celebrity gossip, academic style

But here’s the thing: he’s not crazy. Russell Brand is crazy; Val Kilmer is crazy (see Chuck Klosterman’s profile in Esquire if you don’t believe me). Tom Cruise’s crazy rises from profiles like steam from a volcano. But Channing Tatum is not crazy, and neither is his image. Rather, his image of a tough, lovable doofus — and doofuses sure love to have fun. Not the world-traveling, fancy cocktail drinking, airplane-piloting kind of fun (read: upper-class fun), but the shooting-guns, playing-pool, riding-around-on-four-wheelers-while-drunk sort of fun. Around where I grew up in Northern Idaho, we just called this “hick-ing out,” but we might also call it (rural) working-class fun. And if upper-class fun reeks of European glamour, then working-class fun is pure America.

But if Tatum were just pure America, I might still find him attractive, but I wouldn’t find him enjoyable. In fact, he’d probably be insufferable. If Tatum were just the sum of his parts - Bad Actor, Good Looking, Beautiful Body (in the words of one of my friends from college, that body just goes on forever…), he’d still be a model or a regular on the soap opera circuit. He’d be in Vampire Diaries or mired in the seventeenth season of One Tree Hill. But Tatum has something that makes him more than a beautiful face, that gives him a weird, unexpected form of charisma —

And that thing, I’d argue, is his ability to dance. His actual dancing skill (on display in Step Up), of course, but also all that his dancing signifies. Let’s unpack this a bit.

Tatum can actually dance. He’s not classically trained (how un-American would that be!); he’s self-taught. In Step Up, he naturally plays a self-taught dancer who “spices up” his love interest’s formal choreography. See for yourself:

[My personal favorite dance moment comes earlier in the film, when Tatum does a weird dippy move and pops his collar. So good, SO BAD!] He rejects all the feminine connotations of “male dancer” — he dances in sweat pants rather than tights; the scene when she makes him do ballet is played for pure laughs. His dancing is physical, improvisational, and marked as amateur.

So the dancing is cute. But the “Dancing” component of Tatum’s star image is packed with meaning -

1.) How he started dancing.

Here’s where it gets so good: Tatum didn’t just start dancing around his living room. He was a STRIPPER. A male exotic dancer. There is tape, and it is right here. SO. MUCH. HAIR. GEL. While Tatum didn’t exactly broadcast the fact during his early film career, once it did arise, he embraced it whole-heartedly. As he told GQ, “I had wanted to tell people [...] I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t regret one thing. I’m not a person who hides shit.”

He then proceeded to make fun of himself all over the place — he laughs about it on Ellen and then gives her a lap dance. He developed a script on the inside of the male stripping “industry,” and Steven Soderbergh jumped to direct it. He’s not just “owning” his past as a stripper, he’s exploiting it. A past as a male stripper could be emasculating, it could be gross, it could be embarrassing. But Tatum, working, I’m sure, with some coaching from his PR team, has rendered it endearing.

2.) Dancing —> Monogamy

Tatum met his wife, Jenna Dewan, while filming Step Up. As they danced together, they fell in love, etc. etc. Fans love it when the actors who play characters who fall in love actually fall in love themselves (McGoslings, Twi-Hards), but this is something a little different. Crucially, Tatum has been with Dewan the entire time that he has been in the public eye.

His star text is that of a pure monogamist. Even in his movies, he’s never a philanderer — always into one girl; in fact, totally, selflessly devoted to one girl. It’s the perfect counterpoint to the ostensible “crazy” of his textual and extra-textual roles: sure, Tatum drinks whiskey and shoots guns, but he loves his wife. The moment in the latest GQ profile when he steps out of the house to call his wife is just pure monogamist gold.

3.) Dancing -> Sincerity

Tatum may be a self-taught dancer. He may play his “route” to dancing as a joke. But dancing is totally a sincere thing. Look at his face when he dances! He is SERIOUS about choreography! At other times, he’s just reveling in the dexterity of his own body. He loves to dance, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

That sort of transparent sincerity inflects Tatum’s entire image. You see it in the very earnest way he professes his love in Dear John, and you see it in the way that he talks about “real people” in nearly every profile. When someone in the bar in the old mining town uses the phrase “shit brickhouse,” he replies

“Oh, my God! Yes! Brick shithouse!” Chan says, slapping his knee the next day at Rusty’s. “See! This is why I wanted to come out here. I love these places. You can’t get this good a time in the city! Real people, man. Real people.”

I’m this close to cringing. But then I remember that it’s coming from Channing Tatum’s big, over-sized, attractive face — that he doesn’t want to observe and laugh at these “real people” so much as go back to the time when he was one of them, that I forgive him all his dopey authenticity-seeking. I mean, look at this closer to the Details interview:

 

You see this sincere Tatum in half of his pictures — the half when he’s straight-faced and doing awkward things with his body, model-y, mooney-looking things. But something about it makes me love him even more, like the guy writing really bad yet really sincere acrostic love poetry.

Lainey Gossip argues that he out-Matthew McConaughey’s Matthew McConaghey. But these days, McConaghey’s just a douche with his shirt off. Tatum, on the other hand, has three high profile movies coming out this year and two in pre-production. The trick, I think, is that Tatum can do what McConaughey has never quite been able to pull off: he can play his sincerity straight, as he does in nearly every film. But he can also play that sincerity for laughs, as he does in the trailer for 21 Jump Street.

I could be wrong, but this actually looks hilarious — in part because it takes Tatum’s established image and satirizes it. Ultimately, this knowledge forms the crux of Tatum’s success: he and his team know his image and how to exploit it, but they also know how to make fun of it. And that, more than any actual acting skill, is a ticket to stardom.