Zoolander 2’s cameos commit a real fashion crime

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/02/2016 (3856 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Zoolander 2 is being scorned as an irrelevant, desperate, dated despoiler of the much loved, much quoted 2001 original. Some commentators suggest fans missing the earlier outing’s goof-off humour can at least console themselves by playing spot-the-cameo.

Or can they?

The movie’s cavalcade of celebrity appearances starts with Justin Bieber getting gunned down in Rome. That sounds promising. Who doesn’t want to see Canada’s least favourite export silenced by a barrage of (fake) bullets?

The Biebs is soon joined by Demi Lovato, Madonna, Miley Cyrus, Lenny Kravitz, Usher and Bruce Springsteen — and that’s all before the credits roll.

Cameos might offer some temporary refreshment in Zoolander 2’s jokeless wasteland. But they could also be one of the reasons this toothless, tone-deaf comedy misfires in the first place.

Here are a few things to think about while waiting for Katy Perry or John Malkovich or the editor of Vogue Italia to drop in:

Cameos are distracting: Oh, sure, a movie that’s somehow big enough and crazy enough to contain Willie Nelson, Kate Moss, A$AP Rocky, Kiefer Sutherland, Ariane Grande, Sparrowhawk, Christiane Amanpour and a pygmy hippopotamus feels fun — at first. But as we jump from hipster DJ Skrillex to old-school news anchor Jim Lehrer, from singer Susan Boyle to the inevitable Kim Kardashian West, the celebrity pop-ups become exhausting.

You could say the constant cameos take the audience out of the action. (Ooh, look, there’s Sting, making a joke about his tantric sex life.) But in the lazy, underachieving Zoolander 2, there is no action to be taken out of. Shameless joke-milking has replaced story, and cameos have taken the place of characters.

Cameos declaw the satire: The “really, really, ridiculously good-looking” Derek Zoolander made the cover of Vogue this month, doing his best Blue Steel. (Or possibly Magnum. Or maybe Le Tigre.) This is good news for Ben Stiller but bad news for satire.

The send-ups in the first film weren’t exactly cutting. You can hate the fashion industry’s Mugatu-like excess and Derelicte insensitivity while loving its extravagant beauty and endless creativity.

But in Zoolander 2, there’s barely a barb of ridicule. Vogue editor Anna Wintour is called out as “the white witch of Narnia,” but she’s got Derek on her magazine cover, having clearly calculated that this crossover marketing ploy is worth a glancing reference to her pale spikiness. Stiller, who also acted as co-scripter and director, has said getting Wintour onside really opened doors for the sequel.

But Stiller was funnier in the original Zoolander, when he was banging on those closed doors instead of inside partying with the likes of Marc Jacobs (or “Marc by Marc Jacobs,” as he’s called in the movie), Tommy Hilfiger, Valentino, Alexander Wang and Vera Wang (“both Wangs,” so-hot-right-now Hansel marvels).

The first Zoolander rather impolitely raised the issue of child labour in overseas factories, but the only fashion criminal Zoolander 2 is willing to indict is MC Hammer — for inventing “hammer pants,” which is at worst a sartorial misdemeanour.

Cameos let everyone in on the joke: Sometimes cameos are innocuous. Why not let Neil Degrasse Tyson, everyone’s favourite cosmologist, make an appearance while Derek and Hansel question their male-modelling place in the universe?

But cameos can become a way for the rich and famous to prove they’re in on the joke. When Mugatu (Will Ferrell) suggests über-prepster fashion designer Hilfiger and his new collection are “being brought to you by white privilege” — one of Zoo 2’s only zingers — Hilfiger is right there, grinning to show he gets it.

Zoolander 2’s unending cameo-fest soon becomes a self-congratulatory, self-referencing exercise in celebrity self-gratification that essentially renders any potential targets harmless and comedy-proof. Fashionistas and celebrities may be egregiously entitled narcissists, the movie seems to say, but look — they’re self-aware egregiously entitled narcissists.

It’s like letting Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live. It grants him a kind of cred he doesn’t deserve. It makes him a joker instead of an increasingly terrible joke. Did Charlie Chaplin give Joseph Goebbels a walk-on role in The Great Dictator? No, he didn’t.

And OK, fashion is not fascism — well, maybe a little — but the comedy mechanism is the same. Despite cameo appearances by every celebrity contact in Ben Stiller’s iPhone, Zoolander 2 remains a poorly conceived, badly stitched designer knock-off.

 

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca