Though clearly bad, there is surprising (historical and contemporary) relevance in this belabored sequel.
by Kevin Flanagan
In a recent review, I remarked how The Happy Hooker (1975) is a strange film, too sentimental and pseudo-empowered to be pure exploitation, but with just enough silly T&A to be lauded as profound and truly feminist. In fact, I found that the film, in its messy and probably unintentional way, actually said loads about the status of empowered female sexuality by the middle of the 1970s, when the revolutionary implications of widespread permissiveness had diffused, leaving empty consumerism in their wake.
Well, I must admit to having been a bit surprised with The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington (1977), another clearly flawed and “bad” movie, yet one that somehow ups the subtextual and situational ante. Better still, the film makes very clear connections between economic uncertainty, the halls of power (in this case, the Washington D.C. “insider” club of Capitol Hill) and sexual hypocrisy. Perhaps that's a bit too kind, though. Unwittingly, The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington is simultaneously stupider and smarter than the original, at once far less dull and more non-senscial, non-narrative. The social statement it gives is ultimately more profound, yet more idiotically delivered.
In brief, this sequel replaces Lynn Redgrave's Xaviera Hollander with Joey Heatherton's Xaviera. Where the Xaviera of The Happy Hooker works through a journey into self-confidence (starting with her getting dumped at the beginning of the film, to when she stands up for her fellow prostitutes by the end), the Xaviera of The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington has plateaued, personally and in terms of her wielded influence. Now the head of a multi-tier business, known to the public, and supremely confident in her sexual smarts, she endures photo-shoots, consults for international businesses looking to sexualize their products, and is even called on to seduce an oil sheik in the self-interests of American capitalist longevity. Such as it is, the main plot concerns a sex scandal on Capitol Hill, with Xaviera being summoned as expert testimony to condemn the licentious attitudes of the guilty Senator and his incident. Instead, her bemused-one-step-ahead smarminess causes her to reveal the sexual desires of all of the prosecuting Congressionals. She and her girls managed to seduce—though no struggle seems to have accompanied—the entire tribunal. In the end, Xaviera is romantically involved with her lawyer confidante, and the U.S. Government has been revealed as a hot bed for role-play fantasy, infidelity, and S&M. Recent, high-profile sex scandals (hell, just think of the early summer months of 2009) on the Right and Left add proof to the pudding.
So while The Happy Hooker shows an awakening into business acumen—Xaviera supersedes the previous Madam and learns the ropes of business as she goes—in The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington she is the model capitalist free agent, a true fit for late 1970s anxieties. In an era when big government comes to be regarded with suspicion, crowned by the failure of Carter and the opportunism of Reagan's “morning” [“mourning?”] in America, privatization, flexibility, and business service to the nation are the keys of the day. With oil scarcity a real, very recent memory (thus Xaviera's Bond-like gift to America, a taking-one-for-the-team with a Middle-Eastern oil magnate in the interest of our way of life) and economic recession on the rise, Xaviera is the ultimate Janus: a sexually liberated women, a personal libertarian, who nonetheless embodies (literally!!) all of the desirable traits of the conservative Randian superwoman. In fact, the film links sexual unrest to economic fear. In a tell-tale, throw-away clue at the beginning of the film, the initial sex scandal—a senator feeling up his younger secretary on a couch, as they are discovered by the maid and the randy security guard—is immediately followed by the spinning newspaper trope, where the headline zooms into view to show its public status. Under one of the main headlines linking Washington to sex is a notice of 800,000+ jobless. In the late 1970s, America was experiencing similar spates of joblessness and economic malaise. As the pointy-heads in Washington are more pressured to fix the nation's problems, the sexual unrest of these leaders is thrown into sharp focus. The anxieties of governance are temporarily displaced onto sexual escapades. In turn, the moral outrage over its exposure punctuates the 24 hour news cycle with human interest stories that briefly distract from the nation's real problems. In this sense, Xaviera's cool assurance in her providing functions—girls, sex, fun—is totally acceptable. Her sex-circus becomes media circus, and obscures the real issues of the day.
Here's the thing, overall: whereas I would accuse many sequels of mis-reading their predecessors, I cannot claim that The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington did not “learn” something from its source. For example, the sequels to The Matrix (1999) mis-read the original in the sense that they augment its elegant blend of action, techno-utopianism, and prescient (yet simplified ) philosophical musing with overwhelming spectacle, bloated pseudo-religious posturing, and complication for complication's sake. The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, on the other hand, recognizes the only really interesting thing about its forebear, and heightens it. Sure, the comedy this time around is more broad—lots of double-takes toward the camera, bulging eyeballs and agape mouths, plenty of entendres that are so obvious that they may not even qualify as “double” entendres—but the social anxiety is more acute. As if this weren't enough, here's the non-academic in me: this sequel has more and better flesh, for more of the film, and is shorter to boot. More boobs, more social value, more questionable politics. Just another day inside the Beltway…
