Come In Zebra Three!

Bo and Luke, Ponch and Jon, Starsky and Hutch. Buddy TV ruled in the Seventies. But what was all that male bonding really about, asks Mark Simpson. And can a movie remake ever be half as cool, man?

Independent on Sunday, 29 February 2004

The President of the United States announced last week that gay marriage is ungodly and un-American. So un-American, in fact, that he wants to amend the US Constitution itself to outlaw forever same-sex weddings. Apparently, in His infinite wisdom, God decided heterosexuals would shoulder alone the burden of keeping American divorce lawyers in Italian sports cars.

But don't be fooled. Male "marriage" has been one of the most central and abidingly popular institutions of American culture from the earliest days.

An all-guy marriage is about as all-American as you can get. God may have created Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, but in the imagination of American wilderness, forever on the run from domesticity, he created us Adam and Steve, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, Butch and Sundance, Starsky and Hutch.

Some might object that gay marriage, unlike the male marriage of American imagination, involves sex - but perhaps that merely betrays an optimism about gay marriage few would extend to marriage in general.

Like many other boys - and quite a few girls - growing up in the Seventies, the heyday of the TV buddy series, I wanted to be an astronaut, a cowboy, or a cop. Though in hindsight I suspect I wanted to be buddies with a cowboy or an astronaut or a cop, just like loveable-and-loving rogues Hannibal Heyes and Jed Kid Curry (Alias Smith and Jones), Ponch and Jon (Chips), Bo and Luke Duke (The Dukes of Hazzard), or Starsky and Hutch. (I also wanted to be Scooby Doo, but that's another story.) I knew that to do this I'd have to move to America. Somehow I'd worked out that buddies weren't really allowed in Britain. There wasn't enough space for them. Oh yeah, you could have mates, but not a buddy. No matter how many times you made them play Starsky and Hutch games with you. There just wasn't room in cynical, cramped Britain for something as outdoor and optimistic and big-hearted as buddies. Or customised red-and-white Ford Gran Torino sports cars.

Some unkind people might say that, in my case, the appeal of TV buddy series was more to do with the medically dangerous tightness of Starsky or Bo's jeans than anything else, but I still like to think that it was the romantic dimensions which I was responding to.

Todd Phillips, the director of the new big-screen comedy version of Starsky and Hutch, starring Ben Stiller as the over-caffeinated brunette Starsky and Owen Wilson as his almost criminally laid-back blond partner Hutch, is open about the romantic appeal of buddiness. "I describe the film as a romantic comedy between two straight men," he says. "It sort of follows the beats of a typical romantic comedy in that they don't really get along at first, they start to get along, they break up and then they come back together for a better union than ever. But in this case it's two straight guys going through those same beats." And there's the same resolution as in most romantic comedies: marriage.

Though here it is symbolic: by the end of the film we see our heroes' partnership "blessed" by a visibly aged David Soul and a worryingly well-preserved Paul Michael Glaser, still together after all these years (and still bickering), who hand over their famous car as a kind of wedding present/honeymoon vehicle to their odd offspring.

However, Soul was not always in favour of the new partnership and originally criticised the casting of the movie, saying he didn't think that Stiller and Wilson would have the right "chemistry". His solution? A film starring him and Michael Glaser, of course. Egomania aside, he was right. Stiller and Wilson, who have appeared in other movies together and are reportedly off-screen buddies, definitely don't have the same bond as the original pairing. But this probably isn't their fault, but the fault of our times. Starsky and Hutch is an entertaining and well-made movie that never really does anything more than entertain. If it is a romantic comedy then it's one without much romance, except about the Seventies themselves. Most of the "chemistry" is provided by the "Red Tomato", the customised Gran Torino, which seems even shinier and redder than it did on TV in the Seventies, perhaps because here it stands in for Hutch and Starsky's all-guy love for one another. Which, I suppose, is very modern.

This perceived lack of heart is probably down, in part, to nostalgia for a better, kinder, truer time when on-screen cops had twinklier eyes and people (you and me) hadn't replaced relationships with things. And maybe it's also because this is a movie and not a TV series with all the opportunities for growth and development that such a medium offers.

But mostly I think it's down to a loss of innocence, or at least a loss of the disavowal upon which male marriage depended. In its place we have fear of commitment - and the cold clammy hand of irony on your knee instead of a manly bear hug.

Early on there's a scene, probably the funniest in the film, where our boys need to get some information out of an imprisoned gay biker (in a hair-net). To placate him they have to act out, in the prison visiting area, his fantasy - involving gay dragons. Hutch and Starsky are understandably not very happy about this, but if it will help them close this murder case then, hey, it's worth it. And besides, no one need know. Inevitably, their antics have been recorded by a closed-circuit security camera. Cue the next scene: Captain Dobey hauling their asses into his office and giving them a serious dressing-down while the other cops - who have already been mocking our boys as fags, calling them names like "Sonny and Cher" - laugh like drains. This isn't the (TV) Seventies any more, Toto. In a mediatised world, what's private gets made public. Male friendship in the past may or may not have involved sex, but the difference between male friendship involving sex and male friendship not involving sex would often have been impossible to spot. Laurel and Hardy and Morecambe and Wise shared a bed, after all.

As well as being funny, this sequence smartly deflects familiar anxieties in a gay-aware/ gay-obsessed world - making the possibility of sex between our buddies the fantasy of gays in hair-nets or fat, ugly homophobic cops.

Later, however, Hutch - having put an out-of-it Starsky (who has confused artificial sweetener with cocaine) to bed - makes out with a couple of cheerleader gal pals, whom he asks to kiss for him, which they do, willingly. Apparently, female friendship can - Yes, it's true! - be explicitly erotic; male friendship mustn't be, unless it's against your will and you're pretending to be dragons.

Actually, the notion that on-screen buddies might really do anything for one another isn't just the concept of gays or homophobes. It's the rather explicit fantasy of the thousands of straight women who write and consume "slash" fiction - online narrative pornography where Kirk/Spock, Batman/Robin, Sam/Frodo, and, yes, Starsky/Hutch are brought together by a "/" and a very graphic, very messy consummation of their on-screen romance. The interest many women have in the (very) carnal possibility of male friendship probably had something to do with why millions of them on both sides of the Atlantic watched Queer as Folk; the storyline of friendship-turned-lustful didn't really make much sense in the gay world it was supposedly set in, where sex usually comes first and friendship later, but was something women responded to.

If you think I'm making too much of that one prison visit scene in Starsky & Hutch, I should point out that that scene is making too much of itself. Bear in mind that Ben Stiller directed The Cable Guy, an extremely knowing and darkly funny buddy flick starring Jim Carrey - rather better than Starsky and Hutch, but a commercial disaster. In it there's another prison visit scene: Carrey torments poor incarcerated Matthew Broderick (who he framed because he wouldn't be his buddy) by re-enacting the scene from Midnight Express where Brad Davies orders his tearful girlfriend to push her breasts against the glass screen. "Oh, Billy!" Carrey sobs loudly, hiking up his shirt and pressing his hairy nipple against the glass. In front of the other, hardened cons. In the same film, Owen Wilson is assaulted in the mens' room by Carrey dressed as Freddie Mercury, who forces him to fellate a hand-drier.

The irony of all these ironies gives me a headache - not to mention making me somewhat afraid to commit. America today is far too knowing a place for buddies of the Seventies variety. It's not big or bluff or breezy enough any more. And there isn't as much chest hair. It seems to have become very middle-class and suburban - buddiness was a staple of blue-collar America.

The biggest irony, however, may be that it was people like me who helped do for male marriage. The increased visibility of homosexuality since the Seventies has clearly made on-screen male togetherness problematic; it's now sleeping on the couch. To be honest, if I thought that banning new-fangled gay marriage would help bring back good old-fashioned male marriage I would probably be its most vocal advocate, but it's far too late for that.

Perhaps the only solution is to give the slash ladies what they want and leave the guys to catch up with it. Maybe the already-mooted sequel to Starsky and Hutch (or the planned film version of The Dukes of Hazzard) should feature an actual marriage scene instead of a symbolic one. Though, of course, if Bush's Amendment to the American Constitution is passed, this would mean even more dodgy prison scenes.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2004

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