The Importance of Being Richard

Decades of feminist toil notwithstanding, the framework of the relationship between the male and female of our species remains on display in the exchange between male John and female prostitute: women continue to be granted access to the means for economic survival only to the extent that their sexual wares remain for sale. The inviolability of this sexual paradigm in late twentieth century and post-millennial America is writ large in the Hollywood career of Richard Gere.

Gere first shot to fame via 1980’s American Gigolo, in which Gere flipped the sexual script in his portrayal of the male prostitute servicing a female clientele. The success of this film hinged on the erotic potency of the violation of taboo found in its illicit rearrangement of sexual typecasting (re. the box-office potential of taboo-busting, witness the aptly titled pornographic film Taboo, one of the highest grossing blue movies to date, in which a male in his late adolescence lusts after, and ultimately consummates a sexual relationship with, his mother). The success of American Gigolo simultaneously made and unmade Gere, as he had unquestionably ascended to star status, but on his way up became marked as persona non gratis, effectively emasculated by the viral femininity that had leeched into his Hollywood aura during his turn as prostitute, i.e. Woman.

It is crucial not to let the box-office success of Gere’s 1982 smash hit, An Officer and a Gentleman, muddy the waters. Understood correctly, An Officer and a Gentleman is the exception that proves the rule that when one swims against the tide of masculine domination, one swims at one’s own risk. Gere’s ability to temporarily transcend the stain from American Gigolo is secured in the famous final scene of An Officer and a Gentleman in which Gere, in full Marine dress blues, storms onto the factory floor and literally sweeps Debra Winger off of her feet and out of the factory, to the cheers of her female factory co-workers. Each element in this scene is crucial to Gere’s brief transcendence. The marine uniform as warrior’s cloth cloaks Gere’s sexual stain, obscuring it from the viewer’s gaze. Gere sweeps Winger off her feet in a factory, the archetypal site of involvement in the wage economy, symbolically removing Woman from the labor pool and placing her economic survival back in its rightful domain of sexual object-hood. Winger swoons in Gere’s masculine embrace, an embrace which clearly references Man’s purchased ownership of Woman’s sexuality via marriage as rendered in the traditional carrying of the newly betrothed bride over the threshold, which is always a precursor to laying the virgin down in the marriage bed and taking possession of her sex. This shot reverses the transgressive act of taking women back across the threshold into sexual freedom that Gere, by bedding them for pay, had symbolically accomplished in American Gigolo. Finally, the cheers of Winger’s female factory co-workers signal their complicity in the sexual status quo, as they long to be liberated from the oppressive workaday life of factory labor by their own knight in shining armor; a life of indentured sexual servitude seems a small price to pay at the end of an eight hour shift on the factory floor for peanut wages. These women’s cheers signal that the feminist’s victory has in fact been Pyrrhic in nature, as the fruits of liberation from masculine domination are revealed as but a subjugation of a higher order. The song of women’s liberation is lost in the throbbing beat of workingman’s blues.

Post- An Officer and a Gentleman, Gere’s career entered its wilderness period, as the stain of American Gigolo, temporarily undone in the narrative of Officer’s denouement , reasserted itself in a near-decade long series of box-office disappointments. The only heat Gere generated during this period came in the form of a perverse urban legend. Legend has it that Gere engaged in a radical form of bestiality, inserting a mouse encased in a condom inside his rectum, with the frantic scratching of the mouse intended to generate sexual stimulation. Gere almost certainly never actually engaged in any such sexual shenanigans, but the viral spread of this rumor, which became so commonplace as to be considered a matter of course, had nothing to do with whether Gere actually stuffed a mouse in his arse. The ubiquity of this urban legend was an expression of zeitgeist, a collective recognition of the stain attached to Gere as a result of his actions in American Gigolo. The urban legend was a reformulation of the cultural stigma attached to Gere’s transgressive sexual persona. It was the very success of American Gigolo, in which mass culture encountered its own unacceptable desire for non-traditional sex, which foundered Gere. Gere’s stain, translated to narrative form via the urban legend, was the accompanying equal and opposite reaction to our collective repression of unacceptable, libido-driven desire.

Gere’s salvation as Hollywood leading man came with 1990’s Pretty Woman, in which Gere permanently erased his stain by renouncing American Gigolo’s radical core. By portraying a man paying to have sex with a female prostitute, Gere is able to stuff the terrifying specter of our sexual unchaining back into Pandora’s Box. It all plays out like a failed psychoanalysis, in which Gere shares his dream/nightmare of being paid to provide sex to a woman, only to have the analyst misinterpret the potentially transformative content of the dream as a symptom of pathology, the only available treatment for which is a reversion to socially acceptable sexual norms, a real, yet cloaked, pathology invisible to the incompetent analyst; the failed analyst, of course, is you and I.

The erasure of the stain enacted by Gere’s performance in Pretty Woman is as comprehensive as it is pathological. Pretty Woman is Gere’s public recital of the requisite Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s, proscribed by that other analyst figure, the Priest (we are, of course, also Priest, in the church of public opin{repress}ion). One conjugal embrace with girl-next-door cum slut Julia Roberts later, and Gere’s sins are completely absolved. The absolution’s probation period ends with Gere’s installation as People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1999. Gere’s new status as Hollywood’s (un)enlightened uber mensch is then codified by his exalted gig as the Dalai Lama’s number one Hollywood henchmen. Namaste!

Gere’s talent as the reverse Harry Houdini, inexplicably capable of re-chaining himself to social sexual norms after the near symbolic-death experience of American Gigolo , is celebrated in 1993’s Somersby. Gere portrays a returning Civil War veteran who, while physically resembling himself as he was before the war, is somehow just plain different enough to raise the question of whether he really is himself after all. Jodie Foster, a real-life “glass closet” lesbian, here dressed in (patriarchal) period costume, perfectly representing the figure of unacceptable, repressed desire, says to the new Gere, in order to prove to him once and for all that he is not the man whom he once was, “I never loved him the way I love you.” Foster’s stated passion for the new Gere is the acceptable, sublimated version of a passion our society is clearly not ready to own: our unequivocal, secret and diabolical desire for our American gigolo.