Favorite Films - Swingers (1996)

Swingers, released in 1996 and directed by Doug Liman, is a time capsule that captures the moment in the 1990s when the swing aesthetic was imported from the 1940s amongst all the cool kids, as I never saw anyone dressing that way in real life. Zoot suits, long wallet chains, brylcreem . . . I only ever saw any of that on TV and in movies like Swingers, but I’m sure out in LA, where this movie is set, it was all the rage. Nevertheless, what struck me was that in the 1990s it was still possible to import and update old bits of Americana and celebrate that cultural richness. Swingers is light-hearted and fun, frequently very funny, and it contains not even a hint of the totalizing wokeness that characterizes today’s cultural products, which is to say that this movie is, in the woke parlance, highly problematic. It is fun and light-hearted, after all, so it actually offers nothing in the way of ham-fisted political commentary. It contains only one black character, and that black character is a well-adjusted and cool hep-cat who doesn’t seem to even notice that he is black, and this movie overtly celebrates heterosexuality; it explores the complicated mating rituals surrounding how men get women, so this movie is overtly racist and homophobic and misogynistic by today’s totalized and humorless cultural standards.

It is absolutely wonderful.

I’m pretty sure this movie is Vince Vaughn’s first big break as Vince Vaughn, but this Vince Vaughn act isn’t yet fully baked, and that alone makes this film worth revisiting. Vaughn and Jon Favreau, who wrote the script, have an unmistakable on-screen chemistry, playing off each other with Vaughn as the alpha-Chad Trent and Favreau as the beta-male Mike.

Only ten minutes into the film we go with this pair on a gambling trip to Las Vegas. Trent insists that Mike get out of the house, get out of his run-down apartment where he is nursing a devastating heartbreak because his ex-girlfriend back in New York has left him and is seeing another man. Mike is holed up and hovering around the land-line telephone hoping that she will call, in his mind wondering how could she leave me so easily after six years? Did it mean nothing? Why won’t she call?

Us beta males have such a hard time when it comes to women. I could relate to Mike’s struggle. I remember Emily, my first serious girlfriend back in college, who was all I could seem to think about at the time. I was crazy about her, but she wasn’t all that crazy about me, and my desperation to have her only pushed her away, and yes, she ended up cheating on me and getting knocked up by a bad boy who ended up in Federal prison for dealing pain killers out the back door of his pharmacy, but I digress. Point being, I very much identified with the Mike’s struggles to come to some kind of understanding about women.

Vaughn’s Trent, though, the alpha-Chad, instinctively knows how to handle women, and he embodies the playful confidence that just seems to come naturally to alpha-Chads. This is established at the Las Vegas casino where Trent plays around with the cocktail waitress, and Mike doesn’t understand it at all. Mike thinks that women want respect and deference, but Trent knows it is all about playfulness and confidence. When Trent picks up the cocktail waitress and even gets her to bring along a friend, Mike is astounded.

Mike: That was so fucking money. That was like the Jedi mind shit.

Trent: See, that’s what I am trying to tell you, baby. Girls love that kind of stuff. They don’t go for the sensitive shit, you know what I mean? You start talking to them about puppy dogs and ice cream. They know what you want to do. What do you think? You really think they don’t know?

Mike: No, I know.

Trent: They know what you want, baby, believe me. You know, when you pretend it’s just like a waste of their time. You’re going to take them that way eventually, right? Don’t apologize for it.

Mike: It’s just that I get like this thing where I want to be a gentleman, you know what I mean, and I want to show respect.

Trent: Oh, Mike. Respect my ass. What they respect is honesty. Look, you see how they dress when they go out, right? They want you to notice them. Now, all you’re doing is letting them know that it’s working. You gotta get off this respect thing. There’s nothing wrong with letting the girls know that you’re money, and that you want to party.

Trent is cool, yet one of the deft maneuvers that director Limon makes with Trent is that he takes him down a peg or two here and there, that even though Trent understands women, this is a messy business and there’s no accounting for all the variables. My first fit of laughter occurs when Mike cock-blocks Trent and prevents him from nailing the cocktail waitress. In an RV, Trent is paired with the waitress and Mike is paired with her friend Lisa, and after a few beers, Trent and the cocktail waitress excuse themselves to the back of the RV to have sex while Mike, instead of going for sex with Lisa, confides in her about his ex-girlfriend. The two decide that Mike needs to call his ex, but the phone is located in the back of the RV where Trent and the waitress are about to get it on. Shamelessly, Mike interrupts them, and the tone goes from a charged sexuality with Trent and the waitress going for it to the tune of Heart’s “Magic Man”, to a dead silence and the cocktail waitress putting on some coffee. Everything about this scene is outstanding, from its performances to its timing.

As a viewer, I was sitting there thinking how pissed off I’d be if my buddy had cock-blocked me like that, but then Vaughn displays what must be the primary Alpha-chad mind-set, that ass is plentiful in this world. Easy come easy go. I was pretty floored by that, a reminder that us betas usually take the opposite attitude, that ass is scarce. To Trent, it was nothing. When Mike apologizes, Trent is magnanimous:

I didn’t really like her that much to be honest. She didn’t really do it for me.

The rest of the movie we follow Mike taking his beta male lumps, with one scene jumping out as particularly splendid. Mike has managed to pick up a girl in a bar and get her phone number. The setup is when Trent cautions him to sit on the number for a day, for two or three days, to avoid coming off as desperate. That’s how we know that Mike is going to call her at 2:30 am as soon as he gets home. I am smiling so big as I write this, because I have been there, desperate to make a connection to a woman.

Mike calls her and gets her answering machine, but he’s cut off before he can give her his number. He calls back, and hilariously is cut off again. He calls back, and now we know that he’s locked into a loop that ends in self-destruction, and it is hilarious but also really hard to watch. On about the fourth call back, Mike says that it just isn’t working out and that he’s not going to be able to continue with her after all, at which point she picks up and says, “never call me again”

Mike has hit rock bottom.

From there, there’s no where to go but up, and we get to see Mike grow and adopt tidbits of Trent’s alpha-Chadness, to the point that he gets to show off his ballroom dancing skills in a lovely scene with an even lovlier Heather Graham. Here, the film’s opening setup finally pays off.

In the opening scene, Mike’s friend Rob (Ron Livingston) had told him:

See, that’s the thing. Somehow they know not to come back until you really forget.

Truer words have scarcely been committed to film. It is only when Mike forgets about his ex and is focused on dating Heather Graham’s Lorraine that Mike’s ex decides to pick up the phone and give him a call with the desire to reconcile, but Mike is having none of it and casually rebuffs her. We see that Mike, as put by Trent:

Our little baby is all growns up.

It is a good film, probably the quintessential 1990s nostalgia film, a real signpost from a simpler and better time. It forecasts the writing excellence of Jon Favreau, who almost single-handedly rescued Star Wars from the clutches of woke Disney with his work on The Mandalorian, and of course it introduces us to the eminently lovable Vince Vaughn, who I can never tire of watching do his Vince Vaughn thing.

But my big takeaway from rewatching this film is the reminder that none of the things this film does can be done today, that nothing like this exists today. You can’t have a primarily white cast that celebrates white-people cultural artifacts like ballroom dancing, which, as a side note, strikes me as such a beautiful and civilized tradition. Certainly, you can’t treat heterosexuality or have unabashedly straight white males going around trying to pick up ass. Certainly, you can’t celebrate America’s rich cultural past. You can’t even be funny because humor relies on truth, something wokeness cannot support. It is a film to show your kids to show them that America wasn’t always a wokist hellscape, that we used to have the capacity to turn out art in the mainstream.