Welcome to the Chippendales Review: Hulu’s True Crime is Overlooking Hornyness

He may have been a king of nudity, but Hugh Hefner probably never found himself in a room full of dancing naked men. (…Probably.) It’s unlikely he thought much about the male form at all, and yet his legacy still casts its long shadows Welcome to Chippendales. Less than five minutes of Hulu’s latest true-crime miniseries goes by before Hefner’s face, youthful and smiling, flashes across the screen. His likeness is taped to the wall of buttoned-up Indian immigrant Somen Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani) as one of the many glossy clippings that make up his living room vision board.

As a topic too The Six Million Dollar Man playing on his TV, Somen (soon to be Steve) ignores both the perfect male specimen Steve Austin on his screen and most of the expansive, sparkling images that make up his vision board. Bionic men, backgammon, luxury clothing and the vision of a better American future be damned; What catches Steve’s eye instead is this little black and white picture of the world’s most famous magazine editor.

It’s not that Steve was unique in that regard; Since the publication of Playboy’s debut issue in 1953, many men have looked with awe and ambition at Hefner’s reputation, fun-loving lifestyle, and the leagues of women he surrounded himself with. But what Steve knows, and what Welcome to Chippendales seems to remind us that Hefner was primarily a businessman. Behind decades of glamor and hedonism stood a simple but profitable fact: Desire is a commodity, something to be bought and sold. And by 1979 second-wave feminism had left its indelible mark, the pill was widespread and liberated women were a market force to be reckoned with; It was abundantly clear that not only men were buying. Sell ​​though? Well, Chippendales took cues from Mr. Playboy in more ways than one.

sure, Welcome to Chippendales can’t change history. This was never meant to be a story about women commodifying their own desires, and there’s no denying that men are built into the story of Steve Banerjee’s dancing empire. But where the show falls short of its topic — and its audience — is what it seems to forget, or worse, intentionally brush aside: women.

Even as they roamed the grounds of Chippendales’ original West Los Angeles location, even as they may flock to this show over a kingdom of half-naked men, even as they delivered the dollar bills that made this chronicle, tragedy and all, possible, Women were never the main concern of Welcome to Chippendales. Aside from a line or two from hapless playmate Dorothy Stratten (Nicola Peltz) – “I have something to tell you, Paul. Something extremely shocking… but women get horny!” – Episode after episode, the importance of female desire to the success of Chippendales is neglected and summarily buried in favor of the sensationalism of male desire. The meat (sorry) of the show isn’t the busy male revue, but the two men who make it busy: Steve and his new Emmy-winning choreographer, Nick De Noia (Murray Bartlett). Both men want success for the club, but for both men success is the definition of control. Methods and egos collide, there is friction.

It doesn’t take long for these tensions to set in; This is true crime, baby. We don’t want socio-political awareness, not really. We want a villain and we want him now. The time that could be spent helping audiences understand what made Chippendales such a worldwide hit – the liberation of women, a more traditional, straight-forward masculinity that heralded the commercialism and conservatism of the 1980s – , is used more directly to help us understand the building blocks of Steve’s ego and uncovering the origins of his growing anger. (Nick isn’t given as much background, but he’s not the villain; we don’t need to understand what drives him so much as we need to know what makes him tick.)

Truly, Steve’s journey is a well-trodden path: A man has a dream unlike the one his parents had for him. He achieves his goals but not theirs and feels like a failure. It hurts and it hurts and then everyone around him has to suffer. What Steve wants (parental approval, fame, fortune) clashes with what Nick wants (creative freedom, fame, fortune), when in fact they’re all the same. Hostilities escalate and what should have been a tale of the fortunate coincidence of historical moments is reduced to the proud follies of two men. It’s lifelike, of course, but still – it’s annoying.

Male desire has always been taken seriously. People may joke about reading Playboy for the articles, but in its heyday the magazine published between pages and pages of naked women writing from the likes of Roald Dahl, PG Wodehouse, Ray Bradbury, Alex Haley, Margaret Atwood and many, many more. Feminine desire has seldom received the same treatment; even a former Chippendales dancer has described the show as a “comedy act for women”. It’s not that what we want was never in vogue — Chippendales herself is just one example of women’s outsized influence on popular culture. But for every bit of legitimacy our desires get, there’s always a wave of ridicule and obliteration waiting in the wings. There’s always someone (usually a man) who says, “It doesn’t really matter” or “It’s always been overrated.”

While Welcome to Chippendales does not mock or taunt women, the camera keeps sliding over screaming crowds and backstage gatherings, sending a clear message: That doesn’t really matter. When men want women, it makes headlines. But when do women want men? Well, we know that – what is that real story?

It’s not just the women Chippendale however, forgets. Even most dancers are marginalized as nothing more than faceless accessories in Steve’s relentless pursuit of fame and fortune. They rip their pants off with gusto and regularly have sex with adoring fans, but nothing sticks with them. Almost none of them is attributed an inwardness. The show seems almost as disinterested in them as it is in the women they serve. But that’s the trap of true crime, or at least the river of true crime shows we’ve been swimming in lately: any detail that doesn’t contribute to the implied behavioral profile of the miserable creature we’re focusing on isn’t really worth searching for. If it won’t tell us what Steve is doing then what’s the point? Aside from making caricatures of real-life dancers, this formal tendency once again delegitimizes female desire. It flattens it, reducing a complex phenomenon to a simple fact – here, naked, muscular men – to make way for the violent main attraction.

One notable exception—the only one, really—is Otis (Quentin Plair), the Chippendales’ only black dancer and their most popular at that. We learn that he has a family and ambitions and that he looks up to Steve as a successful businessman. There are hints of Otis’ struggle with his newfound fame when white women seize opportunities to abuse him, grab his crotch to “confirm” rumors and steal dirty kisses they didn’t ask for. But even Otis, based on real-life Chippendales stripper Hodari Sababu – who used to be that too only black member the dance troupe – soon finds every shred of individuality the show gives him in the destructive path of Steve’s goals. In this week’s episode, aptly titled “Just Business,” Otis finds out too late that he’s been kicked out of the first Chippendales calendar, which is a commercial success before it even hits shelves. You can see the doors of opportunity closing before his eyes. When he confronts Steve about this matter, his answer is simple. “Ultimately, I felt like it would be bad for sales… Most can do that [handle a shirtless Black man], but not all. And we want them to buy the calendars too.” And that’s it. Otis’ career as a Chippendales performer has reached its limit. Not because he can’t, and not because women don’t want him, but because Steve says so. A man’s desire rules everything.

Welcome to Chippendales is essentially a series about the dirty business of wanting. Not the sensual, sexy desire I was hoping for, but a darker kind, the kind that drives otherwise sane men to commit acts of violence like those Steve Banerjee eventually did (no spoilers; the show will get there) . It’s about how greed – the excess of desire – corrupts and devours everything in its path. But beyond that, it’s about the way men’s desires – their egos and their pride – engulfs woman’s specificity, even in the case of Chippendale where they are the ones doing the wishing. Think back to Hugh Hefner and his monthly playmates and centerfolds; Women reduced to a list of turn-ons, zodiac signs and measurements. You can argue that it’s not inherently demeaning, but it’s undeniably flooring in every way. Hefner and Playboy knew men wanted an ideal woman, not a specific one.

Chippendale does nothing so outrageous, and yet the effect isn’t far off: the women who have put Steve Banerjee at the mercy of his perilous path become a faceless, screaming mass. Her desire turns into nothing more than a weapon that Steve and Nick happily use against each other, fuel that fuels the fires of their anger. It has no specificity, no context. “Women get horny!” Dorothy Stratten tells Steve. Welcome to Chippendales indicates that there is nothing else to it.