Raising an orange mocha frappuccino to a stone-cold classic!
Friday Night Family Movie Night this week takes in a turn-of-the-millennium comedy classic. It takes a certain kind of genius to craft a film that’s simultaneously as vacuous and as razor-sharp as Zoolander. It’s a film that seems like it might have been designed during a coke-fuelled Milan Fashion Week afterparty, but beneath the deliberately shallow surface lies a biting parody with more intelligence than any of its characters could hope to fake.
Ben Stiller’s Derek Zoolander isn’t just a dim bulb – he’s a black hole of brainpower, a male model so preposterously self-absorbed he makes Narcissus look like a guy just checking quickly to see if he has spinach in his teeth. But Stiller, also directing, isn’t just pointing and laughing. He’s aiming dead centre at the hollow core of fashion’s cult of personality, with a satirical precision so gleefully absurd it manages to lampoon the industry without alienating it – a fact proven by just how many fashion figures were happy to play along.
Zoolander’s iconic look – Blue Steel – is one of the film’s best running gags not because of how fierce it is (it isn’t), but because it’s indistinguishable (to us laypeople at least) from his other look, Le Tigre or the yet-to-be-perfected Magnum. The joke works because it’s both hilarious and painfully on-point: a perfectly coiffed dig at the idea of personality through branding, and the fashion industry’s tendency to repackage the same thing with new labels and louder hype over and over again.
The plot, in the loosest sense, involves mind control, assassination, and a cabal of fashion industry overlords determined to maintain the status quo by any means necessary – including bumping off the Malaysian Prime Minister to keep child labour sweatshops open. It’s a storyline lifted straight from a Cold War thriller, only dipped in glitter and re-purposed as high-camp espionage nonsense. The ridiculousness is deliberate, and it’s all played with such conviction that it lands harder than it has any right to.
Will Ferrell’s Mugatu is a powdered-up Bond villain by way of Vivienne Westwood, and his performance walks the fine line between grotesque and iconic. Owen Wilson’s Hansel, meanwhile, is Derek’s golden-haired nemesis and mirror image – just as shallow, just as stupid, but oozing effortless cool where Derek’s existential crisis has him oozing sweaty desperation. Their rivalry-turned-bromance plays out like a perfectly choreographed runway spat: all posturing, no substance, and somehow captivating despite – or because of – its utter emptiness.
Zoolander is clever about its stupidity. It skewers the fashion world with affection, mocking its vanities without sneering. The cameos – David Bowie, Billy Zane, even a terrifyingly game Natalie Portman and the now repellant Donald Trump – function like designer labels in themselves: a sign that the satire was never punching down. Everyone was in on the joke, because they knew how close to the bone it cut, except probably Trump who was just in it for the vanity, a genuine Zoolander for the real world.
It’s no accident that the film still resonates two decades later. The fashion world it mocked hasn’t become any less absurd, and the celebrity industrial complex has only metastasised further into self-parody. Zoolander might wear its idiocy on its sleeve, but it has sharper tailoring than most comedies dare to attempt.
