A Film Canon

Most of Eddie Murphy's 80s output has a fairytale quality, but it's most nuanced in Beverly Hills Cop, largely because of the spectrum of 'fairies' - Murphy's stock homosexual character - which, some twenty-five years later, is the most noticeable and unsettling feature of his comedy. At one level, this is simply a minority using another, less visible minority as comic fodder, as well as a calibration of African-American flamboyance against gay flamboyance. But it also speaks to a pervasive queerness at the heart of Murphy's highly performative comic signature. As with his iconic standup routines, a great deal of his comedy comes from impersonation. However, whereas, in his stand-up, it's largely confined to specific characters, or at least specific types, here's it's dispersed into an amorphous impersonative energy that makes his 'real' identity quite slippery, just as his opening pose as a drug dealer gives way to one of the most fluid, glassy car chases on screen. It's crystallised in his encounter with an African-American policeman, who he accuses of doing a poor imitation of 'whiteness', going on to imitate his imitation as queerness. From this perspective, it feels like a version of passing for white, which fits well with his wide-eyed movement from Detroit to the commodity-montage of Beverly Hills; or, rather, clarifies that there's something a bit disingenuous about the frankness and freshness he supposedly brings to his new mileu. It's a semi-conciously camp synthesis of identity, encapsulated in Harold Faltermeyer's relentless 'Axel F' synth riff - the most consistent feature of Murphy's persona, or synecdoche for it - and formulated in response to an inextricably 80s notion of whiteness, based less on criteria of ethnicity, skin colour or racial heritage than on a peculiar proximity to slick, efficient, hyper-commodified sensation.