At a dive bar deep in coal country, Derek Zoolander, male model, sits with his father and brothers after they’ve spent a long day in the mines. An ad for the beauty company Aveda comes on the TV—a spot that, as luck would have it, features Derek at his male-modeliest: hair gelled, torso nude, skin shimmering with body glitter. He also has a tail, a fishy pastel-green appendage that has been grafted onto his lower extremities via a protean form of CGI. “Moisture is the essence of wetness,” the ad’s narrator intones, as Derek (played by Ben Stiller) flaps around in an unconvincing ocean. “And wetness is the essence of beauty.”
Surf and turf, but make it fashion: The joke pretty much delivers itself. But it also functions, in Zoolander, as a plot device. As the ad plays, Derek seems thrilled: Finally, his family will see him. Finally, maybe, they’ll be proud.
Instead, they’re ashamed. Derek’s father (a steely Jon Voight) professes his relief that his wife, having died, never had to “see her son as a mermaid.”
The line is harsh—it might be the most piercing in the film—but if there’s one thing viewers learn about Derek Zoolander, it’s that he will, like a phoenix with a fish tail, persevere. Out of the awkward silence, inspirational music begins to swell. “Mer-man,” Derek corrects his father, the music growing louder around him. “Mer-MAN!”
If Zoolander is a bit like its namesake—absurdly farcical, endlessly watchable—Stiller’s chimeric turn helps explain why. When the film premiered 25 years ago, it had everything: an all-star cast (Owen Wilson as Derek’s nemesis, Hansel; Will Ferrell as the arch-villain; David Duchovny as the most celebrated hand model of all time), a gonzo plot (male models brainwashed to serve as assassins!), and a warm human heart. But it also had terrible timing. It debuted in theaters in late September of 2001. Its early earnings, in that grim moment, were tepid, its reviews decidedly bad. (Roger Ebert, so often a champion of cinematic absurdity, met Derek’s assorted contortions with a signature pose of his own: a thumb turned emphatically down.)
But Zoolander, in the years afterward, gradually ascended to filmdom’s version of haute couture: It became a cult classic, beloved for both its ostentatious idiocy and its insistence that dim-wittedness, seen from the right angle, can be wise. The film does more than merely hold up. Today—with its hero’s insistence that he can vamp to the camera, covered in body glitter, and still be a (mer)man—it looks downright prescient.
[Adam Serwer: The masculinity scam]
Zoolander arrived on the scene as the gender swap, that old cinematic trope, was losing its last traces of subversion. The film did not, on its face, deploy the gimmick; Derek is no Tootsie and certainly no Mrs. Doubtfire. But he gender-bends all the same. Derek is two things at once. As a model, he is a man doing work traditionally done by a woman—a guy whose job is to be gazed at and otherwise lucratively objectified. As a male model, though, he is doing a version of what his father and brothers do every day in the coal mines: asserting, and then typifying, an extremely legible version of manliness. The gender-bending is in one way Zoolander’s most basic joke. But it is also a provocation. Derek takes an insult traditionally lobbed at women—bimbo—and twists it around into a cherished and revealing archetype: the himbo.
The bimbo, from her earliest days, was most directly an answer to the vixen and the femme fatale. She enticed, yes, but she never threatened. She may have been voluptuous (she almost definitely was) but she was also fundamentally flat. The bimbo’s vacuity functions as an invitation, effectively, to the people who see her: Go ahead and look. Go ahead and fantasize. Go ahead and laugh. It turns a three-dimensional person into a two-dimensional image and then, in an elegant little trick, insists that she, herself, is responsible for the flattening. The bimbo is silly and empty and treated accordingly. Why consider the person behind the appearance when, the stereotype insists, there is none?
The himbo operates similarly. His attractiveness—his never-misses-leg-day show of masculinity—is his blessing and his curse. It elevates him as someone to be looked at, and it demeans him as something to be looked at. And Derek is a himbo in Platonic form. He is demeaned in terms usually reserved for women. He is a male model caught in the male gaze. Gender swapping can be a gimmick, but it can also offer insights. And as Derek tries bimbohood on for size, he demonstrates how silly the idea has always been.
Himbohood makes Derek mockable. But it also makes him relatable. It is one of the primary sources of his appeal. Derek is not, on the face of things, an obvious hero. He can be superficial (learning that his love interest was heavy in her youth, he responds with a knee-jerk “ew”). He can be vain (at the VH1 Fashion Awards, unable to fathom not being named Male Model of the Year, he barrels to the stage, so self-absorbed that he didn’t hear Hansel’s name being called). He is the kind of guy who will wear white to a funeral and use the eulogy as an opportunity to talk about himself—and then insist that eulogy is pronounced “you-goog-ly.”
But his himbohood redeems him. It is what allows him to work as Zoolander’s protagonist—and to be seen, in his lighthearted way, as worthy of celebration. A himbo’s charm lies in the discrepancy between what he might be and what he is: Big and burly, he could treat manliness as something to be wielded. But he is too gentle for that, too dim-witted, too pure. He is a hold-harmless clause in human form. And Derek, being exceptionally burly and exceptionally dim, is more reassuring than most. Even when he is brainwashed into violence, he is incapable of carrying it out.
That may be, for many of the men in Derek’s orbit—including his coal-miner father—a profound failing. But those men, in the end, are Zoolander’s true villains. And the tensions Derek lives out, as he makes his journey from successful model to failed model to brainwashed model, bring an avant-garde edge to the film’s absurdities.
Zoolander is, like its star, always more than it seems. It is a comedy that’s also a spy drama and a political thriller and a fast-paced action-adventure. (Its plot, Stiller has said, was inspired by The Manchurian Candidate; he filled it with cheeky callbacks to James Bond.) It throws on different genres like interchangeable outerwear. When Derek returns to his hill-country hometown, Zoolander briefly becomes a gritty—and exaggeratedly sooty—portrait of working-class life. A famous sequence pitting Derek and Hansel against each other in a “walk-off” becomes a boxing drama complete with a climactic prizefight, its two champions battling before a rabid crowd.
Fighter, killer, miner, spy: You might notice that each figure is distinctly, and stereotypically, masculine. Each identity is an option for Derek. And each is one he rejects. Maybe he’ll join his father and brothers in the mines. Maybe he’ll become an assassin. Maybe he’ll be conscripted into someone else’s war. None of that happens, of course, and only partly because Derek is the kind of guy who shows up to the mines clad in a snakeskin leisure suit. Those traditional ways of being manly are not his way of being manly. His version of masculinity is louder, and quieter. It is softer. It is inflected with femininity. It is a hybrid beast frolicking in the water with liquid ease—a mer-man.
[Conor Friedersdorf: What do ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ even mean now?]
The gender swap, in its Y2K format, considered the moment’s anxieties—the sexual revolution, its battles prolonged into cold war—but also its possibilities. The man as the nurturing nanny, the woman as the steely commando (think G.I. Jane) were gimmicks, but ones that invited people to imagine old binaries in new ways. Zoolander did the same but, amid all the farce, remarkably subtly. The film gave us a man who moved through the world like a woman: watched, judged, underestimated, misunderstood.
That Derek himself is too clueless to see those ironies makes him only more endearing. He is a male model worth emulating precisely because he would never see “male” as superior to anything else. His vacuity amounts to innocence—and his innocence amounts to enlightenment. Little wonder, then, that pop culture now teems with himbos: guys whose looks say “leading man” and whose actions say “useful idiot.” Andy in Parks and Recreation, Jason in The Good Place, the assorted magicians of Magic Mike—they and their many counterparts are also, in their own way, male models: men who, at a time when masculinity is so often talked about as a problem to be solved, hint at some kind of solution. They aren’t anxious about their masculinity. They aren’t scared of women. They are men who offer comic relief—and relief of a much broader sort.