The Glorious Homoeroticism of Channing Tatum’s ‘Fighting’

In the spring of 2009, Channing Tatum was mostly known for the Step Up movies and the Amanda Bynes gender-bending soccer comedy/Shakespeare adaptation She’s the Man. His one bid to be taken as a serious actor, 2008’s Stop-Loss, was a disappointment critically and commercially, and the movies that would break him into the ranks of Hollywood’s top leading hunks men were still a few years away. At this point in his career, Channing Tatum was a thick neck who could dance and looked good in a tank-top. Fighting, the grimy little movie about underground bare-knuckle brawlers in NYC, didn’t do anything to help break Tatum out of that mold. In fact, you could say it actually held him back since it suppressed the quality that would end up endearing him to mainstream America: his goofy, doofy charm. The kind that was on display in 21 Jump Street and Magic Mike.

So if Fighting is just a grim, punchy movie featuring Channing Tatum keeping his light hidden under a bushel for the sake of selling him as a brooding tough guy, why are we recommending that you watch it this weekend? The answer lies in its glorious homoeroticism which pervades every corner of this movie. Director Dito Montiel, who’d previously directed Tatum in another sweaty tough-guy performance in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, made the fascinating creative decision to tell the story of a street vendor coaxed into the dangerous world of underground fighting as an allegory for a story about a prostitute and a pimp.

Meet Harvey, played by Terrence Howard in one of the strangest and most affected performances of his illustrious career. He spots Shawn (Tatum) fighting his way out of a thorny situation while selling illegal goods in Midtown and gets the idea that he can make them both some money by arranging for Shawn participate in illegal underground fist-fights. Harvey is a hustler and a con-man and he’s pretty obviously out to use Shawn’s physical gifts in order to make him some money. Bear in mind that throughout the movie, Howard looks at Tatum like he’s sizing up a particularly delectable steak. There’s nothing overtly sexual in the text of the story, which only enhances the homoeroticism, really. When Harvey is leering at Shawn, he’s leering at his … fighting ability. Yeah.

In fairness to Harvey, literally every character in the movie stares at Channing Tatum like this. Luis Guzman shows up as a rival pimp illegal-fight promoter and gives Tatum the eye. Other fighters look him up and down. And then there’s the decidedly effete Jack, played by Roger Guenveur Smith, who acts as if he and Terrence Howard had a wager on who could stare at Tatum more filthily within a scene before Montiel had to step in. This is literally how he ends his first scene with Tatum:

Why yes, he did look down at Shawn’s crotch at the end there!

All the relationships in the movie feel fraught with sexual tension that doesn’t have any basis in the narrative. Brian White plays a rival fighter who reacts to Shawn like he’s the new boyfriend of an ex-lover. Harvey finds Shawn sleeping on a park bench, invites him to stay in his home, and entices him with Broadway tickets (he hears Wicked is very good). There’s a woman who Shawn ends up having sex with, only to find out later that she is a LITERAL surrogate for Harvey (she places bets for him).

The series of back rooms and basements where Harvey takes Shawn to “fight” could not be stylized more like bath houses. They’re all these Brighton Beach, Russian, indoor-pillars, Grecian-inspired caverns, full of shady characters staring from across the room. Shawn’s second big fight happens in an underground social club, and Montiel films it like a cut scene from Eyes Wide Shut or perhaps one of the more sexually explicit moments in The Devil’s Advocate.

The crazy thing is, the movie is almost 4/5 over before Channing Tatum takes his shirt off. IT’S CRAZY. It’s like there was already so much homoeroticism in the film itself that a shirtless shot would have saturated the field and the colors would have bled into each other and the film would have caught fire and the theater would have flooded.

The film ends the way all hooker/pimp stories end … if they were written by the pimp. Shawn makes a million dollars off of his big fight, gives Harvey the money so he can buy his way out of debt (for which he’d have probably gotten murdered), and then they all decide to keep the money and run away to Alabama with Harvey’s sex-surrogate woman in tow. I’m still waiting for the sequel. We all are.

[You can stream Fighting on Netflix.]