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American Gigolo wants to say sorry Not every fetish needs a backstory

(American Gigalo)


September 26, 2022   6 mins

Julian Kay is a thrillingly charming escort, as comfortable at international art auctions as he is on the pull-up bar. His speciality is older women, and when one asks him, in one of those old hotel restaurant booths so cushioned and pink they seem almost like the womb, “How many languages do you speak?”, he replies: “five or six.” “Plus the international language?” “That’s right.”

Julian is the protagonist of Paul Schrader’s 1980 masterpiece American Gigolo, made in the golden age of the erotic thriller. He’s played, and overshadowed, by Richard Gere, who made history as the first leading man to get full-frontally nude in an American studio film. This was another golden age, after all — of sexual freedom — between the invention of the Pill and the horrors of the AIDS crisis.

Why was Julian like this? Why was he so talented at languages, and suave, and erudite; and why was he so into making older ladies feel good? Why was he selling sex, anyway? And what about that murder he was framed for? Nobody cared. The plot was always secondary to the style, merely a support structure for a case study in early Eighties seduction. The point of Julian, if there was one, was his narcissism: he’s a shiny shell draped in Armani suits, who may well have absolutely nothing inside. Later, Schrader actually disavowed Julian a bit, calling him “really just a thin guy”, superficial without knowing it. In that way, maybe, he represents that brief, proto-Reagan paradise: a little stupid, a little evil, but kind of cool.

He was a man of his time, but now, Julian is back. Showtime has created an American Gigolo miniseries, out last week. A hodge-podge of sequel, prequel and remake, the show seems so singularly hellbent on destroying its source material that one wonders: why on Earth was it made? Schrader is apparently wondering, too: though credited as a “corporate consultant” on the final product (his salary was $50,000), he has called the show a “terrible idea” and vowed not to watch it.

A wise choice. Julian has been reimagined as a generic, pitiable, weeping loser, a superannuated sad sack in disgusting hoodies with greasy hair. He’s 45 years old. He’s played by Jon Bernthal. And he shares nothing but a profession with the original character. Julian’s sexiness, it seems, doesn’t work with the archetypal protagonist of prestige television: the sensitive man obsessed with his childhood.

Viewers of the original American Gigolo didn’t care why Julian did what he did. But the new show insists on providing us with a hackneyed backstory, in the form of shot-for-shot flashbacks. Sometimes, there’s the same footage twice in the same episode. Here’s the post-prison Julian grabbing a fence; here’s him doing so as a poor boy in a generic Dust Bowl setting, with his extremely simple mother. Oh, there he goes sleeping with her friend. Fetish understood. And then we find out why he sells sex: a mysterious French-speaking brunette named Olga shows up to the family shack in an extraordinarily short tweed skirt suit, asks to look in his mouth, hands his mother an envelope, and tells him she’ll be waiting in the car. Julian asks his mom: “What?” She sobs: “You’re gonna go to Hollywood and you’re gonna be a big star!” He again asks: “What, Mom?” She screams: “You need to get the fuck out of here right now!” He’s then sent to, it would appear, a high-class gigolo camp.

To ensure that the audience can congratulate itself on watching virtuous prestige television attuned to the havoc wrought by toxic masculinity — not the reality shows that their less successful cousins watch — Julian must now have “feelings”, “trauma”, and “pain”. To ensure the creators have ten hours of material, in a business model premised on streaming audiences no longer leaving their homes, or even their beds, to consume “content”, he must also have an incessantly — and very slowly — rehashed “past”.

It is difficult not to see the new American Gigolo as the latest absurd iteration of the media’s anxious, obsessive search for trauma, victimhood, and injury in what, until now, have been recognised as happier chapters in the American story. As Mike Hale has aptly put it in the New York Times, it “remakes an era-defining film for the current age of victimisation”. The whole point of the original Julian was that he was young, confident, and the sexiest man imaginable, a man so alluring that the gorgeous wife of a prominent politician would risk literal death to be with him. But the new Julian is a bundle of pathetic clichés of the repentant male: “I’ve done dumb things.” “I’ve hurt people.” “If I sat on your feet, would you feed me?”

Low-effort psychology, apparently, is a key tenet of prestige television these days — as is box-ticking political lip service. American Gigolo has been reinvented to conform to our current sexual mores: all the sex in this tragic remake are more ferarum and a little rough. In the original, the only BDSM scene, which completely turns off Julian, is orchestrated by a disgusting creep who murders his wife. The whole film revolves around Julian’s sexual tenderness and care toward his love-hungry customers. But whatever! Now it’s hot for a traumatised male to “explore” kink and subsequently cry about how he’s caused “pain”.

And perhaps it’s impossible to emulate the sexiness of the original American Gigolo at a time when sex is regarded as suspect, and “sex workers” themselves embody an inscrutable mixture of saintly victimhood and feminist triumph. Plus, the day-to-day of today’s young escort is a lot more mundane: see Pacho Velez’s performatively boring portrayal of sugar babies in his recent film Searchers, just staring at their iPhones as they scroll through options. That’s a lot less compelling than the original Julian Kay sliding into fancy lounges and waiting for a lady with big earrings to walk over with her cocktail.

The new American Gigolo is, then, as representative of its moment as the first one was. The late critic Mark Fisher wrote about the cultural exhaustion of the 2000s, of the inability to create new artistic forms. In the decades since the Reagan era, he argued, with crash after crash punctuated by booms of ever more inequality and precarity, society became increasingly fearful of the future and ambivalent about the present. Culture, therefore, could be nothing more than a tranquilising and unchallenging rehash of stale nostalgia. American Gigolo is a case in point: its creators, I suppose, vaguely remembered American Gigolo as cool, thought other middle-aged people would, and most importantly, couldn’t think of anything better to make.

The series is part of a larger and more depressing trend toward anodyne, cookie-cutter, sad-sensitive-male remakes. Most cynically, perhaps, is the tendency — part of streaming services’ “microtargeting” strategies based on harvesting demographic data — toward clumsy, politically correct updates of exciting black media. Amazon’s 2021 Coming 2 America, a sequel to Eddie Murphy’s beloved 1988 film, is so lazy it de-ages the actors using CGI to recreate scenes from the original; but for contemporary audiences, it inserts unwieldy references to women’s rights. The 2019 Netflix film Dolemite is My Name likewise stars the now 61-year-old Murphy. Here he portrays Rudy Ray Moore, stand-up and Blaxploitation director best known for Dolemite (1975). In both films, Murphy’s lines are far less shocking than in his Eighties triumphs.

What made the originals funny would never be acceptable today: the humour of Coming to America largely rode on Eddie Murphy’s “African voice”; the humour of Dolemite rode on the Blaxploitation genre’s radical redeployment of Black stereotypes. Today, they have been revised to cleanse the edginess, anger, and discomfort of their originals, in the relentless march to neutralise everything that could possibly risk controversy. Like the woke-washed American Gigolo, the rehash of Dolemite includes absurdly stiff, laundered dialogue. A toothless liquor store haunt says: “Hotel Dunbar: that used to be the centre of Black arts and entertainment.” Snoop Dog, as a Rasta, turns down Murphy’s music: “Sometimes our dreams don’t work out, brother.” The original Dolemite is pretty much known for his catchphrase “Do-lo-mite!” (like “Dy-na-mite!”); now we must suffer Murphy saying things like: “I don’t have a lot of good memories of back home.”

Not even the Classics are safe. In fact, they offer the most absurd example of this bleak trend. Robert Icke, who has been described as the “great hope of British theatre”, has decided to turn the earliest extant work of Greek tragedy, set approximately 3,000 years before the invention of psychology, into another struggle session about trauma. In his adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, during a sold-out West End run, Icke had Orestes recount what he experienced after the end of the Trojan War to a therapist, in a move so inappropriate that even the Guardian called it “neurotic”. In the adaptation’s New York run this summer, Agamemnon was a selfish politician making cynical remarks to a television journalist about how difficult democracy is — despite the fact that the play was set in a pre-democratic era. The adaptation has been dubbed a “masterpiece”.

Most astonishingly, every reference to Greek gods was gone: in their place, Agamemnon, the infamously selfish and infinitely brave antihero of Greek epic, was talking about how his religion “helped” him cope and how he wished he could spend more time with his family. At his trial, Orestes protested that people who’ve been hurt in turn harm others. Yes: the leading British theatrical talent of our day has taken Aeschylus’s timeless and unsurpassed poetry about divine prophecy and replaced it with pabulum about how “hurt people hurt people”.

Taken together, these terrible cultural offerings reveal the unrestricted seepage of cut-rate therapy and its wooden jargon into the very furthest reaches of history. The past has been terrorised and defused, and audiences no longer, apparently, are considered adult enough to consider events without a pre-packaged trauma narrative to delineate who’s good and who’s bad. The gigolo must be sad; Dolemite must be wounded; and even the House of Atreus must be analysed with all the subtlety of an Instagram self-care post explaining “PTSD”.

The impact is palpable: in a major way, the purpose of art is to show that a past existed, and that it was different from the present. These bowlderised and ham-fisted revisits brainwash viewers into a terribly misleading idea: art has always been one way, as has psychology, as has politics, as has religion, as has everything. “Source material” is less marshalled into new interpretations, more colonised into uniformity. It is a sad day when Julian Kay, Dolemite and Agamemnon somehow all have precisely the same thing to say: “I’m in a lot of pain, and I’m sorry!”


Ann Manov is a writer living in New York. Visit her website here.

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DA Johnson
DA Johnson
2 years ago

In describing the character of Julian in the 1980 movie American Gigolo Ann Manov says “…he represents that brief, proto-Reagan paradise: a little stupid, a little evil, but kind of cool.” It’s unclear what “proto” means or what President Reagan has to do with this era–let alone this movie–as he was elected in November of 1980 and took office in January of 1981. In point of fact, when this movie was being made in 1980 it was the “stupid…evil…but kind of cool” era of Jimmy Carter.
This seems to be another tiresome instance of a partisan writer desperate to insert a smear against a politician they dislike into an article, however unconnected that politician might be to the subject matter.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
2 years ago
Reply to  DA Johnson

Correct. It’s beyond tiresome.

Ray Mullan
Ray Mullan
2 years ago
Reply to  DA Johnson

This seems to be another tiresome instance of a partisan writer …

I am showing my years but the term “proto–Reagan” is apt to describe a phenomenon which, although it preceded Reagan, came to define the era of his presidency — regardless of whether one views him in a positive or negative light. The post-war narcissism of Western culture took a sudden and dramatic upward turn with the free–market schtick at turn of the seventies and eighties. Hippies gave rise to yuppies and it was “me, me, me” wherever one looked throughout the subsequent decade.

We can see clearly how this continues in the full–blown globalism of the present day but it is better addressed with the question of “who am I?” as opposed to “what can I get?” — mainly because there is increasingly less to define the individual, culturally, politically and certainly economically.

Ann Manov captures this beautifully.

Last edited 2 years ago by Ray Mullan
Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 years ago
Reply to  DA Johnson

I tend to agree, but let’s just try to ignore it for a change; the main thrust of the article was very perceptive. I note however that someone else defends the term ‘proto-Reagan’ and he may be on to something – it is maybe ironic but the economic reforms of Thatcher and Reagan did tend to turbo charge a particular and rather visible form of selfish deracinated materialism.

The problem of course is that a seemingly political reference immediately risks turning off half the audience.
So here we are talking about whether Reaganism was good, bad or mixed rather than the complete ‘woke’ takeover of every art form!

Last edited 2 years ago by Andrew Fisher
Paul K
Paul K
2 years ago

Excellent piece. Thanks.

Andre Lower
Andre Lower
2 years ago

…and that is why people with any notion of taste are simply ignoring the whole lot of recent “cultural” production. So there is this divide between those who are aware that quality cultural offerings exist and those who aren’t. Pretty much a mirror of what happened to the music “industry” over the past 30 years or so. In general terms, what the woke movement is achieving is the reduction of the relevance of popular culture, which their moral hysteria prevents them from noticing. Serves them well, and should make their lives even more boring than they are right now.

Last edited 2 years ago by Andre Lower
Toby B
Toby B
2 years ago

This is very good. Sharp analysis, great writing.

Deborah H
Deborah H
2 years ago

Great piece! I couldn’t help reading it with the Critical Drinker’s Scottish accent.

B Davis
B Davis
2 years ago

Is anyone actually surprised?
Post-Woke, the world is redefined as Oppression. And the world’s denizens…the 117B who have ever lived…they are split between Oppressor and Oppressed. What else is there?
So when you can look at 10,000 years of history and see only Victimization, Inequity, and the long-stifled, overwhelming need for Self-Expression and Safe Spaces… OF COURSE Schrader’s “American Gigolo” must be re-imagined per current dogma. In the Soviet Union of the 30’s, they called this Stalinization of art, ‘Socialist Realism’. Mao defined it as art that ‘served the people’. And Hitler confiscated everything which didn’t thus serve and called it ‘Degenerate’. This no different.
The Julian Kay of almost half-a-century ago could not exist today. Too White… too masculine…too self-assured….too heteronormative… too everything. Would Target hire that character to sell a new clothing line? Would ESPN want Julian to comment on the Game? Would the View want to interview him? Perhaps, but only to castigate and demean.
In the meantime we await American Gigolo #3… in which Julian becomes a BIPOC TransMan struggling for acceptance as a DragQueen StoryHour Performer in Winnetka.
Cover me with kisses, baby
Cover me with love
Roll me in designer sheets
Just make sure you’ve obtained provable Affirmative Consent and are appropriately Gender Fluid.

Brett H
Brett H
2 years ago

I’m in a lot of pain, and I’m sorry.

R Wright
R Wright
2 years ago

Weak men written by even weaker men and diversity hires.

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

Might I arrogantly offer a piece of advice to older men? in my humble opinion women are attracted to two important characteristics….. Men who actually prefer the company and consortia of women to their menfolk, and men who don’t drink!

Richard Ross
Richard Ross
2 years ago

Could pedantically pick thru quite a few awks in this piece (“bowlderized?”) but some gems of phrases too, like “sex workers…embody an inscrutable mixture of saintly victimhood and feminist triumph” and all in the service of an insight worth pointing out. Thank you!

polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago

This Oresteia sound a gas. Are you sure that it isn’t being played for laughs? I once watched a performance in Greek. We all laughed in the wrong places.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
2 years ago
Reply to  polidori redux

That reminds me of going to watch An American Werewolf In London in a provincial town in Sweden (can’t remember exactly where now) whilst backpacking.
The film had subtitles for the majority of the locals whose grasp of English wasn’t great. Me and my mate laughed out loud at the appropriate places but the rest of the audience started to get annoyed and often missed the all-important lines at the bottom of the screen as they turned round to “Shhhh”.
There’s one scene where the protagonists enter an inn out in the sticks. Everything goes quiet; the locals look disapprovingly at this intrusion by strangers. My mate and I left the cinema before the end of the film…

polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

A long time ago, when I was young, a Swedish girl took me to see a Swedish comedy. There were no subtitles (we were in Sweden). I laughed when she laughed. Why? Because she was beautiful.

Arie van Kreuningen
Arie van Kreuningen
2 years ago

“Latest absurd iteration of the media’s anxious, obsessive search for trauma, victimhood,” The movie Blonde also comes to mind, a ‘fictional’ retelling of the life of Marilyn Monroe. They reduced Norman Jean to a sexual punchball who is almost drowned as a child, raped, abused, undergoing abortions, exploited (by powerful men of course), undergoing forced f******o (by the most powerful man, the president), and ultimately ending her life in about 80% of the screen-time. The director Andrew Domnik stated that her suicide was “the most important thing”. Of course, suicide causes her to sit on the golden throne of ultimate trauma and victimhood, why look at other parts of her life? That her life offered so much more, that she is still a household name because of her talents, that other people or actors who committed suicide aren’t nearly as famous (which means she had much more to offer) – is easily forgotten.

Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
2 years ago

Excellent piece. Apart from *precarity* which is not a word.

Richard Ross
Richard Ross
2 years ago
Reply to  Jane Awdry

How about “bowlderized”?

Big Kagi
Big Kagi
2 years ago
Reply to  Jane Awdry

It’s been in use since at least 1910, friend.
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/64050894?redirectedFrom=precarity#eid

Jonathan Weil
Jonathan Weil
2 years ago

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