We have a lot to learn from Michelle Rodriguez, star of the Fast and Furious franchise. The actor has become so skilled at the art of the public apology that one suspects it may be part of the reason she was hired to star in The Assignment (released in the UK as Tomboy), a movie about a male assassin who is forcibly turned into a woman, with one of the most hashtag-problematic plots to emerge in recent times.
Over the years, Rodriguez has issued a mea culpa for plenty of digressions: driving under the influence (she apologised in court, and blamed her behaviour on steroids); saying she was jealous that her deceased co-star Paul Walker had died before her (she apologised for being exploited and her remarks being taken out of context, an arty blend of acknowledging an error and also shifting it on to someone else), and for saying that minorities in Hollywood should “stop stealing all the white people’s superheroes”. Apologising is surely on her CV now, right in the spot where people usually put “conversational French”, and “hobbies: socialising”.
Like when Bieber peed in a mop bucket, there was sufficient internet outcry after her comment on minorities to warrant a serious response – in this case, the full Facebook video, in which Rodriguez admitted she had “stuck my foot in my mouth once again” and clarified that she was trying to say there should be more leading roles for minorities in superhero movies. As with much of her work, reviews for this apology were mixed, though Lost in Showbiz is inclined to think the situation in which the original comment appeared was not ideal for a fully formed ideology to appear: Rodriguez was leaving a restaurant late at night while paparazzi flashes popped off like strobes, which does not sound like a test necessarily designed for one to pass.
And so to her latest project, The Assignment, the plot of which sounds as if it were dredged up from the 70s, because it was. Rodriguez plays Frank Kitchen, an excessively bearded hitman whose illustrious career killing people hits the skids when he bumps off a target with connections. The victim’s sister, an insane surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) who happens to be a genius when she’s not quoting Shakespeare or Poe while in a straitjacket, takes revenge on this hitman by doing the worst thing she can think of – she turns him into a woman. Woman Frank is so furious that he (he’s always a he) sets off to murder everyone he can, while getting a dog and settling down with a woman he has only just met. (If Frank were a lesbian, this would be uncannily accurate.)
When LiS asked Google why Weaver had also signed up to this, a film formerly known as (Re)Assignment (proof, perhaps, that It Does Not Get Better), it discovered that it was first conceived of in 1978. This was a time more free and less complicated than the identity politics era we now live in: you could be sexist and racist on television – all TV, and not just Fox News. Given that the project took four decades to get off the ground, you may be astounded to know that it is not up there with the greats.
In casting Rodriguez as Frank – they don’t bother giving him another name after the back-alley surgical procedure that strips him of his ample prosthetic – the producers knew they could count on a pro to make the public apology when the inevitable dreary backlash came, be it from those sensitive snowflakes who find the notion of gender reassignment being used as a punishment ill-judged, or who view as old-fashioned the idea that being a woman is so hideous it warrants a chest-beating howl of pain. That’s to say nothing of the writing, with lines such as: “I was gonna be a chick, except for in my heart.” LiS will be starting a change.org petition on behalf of scripts everywhere.
But this time, perhaps tired of the tedious merry-go-round of bland, “Sorry, didn’t mean it” responses, Rodriguez has broken loose. She has gone renegade. She has gone the full Frank. On a lengthy Instagram post, she wrote, as if scripting an episode of The Mighty Boosh: “I had fake boob covers to look like man implants & I wore a fake hairy ‘mangina’, which you can’t really see cause they made it so hairy. In retrospect, I’m glad I took the plunge.”
During a red-carpet chat at the Toronto international film festival, she took it further. “Are they mad that somebody decided to take their branded transgender operation and use it on heterosexual people?” she told the interviewer, who had asked whether the movie was offensive. “Does the LGBT community own the operation? If they do, would they want to fire the person who uses it to revenge somebody? Do they have a branding right over a sex change? At the end of the day, it’s a philosophical question.”
At the end of the day, it is. But what we can ascertain, with some clarity, is that celebrity response to controversy has taken on a surreal and defiant new form. LiS is keen to see where it can possibly go from here.
