How a cross-dressing Gene Hackman heralded a new age of Jewish assimilation in Hollywood

By Talya Zax
February 27, 2025

There was absolutely nothing Jewish about Gene Hackman. But he played an essential part in one of the most extraordinary Jewish extravaganzas in film history: The climax of The Birdcage, in which he plays a bigoted conservative senator, Kevin Keeley, being surreally bamboozled by the gay, Jewish, drag club-operating parents of the young man engaged to his daughter.

The con: Those parents — Robin Williams and Nathan Lane, god bless — pretend to be upright, straight Christians, with Lane in full Mrs. Doubtfire drag. They trade tight tank tops for suits and strip their fabulous Miami living room of any item with the merest hint of pizzazz; their high-strung housekeeper trades a wall-mounted moose head for a painfully large and grim crucifix. (The way Williams asks “are we crucifying someone tonight?” — nasal, nonchalant, basically open to the idea — should have won him an Oscar.)

The scene suggested that, as of 1996, when the film was released, Jewish assimilation in the United States was officially camp. Once the stakes changed from “will we be able to survive” to “will my highly educated son be able to marry the senator’s daughter,” so did the genre of the performance. Serious drama was out; a kind double-edged farce, which turned its awareness of its own absurdity into a weapon, was in.

It could never have worked without Hackman. He’s the scene’s straight man: The staunchly unhumorous foil, who, because he lacks a read on the insane hilarity unfolding around him, amplifies it. Watching Lane deliver a homily on growing up in a “wonderful world” of “happy families, and everyone speaking English, and no drugs, and no AIDS” is funny; watching Hackman earnestly take that sarcastic speech at face value is funnier.

And the particular qualities of Hackman’s straight man make him, in some ways, the scene’s most pathetic character. Everyone is trying to impress him, but the power he holds is tenuous. By the time Lane’s coiffed blonde wig has come off and the Semitic ancestry of Hackman’s hosts has been made apparent, he will be desperate for their help and patronage, not the other way around.

Hence: camp. The Birdcage introduces us to a familiar setup: Jews living (albeit large) on society’s fringe of society scrabble to persuade a powerful gentile not to punish them. And then, it inverts that scenario. As reporters descend on the titular club, tipped off to the holier-than-thou senator’s visit to the apartment just above, the Jews end up with the gentile’s fate in their hands. And they enable his escape by adorning him in an identity-masking spangled gown and platinum bouffant — in other words, by getting him to act exactly like them.

In Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” the definitional take on a then-ascendant culture marked by its passion for “artifice and exaggeration,” Sontag wrote: “To camp” — as a verb — “is a mode of seduction — one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders.”

When Hackman enters Williams’ and Lane’s apartment, the assumption is that he’s the insider and they’re the outsiders. But by the time he leaves it, it’s clear that things were always the other way around. Shimmying unsteadily toward the club’s exit, he grips his daughter’s arm and kvetches that “no one will dance with me … I think it’s this dress, I told them white would make me look fat.” The seduction is complete. The flamboyance has captured and transformed its unwilling audience.

One of the characteristics of camp is that it transfigures its subject. An idea, once made camp, cannot be remade as serious without retaining some scent of intentional folly. We never see Hackman’s senator return to Washington, and given how politics tends to work, it’s quite likely that his public face will remain unchanged after his escapade. But for those who witnessed it — and those who heard the rumor of it — a vague impression will remain, and such impressions tend to spread.

There is a reason that, in the eons-ago presidential campaign of 2024, a joke about now-Vice President JD Vance having intimate relations with a couch became omnipresent. Once you imagine a man who has shaped his public persona around the role of upstanding protector of family values doing something ridiculous in the privacy of his own home, his public performance begins to appear a bit more ridiculous, too.

And so with assimilation. The Birdcage is far from alone in lovingly lampooning the awkward efforts of American Jews to be seen as just as American as anyone else. And because a time came in U.S. history when Jewish assimilation could comfortably receive the absurdist treatment, subsequent efforts to rebrand assimilation as a matter to be discussed seriously now come across as somehow tinny.

History inevitably recycles, becoming more risible as it does. In a new era of family values politics, Hackman’s character no longer looks like a dinosaur, but rather a prelude to a time when such politicians would return to power despite their overt outrageousness. Vance was dogged, through the campaign, with allegations that he wears quite a lot of eyeliner — indisputably camp — an accusation that The Birdcage suggests would have doomed Hackman’s senator. Vance made it to the White House anyway.

So it goes: Historical outsiders like Jews and LGBTQ+ people encounter a moment of real influence in culture. Then enough time passes, and the influence is back where it started, in the hands of the straight-laced. The real reason assimilation is camp is that it is an exercise both in hope for something better, and knowledge that the world tends not to work that way. “Camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious,” Sontag wrote.

So, thank god for Hackman, who delivered a particularly indelible depiction of the moment when cultural power switches hands, even if that switch is by its nature brief.

His performance is complete naivete. It’s a reminder that we can laugh at the spectacle of an uptight official making doltish digs about the “nasty little European traditions” of someone he’s not totally aware is Jewish, but at the end of the night, when the wigs come off, he’ll still be in power, just the same.

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