Cop Secret

And 'Gay For The Stay'

As I understand it, people just don’t make comedies anymore. There’s so much pressure for movies to travel overseas that comedy, a genre dependent on wordplay and rhythm, would not be favored given that a laugh in Idaho would play to discriminating silence in Beijing. It’s unfortunate we don’t have them much anymore, we can’t have crowded theaters laughing merrily together at some famous rubber-faced star. Where are all the crossover comedic stars? Every time I want to look up actual mainstream-popular funny people, it’s just a collection of shapeless white men collectively waging a war against charisma.

The flipside of this is that, during this period of my incarceration (‘14-’23) you could probably make a reasonable list of the handful of funny movies released during this period, and it sounds like everyone would feature some of the same titles. Would any of them include the absurdly funny “Cop Secret”? I’m not sure. Should they all do this? Maybe that answer is MY cop secret. (Psst, the answer is absolutely).

First, I want to take you back to 2003. Entering the second hour of “Bad Boys 2”, there’s a scene where Marcus and Mike stop and discuss the trauma caused when Mike fired an errant shot into the buttocks of Marcus during a shootout. The ensuing discussion, brimming with dramatic potential, is snuffed out in two ways. Firstly, Mike cruelly responds to Marcus’ newfound vulnerability by chastising him for being so frank and emotionally-accommodating. Somehow, this abusive relationship survived two sequels. And secondly, their conversation was accidentally broadcast all over the store and misconstrued by the customers as a discussion about homosexual intercourse. While walking out, a brassy middle-aged woman curses them and tells them to “find Jesus”, the joke being that she’s aggressively homophobic (and in the movie’s eyes, justified).

Imagine if the scene took another step. What if Marcus confessed his insecurities and his wounds to Mike and Mike listened? What if the two had a healthy, honest conversation? What if their relationship deepened? Grew more intimate? Evolved so that, two sequels later, the two men were inseparable in their intimacy? What if the woman providing the punchline at the end received a comeuppance for her ignorance? Or, better yet, what if she said, “I’m so jealous of your loving relationship?” Maybe you’d have an experience close to “Cop Secret”.

This action comedy from Iceland academically copies the territory well-trod by the likes of Michael Bay, all the dramatic slow motion, the empty profanity, the worship of cars and guns (a number of shots are direct quotes of Bay’s material). The one cop that can’t play by the rules is the bald, intense Bussi, a Bruce Willis-type who frequently causes a surplus of damage with his car chases, his penchant for violence, and his disrespectful sarcasm. During one interrogation scene, he arrives swigging from a flask, immediately slugging the perp, and eventually breaking their finger while a scowling captain silently looks on. He’s angry, that anger spilling out in his on-again off-again relationship with his wife. Nonetheless, he’s a cop you want on your side. They even do TV profiles on Bussi, because the movie takes place in a world where TV shows do profiles on cops.

Moreover, Bussi can’t get over his professional hatred of Horour. Bussi is a reckless renegade, but Horour is the supercop, a tall, muscular Aryan tough guy, like if Dolph Lundgren swallowed some of the handsome parts of Robert Redford. Bussi favors leather jackets and a stubble, but the clean shaven, independently wealthy Horour wears the newest fashions. What may or may not be relevant is that Horour is openly pansexual, and everyone wishes to go to bed with him. Bussi will work overtime to catch the perp. Horour will have the bad guy in cuffs by closing time.

Together they’d make a great team if they could unite. There’s a cackling supervillain building a means and way of ending all life in Iceland, and Bussi and Horour are both the perfect team for this particular mission. But unlike Horour, Bussi doesn’t even really know what he is, fretting and stewing over the nights he spends lying awake, thinking about the men’s modeling magazine left in the bathroom. The villain is eccentric and sinister, but the real enemy seems like homophobia – the pressure to stay in the closet, the concern of coworkers, the fear of being rejected. The sudden higher profile.

“Cop Secret” is styled exactly like a nineties/00’s cop movie would be, brimming with a corny synth soundtrack, endless helpless henchmen and a structure that doesn’t skimp on the actual thrills. There’s a spoofy undercurrent to the film, but it never betrays its own dramatic gravity even when making a satirical point about the homoeroticism of buddy cop movies. Were we really that far away from Tango hooking up with Cash? If anything, the rampant homophobia in those movies is a way of trying to get your mind off the sexual tension between the male characters, which in turn is confirming the filmmakers are the first ones to notice said tension. The biggest laugh in “Cop Secret” is how explicit it is in turning the subtext into text.

Fittingly, the movie has an appearance by Jon Gnarr. Gnarr was a well-known Icelandic comedian who, in 2009, wanted to make a joke out of politics by running for mayor of Reykjavik. In the wake of worldwide financial calamities, Gnarr was elected, even though his whole campaign was roughly kidding about the region’s democratic choices (I highly recommend the documentary about this, “Gnarr”). It’s also what “Cop Secret” is doing, seeming like a spoof when, by the third act, you are rooting for these two to succeed, rooting for them to become a team at work and a unit at home. You also want to see some gunfights and some explosions, and no one skimps on that either. “Cop Secret” is, thus, the movie(s) you’ve been watching on basic cable for all those years, just more honest.

I was down with many men who had completed a few bids in prison. Many told the same story: they were heterosexual men returning home to loving girlfriends who wondered, out loud, if they had gone “gay for the stay”. It was a real concern, and some lovers on the outside claimed to be fair about it, which seemed like a pose. Many of the men denied they were gay for the stay, but it was obviously something everyone had in mind. You’re lonely for years and you want to be touched. I get it.

I was not gay for the stay, despite a relatively long sentence over eight years. If anything, prison convinced me even more how I was wired. I can’t possibly think of proximity to a man without thinking of bad skin, awful breath, the odor of feet. When I got out of prison, I wanted to avoid situations that were prominently male because that’s how little I wanted to spend time with them. Of course I knew many men who backslid. Many men who spoke glowingly of their wives and who would take an “after hours shower” that may or may not have company. I recall an odious family man in his late thirties who couldn’t help but focus on the one young, lonely male coming in with the new inmates, bringing him in, grooming him with rewards and compliments and bribery, all across from me. If these two men were to find something special together, I wouldn’t want to get in the way. But perhaps some people should have stopped bragging about and celebrating their families so much. And perhaps those people would realize it wasn’t about sexuality but the impotent desire for power. Gay For The Stay is real, I just wish it were more honest.