The Oscar for best torso goes to ...
Six years ago, Arin Babaian was given the opportunity to travel the world with Channing Tatum.
The two men had met a year earlier, when Babaian was drafted by Spyglass Entertainment to help the then largely unknown Tatum beef up for the lead role in their summer action movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
Tatum and Babaian hit it off and vowed to work together on whatever the actor did next. Babaian bid a temporary, anguished goodbye to his fledgling business, and decided to go along for the ride.
Babaian is one of a small group of personal trainers to the stars responsible for perhaps the most significant change in how we view leading men.
If you’ve been to the movies even once in the past couple of years, you’ll probably have noticed that actors are getting, for want of a better word, ripped.
Moviegoers who saw Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy last summer were treated to the sight of Chris Pratt showing off the kind of torso that wouldn’t look out of place in a Tom of Finland print. This summer, he did the same in Jurassic World.
Pratt’s roles don’t exactly demand that kind of marble-hewn physique, and until recently it would have been easy to picture him playing both at a fraction of his current size.
Ten years ago, leading men in popular movies looked like Johnny Depp, Hayden Christensen and Elijah Wood.
Exactly what has changed? Babaian, a 43-year-old native New Yorker, has a few ideas. The first is that actors are increasingly using personal training as a way of immersing themselves in a role that stops short of the obsessive mania of Method.
When Babaian trained Tatum to play a stripper in Magic Mike (2012), the exercises were geared toward shaping his body into a “golden ratio” physique: Shoulder presses and sit-ups helped to mould his upper body into the same kind of harmonious V-shape Michelangelo used in his nudes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But for Foxcatcher (2014), in which he played an Olympic wrestler, his regime was different: Dumbbells, dead-lifts, endless holds and throws.
“The training isn’t separate from rehearsal,” Babaian says, sounding a little stung, when I ask how much time this takes away from learning lines. “It is rehearsal.”
In that respect, the toned bodies of the 2010s couldn’t be further removed from the Muscle Beach look popularized by the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Eighties. Back then, an actor’s body was their brand. Now, it’s just another tool in their arsenal.
But however keen some actors are to embrace rigorous physical fitness, modern audiences seem to be with them every step of the way, and this is where the revolution- ary part comes in. On the Jurassic World publicity tour, Pratt tried to articulate what was going on, with limited success.
“I think it’s appalling that for a long time only women were objectified, but I think if we really want to advocate for equality, it’s important to even things out,” he told Radio 4’s Front Row. “Not objectify women less, but objectify men just as often. There are a lot of women who got careers out of it, and I’m using it to my advantage. And at the end of the day, our bodies are objects.”
Cinema and objectification can’t be pulled apart: What Pratt was getting at was that the ways in which men and women have traditionally been looked at by the camera is changing.
In a 1973 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, the film theorist Laura Mulvey brilliantly nailed down the difference. What usually matters about female characters is how they make male characters feel ... turning them into objects for us to look at and appraise coolly — or, just as often, hotly — from a distance. The leading men, on the other hand, are the ones we’re normally supposed to identify with directly: Mulvey likens the relationship to a child recognizing himself in the mirror and being excited at seeing himself somewhere else — with an added rush of pleasure at his double’s apparently central role in the reflected landscape.
Except when the camera lingers on Pratt’s body in Guardians of the Galaxy, or Henry Cavill’s in Man of Steel, or the gym-toned lead actors in any number of other recent hit films, that isn’t what we’re being invited to think at all, despite the toddler-like gurgles of delight it might provoke.
In Magic Mike XXL, when Tatum starts grinding against his workbench the scene is shot and staged in a way that puts Tatum’s body on display purely for the pleasure of looking at it — except that the uneasy power dynamic that raised a red flag for Mulvey, with the gazedat character reduced to a passive pin-up, is turned on its head.
Like all the dance numbers in the film — and all the ab and pec flashing, come to that — it’s a performance in which Tatum is happily complicit.
“It means there’s a kind of role reversal taking place in the audience,” says Babaian. “It’s as simple as making it possible to look at a male actor whom you find physically attractive and say ‘I like that.’”
I think it’s appalling that for a long time only women were objectified, but I think ... it’s important to even things out.