Dr. Jason Johnson on Pete Buttigieg’s speech to a group of LGBTQ supporters. Other panel members are Matthew Miller (MSNBC), Mike Murphy (Republican Strategist), Heidi Przybyla (NBC News), and host, Nicolle Wallace.
Professor of Political Science. Politics Editor for The Root. Latest Book: Political Consultants and Campaigns: One Day to Sell
Dr. Jason Johnson on Pete Buttigieg’s speech to a group of LGBTQ supporters. Other panel members are Matthew Miller (MSNBC), Mike Murphy (Republican Strategist), Heidi Przybyla (NBC News), and host, Nicolle Wallace.
(Slight spoilers, but not really!)
After seeing gritty Batman, detective Batman, real-world Batman and dozens of other Batman variations, from comics to cartoons to films, where do you go? Lego Batman has the answer. The sequel to the 2014 surprise hit The Lego Movie gives us the greatest Batman love story ever told. It just so happens to be a gay love affair. And it just so happens to be with the Joker.
There are so many guest appearances, movie references, sight gags and homages in this film it feels forced at times. It’s saved by the great interplay between Batman and Robin (Will Arnett and Michael Cera re-igniting their Gob and Michael act from Arrested Development), the neediness of Zach Galifianakis’ Joker and the plot-stabilizing, straight-woman hilarity of Rosario Dawson as Gotham Police Commissioner Barbara Gordon.
What really makes The Lego Batman Movie special, however, isn’t the plot, it’s the motivation behind the plot: the intense and unrequited love between Batman and the Joker.
It’s funny, at first, using the bromance subtext common in movies like Superbad, The Wedding Ringer, Get Hard and on TV shows like The League, or just about anything from Lonely Island. The “humor” is supposed to come from the gay double entendre and witty banter between two presumptively “straight” men arguing with each other in a way that sounds suspiciously like a man and woman the audience knows deep, deep down, really just want to screw each other.
This is not a gay subtext mined for laughs, this is essentially Brokeback Batman. Amid the jokes, action, obsession with tight abs, rainbow color scheme and dance routines, this movie isn’t a nod to gay love between Batman and the Joker, this movie is head-banging to it.
Film critic Wesley Morris pondered in 2015, in a review of Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell’s Get Hard (which is more than on the nose), that eventually Hollywood would acknowledge these “bromance” types of movies had as much romantic potential as straight films. Why can’t two ostensibly straight men fall for each other like any other unlikely odd couple in a rom-com? Lego Batman seems like the unlikely, but incredibly successful, evolution he was predicting. Even if it comes in the form of talking plastic blocks.
It’s not as if Batman and the Joker’s sexual or homoerotic relations haven’t been mined in the past. Batman’s relationship with Dick Grayson (the original Robin and a gay icon in his own right) spawned the “Ambiguously Gay Duo” parody on Saturday Night Live. Wildstorm-DC Comic’s Midnighter character is a gay Batman allegory (with a gay Superman allegory boyfriend). The Joker’s sexual obsession with Batman and Batman’s complex reactions to it have been touched upon in comics, too.
The gayness of The Lego Batman Movie is made more apparent by the fact that Batman and Joker’s relationships with women seem perfunctory at best.
At one point in the movie, Batman and the Joker are just staring at each other, painted-on Lego eyes intensely locked. A kid in the front of the theater screamed out, “Just tell him!!!” to the muffled laughter of the entire audience. This is a reaction usually reserved for a Bridget Jones movie, or whatever Seth Rogen-Jennifer Aniston rom-com got churned out in the last month. The fact that it was so obvious to a child what was going on in this film was revolutionary. By the time Batman finally, painfully, admits, “I hate you” to the Joker near the movie’s climax, there were audible “Awwwws” in the audience. Ace and Gary would be thrilled.
If you like Batman the comic, the cartoon, or the movies, you’ll love The Lego Batman Movie. If you want to see a version of Batman you’ve never seen, you’ll love The Lego Batman Movie. The only way you won’t like The Lego Batman Movie is if you’re against action, laughs, costumes and love. Whether he intended to or not, even the Dark Knight learns to embrace all of those by the end of this movie.
This article originally appeared online at The Root.
On The War Room on Current TV, Hiram College professor Jason Johnson discusses key political issues with Bill Press.
On the Voting Rights Act with Bill Press. They also discussed Hillary Clinton’s lunch meeting with Barack Obama.
On President Obama’s economic policy
On Pope Francis’ announcement on gay priests, and the issue of global gay rights movement.
This Wednesday during a press conference the #1 Draft pick in the WNBA, Brittney Griner did the unspeakable. She casually, matter of factly and openly came out as gay in her first press conference as a professional basketball player. Griner enters the WNBA as one of the most successful college basketball players (male or female) ever, and she will do wonders for the Phoenix Mercury as a low post defensive stopper. However, what is more important than her play on the court is that her openness about her sexuality shows that as a league and a business the WNBA has finally grown up. Griner’s admission shows that the WNBA is no longer obsessed with finding that “crossover” star to “save” the league and might actually get back to the business of promoting good basketball.
I was a huge WNBA fan when the league premiered in the late 1990s. Not because I was trying to be progressive, or because I was trying to impress some woman, or because of a slew of other lame reason often associated with viewing women’s sports by men. I became a fan of the WNBA the normal way that most fans come to a sport: A friend got me watching. Micky (not her real name) was one of my best friends in graduate school and a basketball freak. She played high-school ball in Connecticut, she played as an undergrad at Dartmouth and she coached a girl’s rec team while we were in graduate school. She introduced me to the WNBA and her enthusiasm, knowledge of the players (many of whom she’d faced in college or high-school) was enough to rope me in. I immediately took to the Houston Comets. Now I’ll admit, they were one of the original eight WNBA teams, and they won the first four WNBA championships so maybe I was a bit of a front-runner, but it was really their style of play that hooked me into the game. I was a Comets fan because Cynthia Cooper, Cheryl Swoopes and the incredible power forward Tina Thompson played the kind of fast-paced inside-outside game of my favorite NBA team at the time, the Sacramento Kings. I would tell Micky all the time that I wished Chris Webber played in the post with as much guts and backbone as Tina Thompson. I was the epitome of what the WNBA wanted at the time: A straight African American male basketball fan who started watching the women’s game because it looked similar to my favorite NBA teams. The problem is, there weren’t enough of men out there for the WNBA to stay profitable, and the league severely misjudged how to bring more men like me to the game.
I didn’t watch WNBA games because the women were cute, that made no difference to me. And even though it was the early 2000s, it was not a surprise to me that many women in professional basketball were lesbians. Some of the first gay women I ever knew were from my high school basketball team. I went to Charlotte Sting games and saw large groups of gay women screaming in the stands. But the league, desperate for the wrong kinds of fans, tried to hide the sexuality of their players. The WNBA also tried to convince male sports fans accustomed to Sports Illustrated Swimsuit models that tall lanky athletic women in knee shorts were just as sexy as Kate Moss. The league foolishly spent years chasing after male viewers that they were never going to get with the belief that ‘feminizing’ women athletes and making them all out to be “the Girl next door” would somehow convince men that the game was worth watching.
Early WNBA ads were supposed to link the league with the old ABA of the 1970s which made no sense since the WNBA style of play was nothing like the macho highlight factory of that old league. Does this 1998 ad make you want to watch a WNBA game or pull out your old 8 Track and listen to George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars?
By the mid 2000s the league was in full “Girl Next Door” mode. After high profile players like Cheryl Swoopes admitted to being gay, the league was afraid they would be perceived as too “gay” and swung hard in the other direction. Players were constantly shown in dresses and with long hair in promotions. Anything to ‘fem’ them up. But who was this really going to appeal to? Sexist men who don’t like women’s sports weren’t about to change just because Swin Cash had a nice weave. For the WNBA 10th anniversary they ran a commercial with the tag line “Have you Seen Her” from the old Chi-Lites song. The clips made going to a WNBA game more of a social statement than a sporting event. This commercial could easily double as a PSA for the Girl Scouts. Where’s the balling? Where’s the heart? The game winners and the passion?
By the 2007-2008 season, the league was in horrible financial shape. Of the original eight franchises in the league, several, including the Houston Comets, would be out of business in a year. I had stopped watching the league, partially because my favorite players had retired or moved on to other teams and new players didn’t pique my interest. But the WNBA was convinced that their hard times had nothing to do with a lack of quality stars, rotating franchises or a poor economy. ESPN airwaves were bombarded by commercials that suggested the league was desperate for a savior. WNBA executives were just convinced that if they could find that one crossover star the league would bounce back. But finding the Tiger Woods, Jeff Gordon or Venus and Serena of the WNBA proved to be very difficult. Commercials trotted out Diana Taurasi, Chamique Holdsclaw and others all in an attempt to save the league. When Candace Parker, another league savior, came in 2008 she was basically begging people to save a dying league in the “Expect Great” series of ads. The problem was that the WNBA was using the wrong medicine to treat a life threatening illness.
Americans love football, basketball, baseball and hockey. Some of the sports work because they have long standing ties in a community but in many cases leagues survive because they maintain a steady happy fanbase rather than constantly seek to expand to other groups of viewers. Hockey has never tried to bring in black viewers, even with Jerone Iglina as a star of the Calgary Flames. NASCAR made a half hearted attempt to bring in middle class viewers with Jeff Gordon but basically settled on a working class and southern fan base. Of course sexism, classism and racism play a role in why women’s basketball has struggled, and why women’s sports in general have difficulty maintaining professional leagues in America. But another major problem with the WNBA was that despite a fan base of middle class lesbians, parents of young girls and a few basketball purists their public marketing strategy for over a decade seemed focused on skeptical old school male sports fans, a group that was never going to be a an easy sell. And fortunately it seems like all of this began to change when Griner made her announcement on Wednesday.
While overall television ratings and attendance of women’s basketball in America remains anemic, the league itself seems to have found a happy place in which to exist. You no longer see columns or spokespersons trying to play up the “Girl Next” door element of the league. The WNBA draft was held in prime time on a Monday night so that casual fans might actually run across the picks. While Skyler Diggins is a great player and her physical beauty has garnered her thousands of twitter followers and some love from Lil Wayne, she was not made the singular STAR of draft night. Instead Brittney Griner, Delle Donne and Diggins were rolled out as three new players coming in who will transform the league similar to how LeBron, Wade, and Melo were promoted in 2004. And most importantly, no one really batted an eye when Griner mentioned that she was gay. Trust me, as recently as five years ago, league officials and agents would have begged her to stay quiet about her sexuality. For fear that she would release the elephant in the room that the WNBA has the most out of the closet athletes of any major American sport. But that elephant has been stomping its way around for years, and the WNBA rather than trying to hide who it’s player are, who their fans are or where America is has decided to just embrace whatever comes and focus on good basketball rather than social engineering and bad commercials.
This article originally appeared online at Politic365.com.
Apparently everyone’s favorite King of the South, T.I. is not as sensitive to gay rights as some columnists would like. Fresh out of his latest stint in the pokey, Clifford Harris has done a recent interview in Vibe Magazine where he gets vaguely political by claiming that gays are too sensitive and should learn how to roll with the punches more. The most “offensive” quote is T.I. discussing his point further by referencing Tracy Morgan’s supposedly homophobic stand-up routine where he rants about gay folk.
“Man, I will say this, the funniest joke I ever heard Tracy say during a stand-up was, ‘C’mon man, I think gay people are too sensitive. If you can take a d***, you can take a joke.’ [Cracks up laughing.] That s*** was funny to me. And it’s kind of true.”
Look I’ll say right off the bat I don’t know how intimate T.I. is with taking anything (how long was he in prison again?). But, while the author of Nerve column goes off the rails a bit criticizing T.I. as a homophobic monster I’m a bit less hostile about it.
To be honest, Clifford’s opinion is pretty progressive given where a lot of rappers were just a few years ago. Back then, calling someone “faggot” was just a standard lyric and no one blinked.
More importantly, I think his views reflect the kind of annoyance and disconnect that many African Americans feel about how the homosexual struggle for equality has been compared to the African American struggle for equality. It is well known that the religious Black community is not all that fond of homosexuality and that rap music is one of the most consistent perpetrators of homophobic slurs expressed in popular culture.
At the same time the homosexual rights movement has been pretty lousy about including diverse voices, and really showed their true colors when LGBT organizations went off on African Americans when it looked like black voters might not support a gay marriage law in California back in 2008. When many African Americans see a slew of public service ads in the last few years against homophobia, or the manner in which the anti-bullying campaign has been strongly linked to violence against gay teens there is occasional side-eye. In large part because such an open and publicized battle against racism on a social (as opposed to legislative) level took much longer and faced much more resistance than the battle against homophobia seems to face today.
Arguing over who’s got it worse, or intra-political battles between oppressed groups is, generally a waste of time. Thus, it is in the interest of all minorities to support one another in the face of discrimination. However, expecting the support from all corners – let alone the King of the South – probably won’t work out too well.
This article originally appeared online at Politic365.com.
Dr. Jason Johnson is a professor, political analyst and public speaker. Fresh, unflappable, objective, he is known for his ability to break down stories with wit and candor. Johnson is the author the book Political Consultants and Campaigns: One Day to Sell, a tenured professor in the School of Global Journalism & Communication at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland and Politics Editor at TheRoot.com. Dr. Johnson has an extensive public speaking and media background ranging from … [Read More...] about About Jason Johnson