White Chicks (2004)
By Ciara Midreé — October 7, 2017
Who am I kidding, this movie is just a pleasure, no guilt about it. But I probably do shrug when I mention it. I probably say something like, “I don’t know, it makes me laugh.” When Marlon and Shawn’s characters get hit on as women for the first time and they react with irrational anger, it’s more than a little problematic. Shades of racism and sexism run through this movie, along with a heavy dose of homophobia.
Buuuut those wigs are laid and those ice blue contacts are poppin, and the movie came out before I knew any better, so it got me! It’s also not as terrible as some other late 90s/early 2000s movies, or even some movies and shows that come out now which wrestle with gender roles.
So I focus on the things the movie got right. First off, I laugh way more at this movie than I do at a ton of recent comedies. I laugh out loud. I also like a lot of the things it does differently than its predecessor, Some Like it Hot (1959). Maybe they balance out the icky bits with the way they change the “love interests” of the main characters. Instead of an old fuddy-duddy pursuing Marlon’s character, they have fine-ass Terry Crews, who is comic gold in every scene he’s in. Instead of a secretly alcoholic Marilyn Monroe, they have a gorgeous investigative journalist for Shawn to woo. She doesn’t exactly have Marilyn’s screen presence, but it’s nice that he’s not just going after some airhead (or one of the White women— that’s for Crews to do, and he does it for laughs so it doesn’t look like Black women aren’t appreciated).
They also have the main characters impersonating specific women, which lessens the idea of them impersonating or mocking all women or, worse, mocking drag queens or transgender women. They then play up the absurdity of all the characters insisting that six foot-whatever Marlon and Shawn are actually two skinny White girls. In Some Like it Hot, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon were both 5’9”— in dresses they look like tall, slightly muscular women (Especially Curtis, who arguably didn’t even need a wig to bring out his feminine allure; he was a very pretty man). They pretend to be typical women, whatever that was supposed to be back in 1959. Apparently just high pitched voices, limp wrists, and navigating sexual assault from every man you meet (there’s a real rape-y vibe to that movie).
Quite differently, Marlon and Shawn intend to become two particular people, two women that they look nothing like— not in height, build, facial features, or skin tone. The fact that everyone “recognizes” these men as the sisters, even though they have a foot and at least 60 lbs of muscle on their female counterparts (and are clearly wearing masks), is what makes this movie— it’s so ridiculous that you’re forced not to take anything else seriously. It’s like Joanne the Scammer but with the race flip set to 11. Just imagine if the Wayans had tried for less realism, a la Dave Chappelle’s
news anchor on Chappelle’s Show— without the thick rubber masks, it might have been even better.
Despite this wonderful layer of absurdity, liking White Chicks makes me a little uncomfortable. In another creative team’s hands, it may have reached absurdist brilliance. It could’ve discussed the implications of middle class Black men assuming the identity of rich White women. Instead it just goes for the cheap jokes, and gets kinda gross and cringeworthy in places. Which I guess makes it as guilty a pleasure as I’m going to get.
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