Merger is the ultimate buzzword of 2000. But the modern impulse to fuse two distinct entities doesn't stop with big businesses like AOL and Time Warner. These days -- or, arguably, once again -- even genders are merging, especially in Hollywood. It's not just that movie and television stars all wear black, or that they're all going blond: They're all actually beginning to look the same. The men look like women and the women look androgynous. Open up an airy, mainstream publication like InStyle and you don't know who you're looking at. Is that beauty at the blockbuster premiere Gwyneth or Brad? Angelina Jolie or Freddie Prinze? It's hard to tell. They're all wearing cargo pants, carrying purses (um, utility bags) and looking, well, ambiguous.
The gender-merge trend has steadily been gaining force since post-"Titanic" Leo fever, right around the time Camille Paglia noted that DiCaprio looked like "a teenage lesbian." Since that signal event, Hollywood women have adopted the tousled style that comes so naturally to guys, and men happily pursue the waif look. Products and services like CK1 perfume, universal hair wax and the rise of unisex clothing are all symptoms. The odd thing is that it's either sexiness or sexlessness -- and not actual sex -- at the center of the trend. Consider the most talked-about movies of last year. They were all about identity and being disillusioned with fixed identities. The idea of sex, or rather the idea of sexual identity, lingered over "American Beauty," "Boys Don't Cry," "Being John Malkovich" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley," but not one of them bothers to include a titillating sex scene.
Jude Law in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" personifies this modern sexual fusion. Law's ebullient character, the dashingly handsome life of the most beautiful parties in the world, reduces women and men -- straight and gay -- to drooling admirers. He's the essence of merger: kinda feminine, kinda masculine, kinda straight, kinda gay, kinda tough, kinda sweet, kinda uptight, kinda carefree, kinda foreign, kinda familiar, kinda wholesome and yet, kinda dangerous. Quite simply, he's everything, and boy, is that now.
It's no surprise that Law has Gwyneth Paltrow and Matt Damon wrapped around his finger. He could probably go either way and the audience would go with him. But in typical 2000 fashion, Law's character doesn't get a chance to go either way. He can't really marry the girl. He definitely can't make-out with the boy. And he's, ahem, indisposed before his character's complex tendencies are truly realized. Of course he's missed as soon as he's gone from the screen. Even though it's the Matt Damon character who ends up searching for a new identity, the audience still looks for Jude Law, wanting to bask in his easy manner, to be impressed by his ability to be everything to everybody.
In an age when everything really is connected to -- or merging with -- everything else, it's an overwhelming task to define the modern everyman. Is gender-blending the result of the working woman? The stay-at-home dad? The break-up of the family? Anonymity on the Internet? Genetic engineering? The booming economy? It's probably a combination, and the effects are clearly popping up in all sorts of films. Talking about gender-merging and sexlessness in movies, professor Thomas Doherty, chairman of the film studies department at Brandeis University, focused on "The Blair Witch Project." "In what other generation would two boys a girl go off into the woods, sleep together, but not mention sex once?"
It makes sense that the sexless trend would go hand in hand with gender-merge, which seems to be partly about the desire to do and make sense of everything. Jude Law is that search in the flesh. He's Twiggy meets Rock Hudson in the year of the merger. Because in 2000, it's not enough to be both mother and whore. You've got to be father, boss and pool boy too. No one wants to be locked in the box, so to speak. Law is delicate, subtle -- almost presexual. He's the sex symbol without the sex. The identity It Boy. And everybody wants him.
