In this movie, set in 2007, late in the second GWB term, which I watched at 1.25% speed in the bath, three craven, late-career, white leading men from 70s, 80s, or 90s Hollywood who really seem to need irl paychecks go on a movie motorcycle trip from Cleveland to Venice Beach with their mutual friend Martin Lawrence. They call their movie friend group, which finds its primary expression in weekend rides, “the Wild Hogs.”
Eventually the Hogs run into Ray Liotta in New Mexico. Ray Liotta is the leader of a “real” bike gang, the Del Fuegos, founded by his father, Henry Fonda (Boomer pausing the movie screen to gesticulate and exclaim: “it’s an Easy Rider reference!! I got the reference!!”). Liotta gets mad that the Wild Hogs are poseurs, and steals one of their motorcycles to “teach them a lesson,” which in turn leads to the destruction of his biker bar, creating beef. Then the Del Fuegos and the Wild Hogs spend acts two and three figuring out who’s actually authentic/who’s actually a man via bluster and violence in a town that’s having a chili competition. It blows over when Henry Fonda eventually shows up to chide Ray Liotta, telling him the bar was “a shithole” (Trump vox) and that he made a ton of money on insurance when it burned down. Ray Liotta says “Sorry pop,” and that’s it. The Wild Hogs prove they are the “real men” and finish the ride to Venice Beach, where Gen X and early Millenial women in bikinis smile at them and wave. Over the end credits, Ray Liotta’s bar is rebuilt by “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” into something that looks like a Guy Fierri restaurant or something.
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The other Hogs are William H (“Hilliam”) Macy, John Travolta, and Tim Allen. Macy is sort of the central character; he plays “a computer programmer” who is “afraid to talk to women.” He is introduced in a cafe, where he is using a desktop implementation of Siri called “Mac,” via an open interface that looks something like Audacity. When he tries to seem like a cool computer guy, it misunderstands his command to “open Internet” and searches for “alternative sex,” immediately opening a million “popups” for things like “kinky granny” sites, which all play sound. As he struggles to close the popups, he spills coffee on his computer, which resembles a gray-bodied plastic 2003 HP Pavilion (not the aluminum-bodied Powerbook G4, and certainly not a 2007 white MacBook). The coffee spill causes his computer to spark and emit smoke; everyone in the cafe is disgusted at the display. Later, in his enthusiasm for the bike trip, he gets a bicep “tat” of the Apple rainbow logo. The joke is that Macy doesn’t understand that the rainbow is a symbol of gay pride, and that the Apple logo is not a tough enough tattoo for a biker to have; it’s that kind of movie. And the whole thing also just rings completely false because the rainbow logo was retired in 1998.
Macy’s character is portrayed as earnest, loving, and naive. He admires his male friends, and is on a quest for Maleness via getting laid not unlike Chris Elliot’s in Cabin Boy. (At the time I watched this, Macy was embroiled in the celebrity pay-to-play “college admissions scandal,” which felt cartoonishly appropriate to his presence in this movie.) Meanwhile, Travolta plays the group asshole, and goes all-in on straight-ahead, “no homo” bro masculinity, played with zero irony for laughs. Travolta repeatedly dismisses Macy’s naive comfort with his own body and earnest male admiration for his friends in homophobic terms. There’s even a lengthy interlude in Act 1 with a gay motorcycle cop (played by character actor John C. McGinley (Point Break)) who keeps trying to get the Hogs to have an orgy, and they have to figure out how to escape without appearing not-gay, so as not to rouse the ire of law enforcement and get a ticket. The whole thing is about as endless-feeling and lurid as Jack Nicholson in the dentist’s chair in the OG Little Shop of Horrors (1960).
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That Ray Liotta’s bar is remodeled from “a shithole” into something completely plastic-looking by an HGTV show is weirdly descriptive of this entire movie’s thing: that artificial suburban consumer reality is ultimately the measure of what’s right, manly, and good. Ray Liotta reenters this reality and signals his true beta status by crying tears of joy; he and his criminal biker gang were cowardly lions after all. And the Wild Hogs were right to be prepared to stand up to them in violent conflict all along: that’s what “real men” do.
Is this convincing to anyone? Who does this fantasy belong to? Does anyone watching the movie actually think the bar is better off after this weird renovation? Do they believe that either model of “the biker” depicted here is somehow “authentic?” Do they believe that any of these men are “real men?”
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The last thing I wanna say here is that Davey and I are originally acquainted from being “noise babies” in Philly who also played board games, but we got to know each other by doing a low-level east coast tour together. I had to get out of bed to check if that tour was in 2007, and whether we were plausibly on the road ourselves while the Wild Hogs were fighting Ray Liotta, but it was in 2008. Still, pretty tragic to think that this is the “road movie” we’re left with to describe this time.
Four middle-aged friends hit the road on their motorcycles to rediscover themselves and maybe America. This is the base outline for Wild Hogs a movie made in the waning years of the Bush administration, right before things got inconceivably weird for the baby boomers. I’d heard Wild Hogs was something in the vein of Grown Ups 2, a film equal parts psychotically banal and malevolent. While it does share those qualities it doesn’t possess that film’s sheer volume of incoherent bad vibes, leaving it a mere pretender to the crown of that brand of psychedelically-bleak Americana. So while I mentally group Grown Ups 2 in with Lars Von Trier and similar punishers, Wild Hogs I found more akin to something like Sixteen Candles; a middling comedy with toxic overtones that get more pronounced and poisonous over time. The movie’s only saving grace is to witness its obsessive focus, with every joke and plot development all stemming from the question of “How to be a Man.”
Wild Hogs believes men should be devoted to one another entirely, but express affection for each other sparingly. The two most common responses for those who break discipline and cross these boundaries is derision or violence. The movie posits one other notable response, typified by its “gay biker cop.” This character’s sole function is to appear whenever our crew of “normal men” get anywhere close to being unguarded with one another. It’s one of Wild Hogs’s wilder fantasies, that a gay authority figure will show up and try to hang out with you and your friends whenever you stray the slightest amount from violently rigid heteronormativity. But there’s something there: the looks of disgust mixed with terror on our heroes faces really capture the white baby boomer fear of marginalized groups attaining authority over them.
I should note here that Martin Lawrence is also a Wild Hog, which to some folks might blow my white boomer thesis out of the water. There is one reference in the film to him being black, which is William Macy’s character saying that the only thing he could think of was “black jokes” when he was trying to talk to a girl he had a crush on. The point Wild Hogs makes here, about how racism can be fueled by male fragility, and how a veneer of equanimity will be suspended for any reason, is real insofar as this mindset goes. No one else calls Macy out when he says this, despite dogging him every chance they get for the rest of the movie. So this isn’t really Lawrence’s movie, and although he’s a part of the gang, the fact that he’s black puts him socially below William Macy’s motorcycle-crashing, accidental-porn-watching fool in terms of worth to the group.
This idea of openness and comfort being the enemy of discipline which in turn would disrupt a rigid hierarchy enforced by derision and violence is Wild Hogs and the at-large baby boomer take on masculinity in a nutshell. While you can‘t entirely blame an entire generation raised by soldiers (many of whom fought in a war themselves) for feeling that being a man means being a part of an army engaged in an endless war against everything else, it is possible to reject this idea… and many have. However Wild Hogs emphatically does not.
Luckily we don’t have to subsist on a world filled with Wild Hogs insights alone. While arguably every year in film can be looked at in terms of how it represents a shift in the contours of masculinity, 2007 has it very much on its mind. There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men both come out, and both interrogate the consequences of this mindset of endless war to different ends. 2007 was also the year that Superbad was released, written by two millennial men, and ending with the two male leads gazing into each others eyes in bed and telling each other that they love each other. At the end of Wild Hogs the gang regained their manhood, but outside the film, what that meant became less valuable and more unrelatable and pointless with every passing year since.
