something that says something about who I am as a writer, a website proprietor and a human being. Also, a weird dude.
I thought about doing the Director’s Cut of Southland Tales, in part because I was supposed to write the liner notes for its DVD release at some point but my DVD player isn’t working. I similarly thought about finally covering Dear Evan Hansen for My World of Flops or Music for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0.
I ultimately settled on a movie I somehow have never written about, despite it being just about the most Nathan Rabin-friendly movie this side of Under the Silver Lake: the Allan Carr-masterminded 1980 camp classic Can’t Stop the Music, a famously unsuccessful and critically derided gay fantasia on disco themes.
Like many of my favorite movies of the 1970s and 80s, Can’t Stop the Music feels like the product of a bag of cocaine that became sentient and decided to break into show-business. If you were a sentient bag of cocaine who wanted to get involved in the “biz”, there was no better time than the 70s and 80s.
Can’t Stop the Music contains the occasional winking drug reference but it seems fundamentally dishonest that there is not a massive silver bowl full of high-grade cocaine in the middle of every scene for the characters to dip their heads into and snort lustily.
Then again, there probably was a massive silver bowl full of high-grade cocaine on the set at all times, it was just discreetly moved out of the camera range seconds before filming began.
Can’t Stop the Music opens with Jack Morell (Steve Gutenberg), its fictionalized, straight version of Village People impresario Jacques Morali, quitting his job at a record store so that he can pursue his dream of writing music full time.
The boyishly handsome young man has no job and no prospects but that doesn’t keep him from being deliriously happy all the same and he bops down the New York streets to an infectious disco beat. The future dream-maker has music in his soul and cocaine coursing through his bloodstream.
Jack’s supermodel roommate Samantha "Sam" Simpson (Valerie Perrine) similarly begins the film by quitting her impossibly glamorous existence as a top supermodel. As with Jack, unemployment renders her deliriously happy.
You know what else makes Sam happy? Everything! Everything makes everyone in Can’t Stop the Music ecstatic, but particularly music, being lucky enough to live in a decade as magical as the 1980s and sex. Can’t Stop the Music doesn’t let a PG rating keep it from feeling pornographic throughout. It’s a goofy family comedy with the salacious soul of an XXX fuck-fest.
Sam is also REALLY into Ice cream. But not just any ice cream, mind you. No, Sam is only interested in ice cream chains willing to pay filmmakers handsomely for promotion.
That means that Sam happily informs the world, “I’m going for a Baskin-Robbins rush!” and is later seen enjoying a double scoop. In a non-coincidental development, Baskin-Robbins cross-promoted the movie by introducing a Can’t Stop the Nuts flavor for a limited time only.
Sam is all about music, friendship, self-belief and being obscenely sexy but she’s also all about dairy. In an act of product placement that makes Mac & Me’s glorification of McDonald’s and Coca-Cola seem subtle and understated by comparison, Sam volunteers to come out of retirement and appear in a commercial for the National Dairy Council but only if she can do so with the campy disco group she’s now managing.
Ever the hustler, Carr got the wholesome folks over at the National Dairy Council to pony up two MILLION dollars to get the Village People to literally sing their praises in a wildly homoerotic production number set to the mercenary disco anthem “Milkshake.”
I’ve seen Can’t Stop the Music multiple times at this point and its existence still amazes me. I still can’t believe that Carr managed to get a massive budget and a major release for a production so steeped in gay sensuality.
Jack and Sam need singers to present Jack’s songs to the world. Thankfully Sam’s social circle is filled with men who conveniently happen to be dressed up like macho archetypes like Native American warriors and cops AND can sing and dance adequately. What are the odds?
Caitlyn Jenner made an infamous debut as a square tax lawyer who becomes enamored of Perrine’s gorgeous, glamorous supermodel and is soon immersed in a wild new world of transgressive sexuality and raucous entertainment.
I always ignorantly assumed that it was inevitable that the members of the Village People would represent cartoonishly over-the-top incarnations of such macho archetypes as Soldier, Construction Worker, Cowboy, Native American, Policeman and Leatherman.
But Can’t Stop the Music contains an audition sequence where any number of Gong Show-ready acts compete for a spot with the group, including a ventriloquist, fire-dancer and tennis player.
In an alternate universe, The Village People could have been a Ventriloquist, Baseball Player, Attorney, Greaser, Plumber and Garbage Man. I think we really missed out in not having at least one ventriloquist in The Village People.
Can’t Stop the Music is a film of wild contradictions. It somehow manages to feel simultaneously G and X rated. It’s naughty and nice, riotously ribald and oddly innocent at the same time.
In that respect the movie captures the bifurcated nature of disco’s appeal as decadent, drugged-up gay party music the whole family could enjoy, particularly the young ones. That’s certainly “YMCA”’s curious legacy.
Allan Carr, who produced and co-wrote the script, set out to make something at once proudly retro and as modern as the latest sounds at the hippest discos. He wanted to fuse MGM spectacle with raw, winking sexuality. He succeeded in making something staggeringly idiotic, of course, but also joyful and unique.
There will never be another movie like Can’t Stop the Music. It’s a goddamn unicorn. Even by the exceedingly lenient standards of discoploitation it’s spectacularly tacky and vulgar.
In his own way Alan Carr was a vulgar genius and Can’t Stop the Music is his cracked trash masterpiece, a quintessential good-bad cult artifact that probably never should have been made but whose mere existence single-handedly makes the world of pop culture tackier and more fun. In the weird world of Alan Carr, the two tended to go hand in hand.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success
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