like your gay uncle who does smack
it started when i started watching nip/tuck, but i started trying to figure out how to post about it when we started watching entourage. callmesandy and i had a super inarticulate debate here and then smartlikejustin said a bunch of smart things here, which i will possibly just end up repeating, but:
i love entourage and i love the dynamic between vince and eric. you'd have to be blind not to notice the homoerotic subtext and yet, somehow the more gay they act, the less gay i actually think they are. and once the subtext is textually acknowledged in a textual way (especially when it's acknowledged in order to dismiss it -- eric tells vince that he has a confession and vince asks him if he's going to come out to him and reminds him that he likes long legs) the spell gets broken, at least for me. i think there's a ton of room for unrequited sexual tension, but once vince and eric talk about how they aren't gay, even though they sort of act like it, it becomes harder to imagine how you could write a plausible story where they're in a secret gay relationship.
(one thing smartlikejustin pointed out when we were talking about this is that the opposite of what's happening on a show like entourage is a show like smallville (particularly in the first season, i guess? like i said, i don't really watch smallville except in a jungian collective unconscious sense where i feel like when you're in fandom, you know a lot about smallville without ever having watched it) where the subtext between clark and lex is painting the fucking walls but it's never textually acknowledged in the show, so it's always possible to imagine that they're secretly fucking.)
when compared to eric and vince, sean and christian on nip/tuck have a similar but more extreme dynamic. since i occasionally feel like i'm the only person who watches this show, a brief summary: sean and christian have been friends since college and now they're partners in a plastic surgery practice. sean is married to college sweetheart julia and christian is a life-long bachelor. julia was christian's girlfriend first, but she dumped him for sean after one date. from the beginning of the show, you get the impression that she still wonders whether or not she made the right decision, and halfway through the first season it's revealed that julia thinks that the father of her oldest child might actually be christian.
so it's your standard love triangle except that the dynamic between sean and christian is INCREDIBLY homoerotic. when julia confesses to sean that christian is their son's father, sean goes and finds christian, punches him out and shouts, "i loved you the most!" in the next episode, they work out their aggression by having a threesome with a hooker (aka the straightest gay threesome ever) and when they reconcile, sean says that he and christian did a good job raising matt (the kid) together. last night matt calls christian instead of sean when he ends up in the principal's office and when the principal assumes that christian is sean, christian says, "no, i'm his biological father," and when the principal assumes it's a "matt has two fathers" scenario, christian's answer is to say, "no, sean's my partner."
here's the thing about nip/tuck: in the last month of episodes, there has been the straightest gay threesome ever (the second of three hard-core threesomes involving main characters on the show in two seasons), a graphic sex scene involving sean and a blow-up doll, the depiction of a sexual relationship between matt and the mother of one of his classmates and the depiction of a sexual relationship between the mother and the son. if sean and christian were secretly gay, or if they were just fucked up and occasionally slept together or used to occasionally sleep together, that show would go there. and because they haven't gone there, i'm convinced that there's something else going on besides secret sublimated gayness, but that's just me.
nip/tuck is the first show i've ever watched where i've really felt like resolving the sexual tension between same-sex characters would be totally likely and plausible for the characters themselves and the tone and intentions of the show, so in absence of that resolution, i end up thinking the characters are really, really straight. and i think the reason that shows that amp up the subtext, acknowledge it and then dismiss it leave me feeling uninterested in their slash potential is that i expect too much.
everyone i know who watches everwood is trying to play gotcha gay because they expect that greg berlanti will go there. ever since ellen, the major character gay retcon reveal has become an acceptable arc. of these (the only other example i can think of at the moment is the obvious: jack on dawson's creek) the one that pushes the envelope is willow on buffy the vampire slayer, because willow had the same-sex hook-up before the Very Special Coming Out Episode. and so i do think that resolved sexual tension between major same-sex characters on a television show will become a standard arc. i don't think it's going to happen this season or next season or even five years from now, but i do think it's getting there.
i know that at least part of my anticipation comes from being in slash fandom and being greedy and wanting subtext to be reality, but i do think there's something there. and for the moment, shows where even the writers seem to realize that vince/eric makes the most logical sense are going to ring a little off to me, the same way will & grace has always felt completely implausible to me because in a million odd years, will has never had a serious boyfriend.
in a much more heterosexual turn of events, when i first moved to boston and joined the ranks of the unemployed, i caught the cycle of dawson's creek reruns on TBS early in the first season. we're closing in on the end of season three this week, and i know that if i really, really worked at it, i could have jumped on this bandwagon a little bit later, but, OH MY GOD PACEY AND JOEY ARE SO IN LOVE OH MY GOD PACEY/JOEY 4EVAH KTHX. yeah, that's all i got.
also, my laptop battery cord is crapping out again, my 'p' key is still missing and the fan is still acting up. clearly, clearly i need to just send it away to the dell technicians in the sky while it's still under warranty, but since i've been procrastinating for almost two months, it's getting toward being a challenge to see just how gimpy my umbilical cord to technology can get.