I Love You Man! or: Evolutions in the Homosocial Continuum.

Check out this Craigslist ad. I love that we live in a time when straight guys can post ads on Craigslist seeking each other out strictly for friendship and "normal guy stuff." (And I liked the movie "I Love You Man," too. Where was Andy Samberg's character when I was in high school? Or more to the point: where was Andy Samberg when I was in high school?)

If I may momentarily delve into the jargon of feminist/queer theory academia, I would say that "I Love You Man," unlike a yucky little dud like "I Now Prounounce You Chuck and Larry," indicates that we as a society may be healing the schizophrenic break in what Eve Sedgwick refers to as the "homosocial continuum" that has been caused in the past by homophobia. (Note homoSOCIAL. Not "homosexual.") What that means in plain English: due to our puritanical heritage, we've had a double standard in this country where women being affectionate and intimate friends can lead into women being "more than friends" without any major backlash or outcry, while the same is not true of men. This doesn't mean that the homoerotic subtext of "I Love You Man" invalidates its heterosexual plotline. It just means that maybe we're reaching a point of maturity and acceptance where the POSSIBILITY of men being "more than friends" isn't something we have to automatically regard with revulsion or distaste.

I'm proud of us. We're growing up. FINALLY.

Three Dancing Slaves

Last night, after a tasty dinner of corned beef, asparagus and mashed potatoes (You can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can't take...) we watched a movie I'd just got from Netflix, "Three Dancing Slaves" ("Le Clan" en Francais directed by Gaël Morel, who also made "Wild Reeds"). It falls in the apparently burgeoning subgenre of Intensely Homoerotic French Indie Films. (Damn, I was hoping that would make a nice acronym.) It was a strange, sexy film, about three HOT brothers whose mother dies while they still live at home (although two of them look like they're in their late 20s at least) with their workaholic, distant father. The entire cast is made up of beautiful young men, in fact I swear there wasn't a single female in the entire movie. If that wasn't enough, they worked in a meat-packing plant (!) A certain someone (who speaks from experience) said, "I didn't think there were that many attractive bodies in all of France." The film was very homoerotically charged and at the same time very much about the bond between brothers, which gave it a borderline incestuous quality that was very provocative and un-American (but maybe that's not fair...there are American directors who push the limits of taboo that way too, like Todd Solondz). It reminded me of discussions in a class I took at PSU a year or two ago, "Same-Sex Desire in Renaissance England," in which we discussed an article by Eve Sedgwick on how there is a schizophrenic break in the continuum of homosocial desire with men in American culture, but not so much with women. (Basically means that women are allowed to hold hands and be more affectionate with one another than men; male-bonding is not allowed to have overt erotic elements in our culture.) As with so many French movies I've seen, there were weird moments I still don't understand (what was up in the scene where a couple thugs forced the bald brother to throw his dog over the cliff and kill it?) In the film's last 20 minutes it broke out into full-fledged homoeroticism with an EXTREMELY hot (albeit brief) sex scene between the youngest brother Olivier (Olive) and his, uh, buddy which includes the line "Rape me, but don't hurt me."

A line like that could get you out of a speeding ticket, I'm guessing.