Plasma Pool

In April of this year, Entertainment Weekly reported the imminent production of I Love You Man, a movie about a groom-to-be who doesn’t have any friends. The plot: his fiancé sets him up on man-dates with her many guy friends so he can find a best man. The movie stars Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, fellow best-supporting winners from Apatow movies past and future. (is anyone else worried that Apatow is fast becoming, if not a cliché, then the type of brand name you say with a bit of a sneer? Is six movies under his production banner too much for one year? Is Apatow the next Scott Rudin, or the next Jude Law?) In some ways, romantic comedies have been heading in this direction for awhile: a movie in which two heterosexual men literally have to go on man dates in order to see if they like each other. This would be the epitome of the “bromance” subgenre, if “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck” hadn’t already come out.

The whole movement of male-dominated romantic comedies has been generally criticized by different critics. The “Ben Affleck” video, while nationally acclaimed, received a stinging rebuke from EW’s Mark Harris. Harris is a great writer—the best back page columnist the magazine’s had since Joel Stein. And whereas the other writers who contribute to the back page who aren’t Stephen King (Dalton Ross and Diablo Cody) write pretty much in the Stein mold of rampant self-deprecating narcissism (lacking Stein’s sense of humor or his willingness to actually do interesting things for his column), Harris constantly focuses his personal musings on genuinely important pop culture topics.

His portrayal of the writer’s strike was pretty much the only worthwhile piece of journalism written about that three-month-long cultural misadventure. He can explore topics ripped right from the headlines (an article about Obama), but is also adept at deep-think critical analysis, as in his article about sci-fi’s dependency on remakes. Like Matt Taibbi, Harris doesn’t go out of his way to make a controversial point; rather, he digs deeper into the conventional wisdom than any other writer. (For comparison, consider a season of The Wire—it doesn’t say anything that we don’t already know about how crappy our school system/drug enforcement/insert-public-institution is, but it does crystallize the issues in a profound, concrete way.)

Harris’s argument, he admits instantly, is an unpopular one. He thinks that “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck” and its ilk (he ropes in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry—you could also include this Super Bowl ad) make fun of homosexuals, and not in a “We’re all friends” type of way, but in a hurtful, pre-Gay Rights kind of way (he compares it to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin making racist jokes about Sammy Davis Jr.) Harris keeps his focus fairly narrow, to the detriment of his argument—he wraps up the column by noting that, after all, the people in the Ben Affleck video aren’t really “the enemy,” just friends who should know better (not Jefferson Davis, just Thomas Jefferson.)

I disagree with Harris’s argument, but at the same time, I wish that he had further explored its implications. The fact that so many bigscreen comedies are awful, coupled with a general lack of good comedies on the air, has, I think, hidden the fact that comedy in general is more transgressive now than ever before. 30 Rock, The Office and Arrested Development are three broadcast comedies which regularly make fun of sensitive racial issues, political issues (an entire episode of Arrested Development was set in Baghdad; in one 30 Rock, Liz thinks her Middle Eastern neighbor—played by the same half-Asian guy who played Barack Obama on Saturday Night Live—is a terrorist)and sexual issues. And then there’s South Park, which practically deconstructs five new stereotypes every week. And then there’s Borat.

Whenever anyone talks about morality in comedy, your eyes should glaze over—great comedy should be transgressive. But it’s the bizarro-world nature of the modern age that transgressive humor is, more than ever, embraced by what used to be called “the establishment.” Borat was the best-reviewed comedy of the year. My parents, who don’t use swear words, wanted to see it. And South Park keeps racking up the awards. The movie version, almost ten years old now, might be the last great cartoon musical.

Here’s the question which several people asked but no one really bothered to answer, perhaps out of fear of being a killjoy: is Borat funny because it makes fun of anti-Semitism, or because it makes fun of Jews in such an over-the-top way that, mentally, we know that it can’t be serious? Would it be as funny if Sacha Baren Cohen were not himself a Jew? (I’m guessing yes—after all, isn’t it practically as funny when your Gentile friends quote the movie verbatim?) Or consider Arrested Development—Lucille Bluth, at the Latin Emmys, surrounded by Hispanic Americans in tuxedos, comments, “So many waiters and none of them will take a drink order!” Are we laughing with her because she’s unfairly characterizing an entire race, or because, in some way, we kind of believe the same thing—that every well-dressed Hispanic we see is in the service industry? Is it wrong to make fun of Asian women for being bad drivers, even though—at least in certain parts of the United States—the stereotype holds indelibly true?

There is no real answer to this kind of question, which is, I think, why Harris’s argument really deserves much more than a one-page column. That being said, I also disagree with Harris entirely, although not so much with his argument as with his platform. I don’t think that “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck” is making fun of homosexual men so much as it’s presenting a barely-heightened reality of modern male heterosexuality.

It is impossible for two men to become good friends nowadays without someone—often multiple someones, including the two men themselves—characterizing the friendship in a homoerotic way. “Man crush” is the preferred terminology—originating, I maintain, from the confused emotions felt by a generation of young men who saw Fight Club and felt pretty much the same way about Brad Pitt as Edward Norton does in the movie—utterly in awe, passionately seeking to become his best friend and to become him.

It’s a confusion of admiration and narcissism, a Tom Ripley complex, and, to many modern young men schooled in sarcasm by The Simpsons when they were five, the easiest way to deal with such strong emotions is to make fun of them in a way which nevertheless heightens them. When guys joke about having a “man crush,” they are trying to prove that they are not actually in love with another man by joking that they are in love with another man. If they didn’t say they were in love with the guy, people might think they were in love with the guy. Round and round.

Fight Club, like 300, is a movie which proves that what was once considered “macho” is actually utterly, rhapsodically gay. That may be some subliminal reason why, in the last few years, the romantic protagonist in films is moving away from the old American archetypes of the man’s man—even before Brokeback Mountain, we all thought cowboys were pretty gay—and turning more into a nerdly, over-talkative persona (perhaps not quite Woody Allen, but certainly Seth Cohen). (This isn’t a male-only phenomenon—see a spring 2008 Vanity Fair cover story on women in comedy and the rise of Tina Fey, who’s line on SNL in support of Hillary Clinton, “Bitch is the new black,” is much more inspirational than anything Hillary herself has ever said.)

I do not mean that the general cultural acceptance of homosexuality has somehow negatively impacted heterosexual men (that kind of reverse-bigotry argument never holds water, least of all from a white heterosexual male). However, for at least this first generation, born into an era of thawing sexual mores and now reaching adulthood just in time for bisexual reality shows and Larry Craig, it is very difficult for young men to express any sense of deep friendship without characterizing that friendship—either in jest, or in 3 a.m. drunken bonding—as somewhat sexual. Young men aren’t afraid to say that they love each other—Spider-Man said it to the Green Goblin, even—but they are afraid to say it without a thin veneer of sarcasm or at least a six-pack between them. That’s where you get the cutesy facebook guy-marriage: “We’re married! But we’re not gay!”

I don’t think this confusion of friendship with love is purely hetero-normative—one could draw some comparison to the growth of non-relationship hook-ups in college. George and Izzie’s romance on Grey’s Anatomy felt so icky because it was so icky—it’s easy for two people who are such good friends to think that they’re in love. Put it this way: if you sleep with half of your female friends, but you’re still just friends, where does that leave your male friends? Just as there are so many fewer restrictions on sexuality (in our lifetime, transvestites will be able to marry transexual canines, and fuck Rick Santorum), there is not really any etiquette left for understanding how to form a real romantic relationship.

More than anything, “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck” is capturing the absolute pinnacle of this moment in masculinity. First and foremost, it is an essential document of what pop culture is right now: It is the funniest thing to hit the internet all year, a spoof of mega-celebrity Live Aid singalongs. Yet most of the high schoolers weren’t even born in time for Live Aid—if anything, they understand the form from the time that it was spoofed on The Simpsons (with Krusty and other celebs wailing “We’re sending our love down the well”). Of course, because this video actually involves real celebrities, it is both the spoof of a celebrity singalong and an actual celebrity singalong. To quote The Simpsons in a context that that show created, it’s funny because it’s true.

Yet “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck” is also the most ecstatically romantic video online right now—and it gets away with it precisely because its protected by the veneer of comedy. In some strange way, we don’t really trust classical romance anymore. Consider how closely the exultant tone of “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck”—the crazy urge to sing, sing, sing about your significant other—parallels Tom Cruise jumping all over the couch. There was something patently uncouth, something just a little too romantic about the whole Tom/Katie romance, so naturally, everyone assumed he was homosexual. How utterly romantic, and thus utterly gay, is it to actually propose on the Eiffel Tower?

We’ve all encountered this singularly euphoric and conflicted phenomenon in one way or another. A girl told me recently that she and her girlfriends find it strange when a guy pursues them while openly demanding a relationship. There is something so violating about that, puncturing as it does the elaborate system of millennial high-anxiety etiquette which demands several invisible steps between dating and coupling, rarely in that order. The more mock-passionate heterosexual guys become about their vividly sarcastic man crushes, the more difficult it is for them to really believe in or express genuine passion for their actual female infatuations. Mark Harris is right to say that it’s wrong to make gay jokes out of some sense that we’re past the historical point when those jokes can still hurt. Nevertheless, “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck,” in its over-the-top yet utterly direct way, is a viscerally accurate portrayal of how modern straight men love each other: at once more vocally and more sarcastically than ever.