Battlestar Galactica - "The Ties That Bind"

Two weeks ago was the first time I've ever watched "Battlestar Galactica" on television. My roommate in Los Angeles, summer 2005, turned me on to the season 1 DVD - we watched two or three per night, usually with a quick puff before, after, and (when the square marrieds in the duplex room were on vacation), during. A fanboy engineer in my abroad program hooked up me with the whole second season - I was avoiding studying for finals, lurking in the computer cluster in the Berlin study center, when I saw the gamechanging invasion of New Caprica. I didn't have a television in LA or Berlin, but even when I had one sitting in my room all during third season, I never thought to actually figure out which day of the week BSG actually aired. Hell, even that term, "aired," didn't have any meaning for me. Somewhere around midweek, the new episode would suddenly appear, like out of the ether or some planetary mist, on the FTP site that was my purveyor.

My preferred method of watching hasn't really changed since then - same computer, albeit with a slightly dustier screen, usually on my lap (sometimes turned on its side so I can watch with my head in my pillow.) As grand as BSG is, my relationship to it is private, almost intimate. It's not like "Lost," where everybody I know talks about it, and I have to plan out weeks in advance who I'll be watching it with, and there is some odd charge from watching it when it debuts, on Thursday night.

But I watched the rerun of the season premiere on television - on the Sci-Fi channel, which was a laughable obscurity before BSG and will be again very soon. It was weird. I couldn't make the screen smaller; I couldn't pull the tiny little pointer forward or backwards; yet the picture was also clearer, there was less distortion during kinetic sequences (and with the shaky camera, that's all the time); it felt like I was watching television, not just watching BSG. Weird.

I was thinking about this today while I was watching "The Ties that Bind." It was just after noon, I was on my couch, and there was this awful glare on the screen. No matter which way I turned it, if I refocused my eyes just a little bit, I could see myself seeing the screen. I tried wearing a dark shirt. I tried moving all around the room. But we don't have blinds in my apartment, so my only options were watching from inside the bathroom, or squinting a little bit whenever the screen was predominantly dark. I lived with the squint. And realized - man, this show is dark.

I don't mean thematically - although this episode, which started with a marriage on life support and ended with spousal abuse, attempted suicide, and plot-twist space homicide, was maybe the darkest yet. I mean dark like they need to get some better fracking lighting onboard. The happy band of distrustful searchers onboard Starbuck's sewage ship look like they're hanging out in a Turkish prison (right down to the catwalk that runs right over the dining table); the sick bay feels like a morgue-in-waiting; and, inside the tiny little dorm room that is (was) Chief and Cally's humble home, their kid's night light casts shadowlights of stars across the dark, sad walls. The show has had some great visuals - nuclear missiles cutting through space just moments after a Battlestar warps away; Cylon copies hanging out on New Caprica, wearing the same clothes and saying hello in exactly the same way - but I can't think of any image more poetic than Cally, always the most overlooked of the show's cast by the show's cast, trying to sleep while the stars pass by her, over her.

By the end of the episode, of course, she's out among the real stars - floating forever, frozen in a moment of realization, of horror, of infinite loss. One of the best things about the show is how threatening space is. In "Star Wars," space was where you had space battles - you could imagine living comfortably onboard the Millenium Falcon, or joy riding in an X-Wing. Space itself was never really threatening, no more than a highway is threatening - its the other cars that you have to worry about. "Star Trek" was pretty much the same way - for all the times that various engineers fretted over hull breaches, space felt almost abstract - viewed on a monitor, with an energy shield of nebulous physics protecting the ship from harm.

Not on Battlestar. You can feel the blackness of space pressing in at all times. Cylons and traitors have been blown out of the airlock - the most horrific punishment imaginable, some awful combination of hanging, drowning and freezing to death, with full knowledge that you will never be buried, nor even have some place marked in ground to remember you. Your own body is your memorial, unless you're fortunate enough to hit a comet or fly into a supernova or float away over the edge of this universe, where matter is antimatter and the dead dance away.

Poor Cally. Because she was such a small character, and such a small girl, it was always great when she appeared on the show, because you'd always be expecting a meek little lamb and instead you'd get a hard-charging toaster-hating big-mama wolf. I can remember Ronald D. Moore and his writers laughing in one of the commentaries about how unexpectedly violent, and fierce, she'd turned out as a character. When a prisoner in "Bastille Day" tries to rape her, she bites off his ear and gets shot for the effort. She Jack Ruby'd Boomer, without remorse, with a look of utter hatred in her big doe eyes; she made sure Boomer knew that she'd do it again. A restless wife, she pushed the Chief into igniting a socialist revolution - wives on this show, from Ellen Tigh to Starbuck to the dearly departed Mrs. Adama, are always much stronger than their husbands. And in last night's episode, Cally proved she had no shame when it came to her husband and her family - sleep-deprived, pumped full of antidepressants, carrying her half-Cylon baby through a bar, she felt no qualms about running over to her seemingly cheating husband, screaming in his face, then vomiting right on the floor.

Cally - her fitful story arc, her short and unhappy life - epitomizes what's great about the show. Although it gets longer, it never seems to get bigger. Look at how other shows swell in cast size, and how new story arcs always seem based on addition. Each season of "The Wire" added in an entire new cast of characters (the docks, the government, the schools, the newspaper.) Each season of "Lost" adds in a new group of ambiguous antagonists - the tailies, the Others, the freighter folk. On old Star Treks, each week would bring a new bunch of aliens, a new planet.

BSG just excavates what's already there. So much of the show is less about moving us forward than moving us sideways towards a different point of view. You could see that in the subplot about Lee's first day in the Quorum. How fascinating to see Roslin in her role as Commander in Chief, obfuscating to help Adama, dodging questions from the people who represent all humanity in what should be a democratic system. What's nice is that this view of her - as a somewhat callous, potentially monomanical, certainly secretive benevolent tyrant - doesn't feel forced, or like some dramatic personality shift. You can absolutely see how the fierce defender of democracy who battled against Adam's military regime (and the utterly lovely romantic who lay next to Adama one lovely New Caprican night) is also the Nixonian president seemingly despised by nearly every other politician at her table.

And you can also see how Cally, who has always loved the Chief - who has lived most of her adult life in service to him, first as a workman and then as a wife - could have no qualms about knocking him in the head and almost killing his half-breed child. You could see that stern resolve in that magnificent shot, with the Chief out of focus and his voice dialed down, robotic.


Gotta love the ending of this episode. First that point of view shot as the landing bay fades quickly away. Then the tiny, ridiculous human body floating through space, not even struggling (we remember that this is Cally's second uncovered excursion into space; second time's the charm.) Then the close-up on her cold, dead face. Then the long tracking shot back, from the Chief's face. Adama is there, no doubt giving him some kind words. She hadn't been sleeping well. She had been depressed. It's important to go on, Chief, for your son. She would have wanted you to go on.

Except she wouldn't have. Cally was a soldier. Cally had all the stones that the Chief has never had. If the Chief wanted to honor her death, he'd put a bullet through the synthetic brain of his newfound Cylon friends, then one in his baby's head, then one in his own. Cally believed in humanity. Cally hated Cylons. Poor Cally. Poor "Battlestar Galactica." You can tell it's not going to end well.

On "Southland Tales" and the Cult of the Overreaching Idiot Infant Auteur

There are exactly three things that make Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales" worth watching:

1) Sarah Michelle Gellar. As porn star political activist Krista Now, Gellar finally gets to flex all the funny-serious acting muscles that made her such a cult national treasure in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." None of the dialogue in the movie makes any sense, and all of it is supposed to be simultaneously uproariously funny and meaningfully allegorical (just like the movie itself), and Gellar is the only person onscreen who seems to know exactly the right note to strike. What a pro this girl is! What a travesty that this is the only good movie role she's ever had!

2) Justin Timberlake singing The Killers. Playing an Iraq War veteran with scars that look more like Mike Tyson tattoos, Timberlake narrates the entire movie. The narration is god-awful exposition, like he's reading the italicized portions of Kelly's shitty, overwritten screenplay. If I tell you that Timberlake spends most of the movie hanging out on a gun turret on the Santa Monica Pier, I have to stress that he doesn't just hang out. He never moves. Whenever we see him, he always swivels the gun from right to left in the exact same motion - it might be the exact same shot, repeated over and over throughout the movie. (At least Ed Wood was using stock footage.) At some point in the movie - I feel like it was towards the end, although the movie never seems to actually begin - he suddenly isn't on the turret, but is instead in a video arcade, selling an existential injection drug called liquid karma to character we've never met before who will suddenly became the main character in the final five minutes. He gives then injects himself with the drug.

And then, in what may be a dream sequence but what feels much more alive than anything else in this mediocre acid trip of a movie, Timberlake lipsyncs to The Killers' unclassic single "All These Things That I've Done." He chugs a can of cheap booze and stumbles through the whole dance number, but it's delightfully choreographed stumbling, and we remember that Timberlake has been a performer his whole life. Descriptions of the movie inevitably make it sound more interesting than it actually is, because it sounds madcap but plays dreary and stonefaced. This is one of the few moments that seems to really hit on what Kelly was hoping for - it's the end of the world, and all I want to do is dance, dance, dance. And then, just as the song is cresting with dancing peroxide blondes, Timberlake gets a melancholy look on his face, and the film shifts to slow motion, and the Killers fade into Moby, and we're back into shitty existential land.

3) The look on the Rock's face when he watches Sarah Michelle Gellar dance. At the end of the film, there is quite a lot happening. Marx's vision of an underclass revolution has come true. The Messiah is rising into the air holding hands with his time travel duplicate, in an overturned ice cream truck. A mega-zeppelin is flying over Los Angeles. There are lots of fireworks. There is so much happening, and it is utterly impossible to care about any of it. But onboard the mega-zeppelin, apropos of nothing, Sarah Michelle Gellar and her porn star girlfriends step onstage and perform a dance number set to Moby. In the audience, the Rock, whose role in the movie never even makes sense to his character, looks at Gellar, the way that Gregory Peck used to look at Audrey Hepburn. He takes off his jacket, steps onstage, and wonderfully, they begin dancing together. It is an incandescent, beautiful moment.

"Southland Tales" is the latest entry in a new canon of young auteur post-masterwork shittiness. Put it next to "The Life Aquatic" and "The Fountain" - it resembles the former in its style (funny names! wide angles!), the latter in its define-the-universe time-tripping storyline. All three should stand as cautionary tales to young filmmakers everywhere. When you make a great movie - and "Donnie Darko," "The Royal Tenenbaums," and "Requiem for a Dream," back at the start of the decade, were great enough to get people talking about a new era in cinema - you will have alot of people willing to give you money and alot of good actors willing to work for you. But the people giving you money only want you for your golden-boy fame, and actors are exceedingly poor judges of which scripts can make a good movie, and no amount of money will save a shitty script, and guys, believe me, few scripts are as shitty as "Southland Tales," "The Life Aquatic," and "The Fountain."

The fact that all three have moments of searing brilliance is not an excuse. Moments like that deserve better movies. These films just do not cohere in any meaningful way - and they don't even try to. They are about incoherence. And you can find plenty of reviews online for all three by critics who try to make that incoherence sound genius. (Nathan Lee, formerly of The Village Voice, said that "Southland Tales" "looks and feels more like life in 2007 than Juno, In the Valley of Elah, and Michael Clayton combined." Only if you believe that life in 2007 is defined by "The Hills," by porno, and by the Ashlee Simpson dregs of pop culture - that is, if you still believe that life in Los Angeles has anything to do with life anywhere else. Here's a satire in which the main forces arrayed against the government are "Neo-Marxists." Ooo, topical! How do you claim to make any kind of satire of the modern age without a single Middle Eastern character, or indeed, any non-Caucasian actors besides The Rock?)

People who defend these films - and that includes the directors - do not argue that they make sense, but rather, that the fact that they make no sense makes lots of sense, deep sense, absolute sense. Bullshit. People sometimes relate "The Fountain" to "2001," but "2001," as a narrative, is almost painfully straightforward. It's a long movie which should be boring, because almost nothing happens in it - lots of scenes watch people talking without really listening, as if observing an animal making animal noises. It's only at the end that "2001" turns into a head trip. "The Fountain," "The Life Aquatic," and "Southland Tales" are the wormhole sequence in "2001" without the actual movie behind it. In their mock-independent way, they represent the same filming instinct as Jerry Bruckheimer - "Let's just get to the good stuff already! Wormholes! Religious stuff! Weird mystery!" Remember at the end of "2001," when Dave Bowman watches himself age in an elaborately designed set? What better metaphor for these movies, which are all aesthetically beautiful and utterly mind-numbing.

Defending these movies because they have something on their mind does no one any good - not the directors, who get encouraged to think of themselves as hidden geniuses (it's the George W. Bush/Fidel Castro argument - "history will absolve me"); not the critics, who could be defending tiny movies that are actually good; not young people, who discover the movie on DVD and, in a fit of high-school drug-induced miasma, start thinking that the key to making a great work of art is thin plotting and TS Eliot quotes. Ever since the 1960s, and especially since the 1990s, the defining image of the film director is less and less that of Alfred Hitchcock - dressed like he has a job, always working, never forgetting that "cinema" is just a word for where people go to watch movies - and more and more that of Peter Fonda directing "Easy Rider" - a young director with great connections trying to make some deeper point about all of humanity, ideally using all male characters with maybe a few angelic whores thrown in.

I'm not saying that young film directors shouldn't reach for awesomeness. Todd Haynes took half a decade to make "I'm Not There," a movie far more overstuffed with ideas and embedded culture references than all three of the above movies combined, yet he never once forgot that he was making a movie about human beings with emotions. There are subjects, predicates, and objects in "I'm Not There." Things are done by people.

People never do stuff in "The Fountain," in "Life Aquatic," and certainly not in "Southland Tales." They talk about doing things. They discuss how many things were going on, before the movie started. In "Life Aquatic," people never stop talking about how great Steve Zissou used to be. In the three separate time periods of "The Fountain," the Spanish Inquisition has been going on, Rachel Weisz has been dying of cancer, and spaceman Hugh Jackman has been traveling through space in a gigantic bubble. In "Southland Tales," so many things happen before the movie that Richard Kelly wrote three prequel comics to fill in the backstory. However, at least one and maybe several of the elements of the backstory are structured in the film as a surprise. Although maybe I'm giving Kelly too much credit. Toward the end of the film, a few characters explain the backstory all in one quick jumble, and although it plays like a surprise, much of the movie is about explaining the movie, so maybe it's just reminding you to remember that you're watching.

Yes, "Southland Tales" is trying to strike a difficult tone - spoof satire apocalypse drama sci-fi messianic pulp noir thriller Marxist-Socialist revolution - but is it a tone that should ever be struck? There are some funny parts in the film, but so many of them are played so slowly, sometimes with slow-motion music scenes. Slow-motion music scenes are never going to be funny. They used to seem deep, back when Kelly shot this scene in "Donnie Darko." Now that everyone can make a movie, we all know how easy a scene like that actually is. Get a bunch of people. Move the camera around them. Set it to slow motion. Turn off the volume and throw in a Tears for Fears song. Depth!

This movie makes me angry. It makes me angry because the three things that I like about it - Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake's dance number, and the look on the Rock's face - are almost enough to make me want to like the movie. They are so good but so unearned. The dance number would be just as effective if it were as a two minute youtube video. Sarah Michelle Gellar's performance could be cut down to five minutes and packaged as a trailer, "Krista Now: Porn Star Activist!" and everyone would want to see that movie. The few things that are great about this film have nothing to do with it being a film. There's never a moment, like at the end of "There Will Be Blood," or hell, "Donnie Darko," where you can feel the full weight of all that has come before pressing through your eyes into your soul. There's no moment that makes you believe this movie actually happened.

"Southland Tales" isn't a film. It's a great soundtrack with some cool album artwork and a shitty name. Richard Kelly must be a genius, because a lobotomized chimpanzee couldn't make a movie this bad.

Battlestar Galactica - "Six of One"

What makes movies better than television? Or rather, what is it that makes the best movies so much better than the best television? Everyone knows now that television is the buzzier, more experimental, more professional, more rewarding, less teen-baiting popular audio-visual medium (sorry, slideshows), but just when everyone is ready to write off the cinema, along comes fall of 2007, which had such a rack of instant masterpieces ("There Will Be Blood," "No Country For Old Men," "The Assassination of Jesse James," "In the Valley of Elah," "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," "Eastern Promises") that it was easy to miss just how revitalized Hollywood's genre films were.

What I mean is that the great films were so great that they almost obscured how good the good films were. "3:10 to Yuma" was the first western since before "Unforgiven" to feel less like an anti-western and more like a genuine pulp western (the former deconstructs the genre; the latter uses the genre to deconstruct humanity.) "Gone, Baby, Gone" was a topdown exploration of modern American class, masquerading as a mystery. Comedies that could have been shrill quirkfests – "Juno" and "Dan in Real Life," both filled with eccentric families and twisted romance – were simultaneously funnier than we thought and wiser than anyone expected.

The ringmaster of this whole spontaneous circus - call it the return of the B-movies, films perpetually at 4 or 5 on your Netflix queue - was Tony Gilroy, who used the international espionage thriller and the Grisham-ish courtroom drama to tell basically the same story about demented bureaucracy, corrosive all-American power, and one man's desperate, simple urge to find himself - the first was called "The Bourne Ultimatum," the second was called "Michael Clayton."

A western, a Boston noir-fest, a pregnant-teen sensation, a family-reunion romance, a threequel blockbuster, and a corporate thriller - what's the common link? More to the point, what is it that makes these very good movies just a little bit more powerful than the best television? Why isn't "3:10 to Yuma" just warmed-over "Deadwood"; what makes "Gone, Baby, Gone" feel different from a couple "Wire" hours; how come one "Bourne" chater has more thrills than four seasons of "Alias"? "Eli Stone" is similar in outline to "Michael Clayton" - a formerly heartless corporate lawyer starts standing up for the little guy (just like in "Shark" and "The Guardian.")

In a sense, this question is simple - why are movies different than TV - but I think it's more complex than it used to be. With bigger budgets and HD, television essentially looks as good as movies do (Michael Mann, ever the subtle innovator, was the first filmmaker to make a movie with a modern TV aesthetic - "Collateral," shot in burnished digital video, feels more like sequel to Mann's TV show "Robbery Homicide Division" than his earlier LA noir "Heat" - making him the spiritual successor to Alfred Hitchcock, who shot "Psycho" with a TV crew and made movie history.) But television still has to be fast - even HBO shows film episodes in under two weeks, about six post-edit minutes per day versus movie's general ratio of 2.5 minutes per day.

That's why TV shows have so many writers - and why the cast size of TV shows keeps on swelling. (When you're out of ideas, pull one lever and the pregnant chick goes into labor; if that's not enough, pull the other lever and Mom's cancer relapses.) And that's also, really, what still separates a great film scene from a great television scene. Each of the very good films mentioned above turn, in one way or another, on one long back-and-forth dialogue scene between two people, in which every line is laced with meaning, without any time for window dressing. (The great films are full of these scenes - is there a line wasted in "No Country for Old Men?")

In "3:10 To Yuma," it's Christian Bale and Russell Crowe's last scene together before the final run for the train - in a way, the whole movie is about paring itself down to these two men, very different characters played by very different actors (Bale tends to play calculating characters - he has secret identities, in one form or another, in "Batman," "The Prestige," "American Psycho"; Crowe plays simple characters helplessly addicted to their own fate, which is why he's so good at playing losers and even better at playing heroes.) In "Gone, Baby, Gone," it's the scene between Amy Ryan and Casey Affleck, when she, the most neglectful drug-addict mother Boston has ever seen, begs him to save her child.

It's the scene in "Bourne" where Matt Damon talks to Julia Stiles, over a table in quiet little European bar. Its maybe the only time in the movie Bourne has a real conversation. He thinks they're talking about his lost love, but they're actually talking about hers. And it's that last scene in "Michael Clayton" between Tilda Swinton and George Clooney, where all of her lies finally catch up with her - its like that penultimate scene from "The Maltese Falcon" between Bogart and the Dame, the moment when a film built on secrets finally runs into brutal truth (except not even Tony Gilroy could write a line like "I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck.")

These are scenes of deep connection between two people. They all seem to run just a little long, and they are all built on decisive twists, not of plot but of character. It doesn't really matter how Bale's farmer lost his leg; we learn that Stiles' character was in love with Bourne right before she departs the series; Amy Ryan's mama is a bitch before this scene and a bitch after this scene. The characters don't really develop in scenes like this, so much as, for one quick second, come into sharp microscopic Blu-Ray focus. In this way, these scenes don't just change our mind about characters we thought we knew - they seem to carry the entire hidden meaning of their entire film, hovering in the silence between words.

In the last decade, television has grown up in a lot of ways, but making a scene like this is still relatively elusive - it takes rehearsal time, and writing time, and an understanding by the creators of just what, exactly, is the central idea of their narrative. Really, most great television nowadays is great because it's so good at keeping the viewer's attention away from this kind of scene - at creating endless tangents from the main point. "24," "Lost," "Battlestar Galactica," "Rome," the underrated "The Nine" - these are all shows whose plots would have once been considered better fodder for movies than for television shows, because they are based on immediacy - terrorists are attacking and the clock is ticking, we have to get off the island, we have to find Earth, we're battling for control of Rome, the bank is being robbed, etc. The joy of these shows is that they can stretch out the immediacy, shade in the characters and the detail, discover new rhythms and even create an entirely new self-realized thesis (can you imagine "Lost" without Benjamin Linus?)

Yet with this stretching out, there is also an endless symphony of distraction. Probably the main complaint that dogs any serial drama is that the characters never talk about what we want them to talk about. Take "Battlestar Galactica." Secretly, we've all been waiting for a conversation like this since the first episode of the series:

(Main cast sit around a table. Baltar smokes a cigarillo. Tigh sips from his flask.)

Baltar: I've got a confession to make. You know how sometimes I'll kind of stare into space when you're talking to me and then respond to what you say awkwardly, as if I was following instructions from someone you can't see? Well, ever since the hot blonde Cylon - the one without the accent - seduced me into accidentally helping destroy humanity, I've been seeing her in my head. For awhile there I thought she was a holographic projection of a chip in my head. Then I thought I was crazy. Now I think she's an angel.

Caprica Six: That's so funny! Ever since I seduced you into destroying humanity, I've been seeing and talking to an invisible version of YOU. Except that the you in my head has a slightly different accent from the you in reality.

Starbuck: Speaking of invisible people, I kept seeing visions of Leoben, right before I blew up, disappeared for two months, and then somehow found earth, maybe. He made me talk to my dead mother. It was dramatic.

Roslin: Visions? Sometimes I'll have visions about being in an opera house.

Baltar: Wait, an opera house? I've been to that opera house! I had a dream about Boomer's child being there! Back then, the Six in my head was saying it was our child, but hey, she was vague about it.

Boomer: Maybe this has something to do with the hybrid. She's the human/cylon creature who always talks nonsensically, except in a way that seems secretly full of meaning. She lives in a neon futuristicky pool.

Adama: Wait, a pool, you say? I remember seeing one of those pools when I was just a young lad fighting in the war! Damn, I hate those Cylons.

Chief: Hey, I'm a Cylon!

Tigh: Me too!

Anders/Tory: Yeah, and us!

Lee: (reacting to everyone at once) Wait, what?

(Curtain falls, applause rings out, curtain rises. Cast takes a bow and points to the orchestra pit. Bear McCreary bows and then murders a Taiko drum)

"Lost" fans can imagine something similar to the above - all the main characters (including dead people, with Miles as a medium) hang out and figure out all the strange ways their lives intersected before they reached the island. ("That's so funny, I met your father when I was in Iraq right after I tortured my superior officer!" "Wait, YOUR dad was in that car accident that almost paralyzed my later ex-wife?") Yet for so much of modern television, the central thesis seems to be that such moments never occur - that no one person can ever know everything there is to know about the show. Think about "The Wire" - which single character could ever fathom the entirety of that show's portrayal of Baltimore? Isn't it strange, but totally natural, that Tommy Carcetti and Jimmy McNulty never actually meet?

Yet there are moments when serial dramas tap into the spirit of the imaginary scene above. It's Locke asking Ben, point blank, "What is the monster?" But it's also little moments, like AJ Soprano, in the final moments of his series, reminding his father that he once said "Try to remember the times that were good." Tony doesn't remember this, but we do - he said it in the first season finale. Moments like these - you might call them fan service, but really it's just explicit continuity - work so well, because, for brief little moments, characters on TV shows seem to know exactly as much about their own lives as we do.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting around to a scene from last week's "Battlestar Galactica" which was simultaneously the least mythological scene in the whole episode (and on the Cylon plot side, this episode had more going on than any episode since season 2's brainfuck gamechanger "Downloaded") and just about the best scene that the show has ever produced.

Roslin is sitting at Adama's desk. Adama, still wearing last night's uniform and looking for all the world like an old man waking up from a bad fraternity flashback, pours himself a glass of space whiskey. "Enjoying that more than usual," says the President of the Human Race. "Hair a the dog. Lee's party," explain the Commanding Officer and Savior of Humanity. There's a deep undercurrent here - her concern masked by sarcasm, his casual air masking a slight embarassment.

She snorts. Not even a laugh. And she changes the subject. She's always so direct. "What do we do now? Put her on trial? Find (her voice turns) Romo Lampkin? Take a show of hands?" Stephen Jenkins, a media creator, often discuss how, in modern superhero comics, the heroes talk to each other the way that kids used to playact them in backyards - a bit more sarcastic, more self-aware. The sneering way she says "Romo Lampkin" is exactly in that spirit - as much a comment on the show itself as on previous events.

"I don't know," he says.

"Follow her into an ambush?" She's not asking it like it's a question.

"She's driven," he tries. He's pacing, trying to get away.

"You gonna keep waltzing or you gonna sit down and talk?" She's angry at him, in a way that's both maternal and something more romantic. "What's going on. Sit." Like a cowed child he comes back.

"What if she's telling the truth?" he says. "She was supposed to die out there. She didn't. I can't explain it. What if she was meant to help us. And this is, um..." he trails off, realizing how completely the two of them have reversed themselves, over the course of their sad little life together. (Because "Battlestar Galactica" is about sad little lives, with group bathrooms and bad food and no sun and reprocessed air.)

"A what?" she says, and she smiles. "A Miracle?" She knows that she has won a point, but in the wrong place, at the wrong time. "Is that what you want to call this? Go ahead, say it. Grab your piece of the golden arrow. I want to hear Admiral Atheist say that a miracle happened." What a marvelously subtle actress Mary McDonnell is! Look at all the emotion she can pack into a line like "Go ahead, say it." Excitement, and teasing sarcasm, but also hope, and disbelief.

"You shot at her and you missed at close range." There's a look on Edward James Olmos' face here that he wears very often - that tough, squinty-eyed, almost Eastwoodian growl. Like Eastwood, Olmos' greatest skill as an actor is the mesmerizing quietude of his voice - like a purr from a grizzly bear. But there's something different in his bearing, now, than when the show started. Maybe it's because he wears his glasses less. Maybe it's because he finds himself more willing to believe in people. Maybe he's in love.

"Duloxin fracks with your aim," she says.

"So does doubt."

This is the point in a bad show where the characters might begin to back away. But she won't. "I pulled the trigger and I'd do it again. She put her life in front of a bullet as if it had no meaning. You drop an egg, you reach for another."

"Maybe convincing you meant more to her than her own life." He's struggling, and he knows it. It's hard to argue with a sober, intelligent, powerful, well-rested dying woman when you're half-drunk, barely conscious, unshowered and starting the weekend early.

"Is that your miracle?" she asks. "You want to talk about miracles? On the very same day that a very pale doctor informed me that I had terminal cancer, most of humanity was annihilated, and I survived. And by some mathematical absurdity, I became president." This is a conversation with more on its mind than just the latest plot twist. This is, we're starting to realize, somehow about the entirety of the show. He wants to believe; she can't allow herself to.

"And then," she continues, "my cancer disappeared, long enough for us to find a way to earth. You can call it whatever you want. And now, I'm dying."

"Don't talk that way," he says. Is there anything sadder than when a manly man tries to confront cancer? It reminds one of Tony Soprano way back in season 1, talking about how his best friend was gonna beat the cancer, same way he could beat up a kid and steal his lunch money.

"Bill, you gotta face this," she says. Roslin has always been a fierce realist, but only because she has so much faith. "My life is coming to an end soon enough, and I am not gonna apologize to you for not trusting her, and I am not, I am not gonna trust her with the fate of this fleet."

And here, something interesting happens - she moves from matters cosmic to matters deeply personal. "You are so buckled up inside. You can't take anymore loss. Your son's leaving, this, me, I know it."

"No one's going anywhere," he says.

"Okay. Here's the truth. This is what's going on. You want to believe Kara. you would rather be wrong about her and face your own demise than risk losing her again." She knows him.

He knows it. "You can say in the room, but get out of my head." He stands up for a refill. It's a good last line for a good scene.

But it's not over. "You're so afraid to live alone," she says.

"And you're afraid to die that way." It's an amazing line. It's tough. It's passive aggressive. But it's also true. She smiles, but there's nothing funny about it.

"You're afraid," he continues, "that you may not be the dying leader you thought you were. Or that your death may be as meaningless as everyone else's." She deconstructed him, but he deconstructed her right back. And it hurt both of them. You have to really love someone to hurt them this bad.

He walks away. She smiles even wider - maybe laughing at the joke of existence, maybe laughing at this funny little man she's inextricably linked to, maybe holding back tears - and puts her glasses back on. She pulls aimlessly at her hair, and finds that it's coming out. She smiles even wider, and cries.

Battlestar Galactica - "He That Believeth In Me"

There are several reasons to not be excited about "The X-Files" movie coming out this summer. The main reason is its writer-director, Chris Carter, who created the original series, but whose follow-up shows were so much weekend afternoon Sci-Fi channel flotsam, trying and failing tried to bite off some of the "X-Files" magic. "Millenium" got the dark visual tone, "Harsh Realm" the endless paranoia, "The Lone Gunmen" the mordant humor, but they all ended up as tiny, mostly tasteless morsels. ("Millenium" - like Clear Pepsi and Clarence Thomas's political ideology - has a few rare, sad fans.)

You could watch one episode of each of those later series and pretty much get the whole idea - whereas "The X-Files" was endlessly changing smorgasboard television. People always point to shows with lavish sci-fi mythology like "Lost" to illustrate the influence of "The X-Files," but really, a decade later, who wants to watch a random "mythology" episode? Sure, the alien plot led to some great bizarro bits - the fetus, the black oil, the faceless aliens - but the whole thing was an aimless tease. More and more, it seems obvious that the real legacy of "The X-Files" was its ability to basically become a different show each week.

It's all the one-offs – the black-and-white "Post-Modern Prometheus," the all-in-long-shots "Triangle," the banned-from-broadcast incest fun-fest "Home," and seven years of weird creatures – that remain inspired. That's why "Sopranos" is the real inheritor of Chris Carter's mojo - "The Test Dream," with Tony lost in a vivid Felliniesque dream (complete with Annette Bening!), is right on the same wavelength as "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," a vivid gonzo panorama (complete with Alex Trebek!)

Other cop shows like CSI feature a crime-of-the-week plot type; with "The X-Files," it was more like genre-of-the-week; now horror, now black comedy, now relationship drama, now eye-popping visual treat. (That kaleidiscope style was what made the series so enjoyable. How can a movie ever capture that?)

So Chris Carter is a genius for creating the show, but he's that peculiar style of genius invented and epitomized by George Lucas - the one-hit wonder in the multimedia age, dry-humping his lone great creation across decades of television, movies, video games, tie-in paperbacks, annual coffee table books, shitty comic books licensed by Dark Horse Comics, and the occasional reunion special, except that nowadays franchises are so important that "reunion specials" get called "prequels" or "sequels" and get big screen deals. And don't forget, the last two seasons of "The X-Files" make Lucas's prequel trilogy look good, or at least not bad.

There's more reasons why "The X-Files" movie might suck. Neither David Duchovny nor Gillian Anderson have done much with their post-show career. Anderson may just be choosy (her roles in "The Last King of Scotland" and "A Cock and Bull Story" are memorable, if tiny), but Duchovny has appeared solely in much-despised indie films (messy auteuristerbation from directors who should know better, like Soderbergh's "Full Frontal" or Freundlich's "Trust the Man") and a vaguely-enjoyed Showtime TV show that's getting sued by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The original series ended with Mulder and Scully on the run from the law, but the whole appeal of "The X-Files" was their FBI partnership, so either the movie is a supernatural version of Bonnie and Clyde or we just agree, Hulk-style, to a healthy dose of continuity amnesia.

That being said, there is one lone reason why "The X-Files" sequel could be the movie of the summer: the show's central concern, the eternal maddening quest for "truth," has never been more timely. In the 1990s, the days of Clinton I and the End of History, "The X-Files" was pretty much the only popular narrative built on skepticism, a lonely gunman sniping at the government in a time when the worst it seemed the government could come up with was furtive office blowjobs and the occasional vague bombing of vaguely-defined nations. In the span of one year, "Independence Day" showed the American President getting in a fighter plane on the fourth of July to shoot down aliens, and "Air Force One" showed us the American President, played by Indiana Jones, wrestling evil Russians. At the time, this played like escapism; post-Iraq II and "Mission Accomplished," it plays like ingenius spoof, if not chic Stalinist jingo.

Now might be the perfect time for the return of "The X-Files," because we've finally caught up with its conspiracy-flavored, "trust-no-one" theme. The Atlantic monthly has a great article about the return of the 70's style of paranoid cinema; "The Wire" just rounded out five glorious years of exposing the miserable machinations of the upper levels of every political, economic, and heroin-dealing organization in the modern American city; and now comes the final season "Battlestar Galactica," the most consistently suspicious television show in history. It's a mesmerizing hallmark of post-"Sopranos" television that you can never be quite sure about who is good or evil, but "Battlestar Galactica" is the first show to actually ponder whether humanity is worth saving.

The show has never been popular --- (Although really, do we even really know what's popular anymore? If the top-rated show on television gets 30 million out of a possible 300 million documented citizens to watch, does that still count as popular? Some of the best and least-watched shows on television are also probably the most illegally-downloaded – I knew several people in college who would always download a high-quality foreign rip of "Lost," because the ones they were putting up on iTunes were full-screen and iPod quality – so is it even possible to remotely guess how many people actually watch what they watch? One of the biggest subtle jokes on Stuff White People Like is that just about every pop culture item it mentions – Wes Anderson films, "Arrested Development," "The Daily Show," Michel Gondry, indie music – is actually incredibly overexposed in the media, and only really popular among people who used to be tastemakers, and in an era when a movie critic loses his job ever two seconds, who's even trying to make taste anymore? What is popularity?)

Anyway, "Battlestar Galactica" has never had very many viewers - a function of its crappy channel, its shitty time slot, its off-putting-yet-secretly-kickass title. The show is expensive to make, and even with two channels co-producing it, you can feel the producers constantly stretching the cash as far as it can go (and you can hear them talk about it on the endlessly illuminating podcasts.) Unlike its compatriots in the new mytho-pop fantasy TV canon, "Heroes" and "Lost," "BSG" has never had a brush with success, and films out of Vancouver, a town synonymous with "cut-rate production" (though also, tellingly, the same place they shot the first four seasons of "The X-Files," and the new movie.)

That lack of excess cash forces the show cut the fat out of its own genre. Shaky close-ups hide tiny sets; long dialogue scenes replace zap-zap space battles; the original series' robots, here computer-animated and never quite convincing, steadily fade into the background to make way for the fascinating human-ish android overseers.

That central conceit of making big somethings out of just a little bit more than nothing, also applies to its central storytelling style: the endless layering of mystery on mystery. In a typical "Battlestar Galactica" scene, three people will be talking about the Cylons. One person, an authority figure (Admiral Adama, President Roslin), will be discussing the need to figure out who is and isn't a Cylon. One of the people they are speaking to will actually be a Cylon, although that person may or may not know this. The other person will not be a Cylon, but will be talking to the invisible Cylon in his head that may be a computer implant, an angel, or a figment of his imagination. The show lost the whole "Who is a Cylon?" thread in season 3, which may, I think, explain the general viewer ennui - now, with the revelation that four of the main cast is Cylons, it's been brought back and supercharged, one last surge towards the series finale.

"Battlestar" never lets us quite believe anyone. The military authorities once declared martial law; the president is a fundamentalist who lets scripture dictate the course of all humanity; and even scrappy underdog characters might turn into sleeper-cell robots, or may be driven mad with homicidal rage, or both. Most post-9/11 narratives address the new fundamental fear that attacks can come from anywhere at anytime - that there are villains everywhere. "Battlestar" pushes this one step further into near-madness, pondering a fear that You are the villain, that You could attack at any time, that a time bomb is waiting to go off in Your mind which could destroy Yourself and everyone around You. Call it Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

And the show never lets us believe in anything, by specifically making the very act of believing one of its ongoing plot points. The two factions on the show - the humans and the Cylons - have very different religions. The humans, our protagonists and the people who are most like us (wearing ties, watching tabloid television, mostly ugly and swearing all the time), are loony polytheists (you will never get tired of hearing old badasses like Edward James Olmos cutely throw in that extra "s," as in "oh my gods" or "Gods damn it") who happen to believe in the Greek pantheon.

The Cylons, the antagonists and the people who are least like us (wearing designer clothes, hanging out with duplicates of themselves, all model-perfect and monotone-speaking), believe in one God and do their best to spread His word everywhere they go. The central genius of the show is that both religions pay off in big dividends - the fleet follows a track mapped out in their bible to earth, and the Cylon God keeps sending people crazy dreams - but you never really trust either one.

The show has the same narrative directness as "Lost" - a cast of ethno-diverse castaways in close quarters on a series-length search, replace "island" with "spaceship" and "getting home" with "finding earth" - but is at once more straightforward and more grandly conceived. "Lost" is littered with references and easter eggs; a single episode will reference a whole host of movies, books, theoretical physicists, and philosophers. "Battlestar" has teasing links with its crap-tastic progenitor and ended season 3 with a version of "All Along the Watchtower," but besides that it's in a pop culture vacuum. Yet it also directly tackles plenty of modern topics - abortion, suicide bombs, political dynasties - with a mixture of the purposefully shrill allegory of "South Park" and the pinpoint dramatization of "The Wire."

"Stop-Loss": Impassioned Awfulness and Bludgeoned Subtlety

"Stop-Loss" is like a sexy 90s-era WB TV show about the least sexy, least 90s topic imaginable It's a morality tale about the death of morality, a movie that's dreadfully sentimental when it comes to personal relationships but endlessly skeptical about everything else - the government, the war, patriotism, Texas pride. It only really figures out its central conflict later in the film, after trying out several different genres like so many clothes in a dressing room - it's a war movie, it's a vacation movie, it's a road movie, it's a buddy movie, it's a romance. The pieces don't fit together one bit. This is the kind of movie that casts Ciarin Hinds - who might be the greatest character actor working right now (he was Julius Caesar in "Rome," a Putin-ish Russian Prez in "The Sum of All Fears," an Israeli hitman in "Munich," and the silent partner in "There Will Be Blood") - as the main character's father, and then scarcely finds any use for him. But it's also the kind of movie that casts a bunch of attractively beefcake actors, and just when you're ready to write this off as "Varsity Blues" with PTSD, you watch them give the most heartbreaking performances in years.

That's the main thing about "Stop-Loss" - it's one of those rare movies ("Juno" was another one) that gets better and better as it goes along. After a horrifying battle sequence set in Iraq, the movie shifts forward in time, and we see soldiers coming home to Texas - some for leave, some for good. For what is probably just about twenty minutes but plays like five hours, we see the soldiers readjusting to life back home. That their anxiety-prone actions are disturbing (excess drinking, spousal abuse, battle flashbacks) doesn't make them any less cliché. But then Ryan Phillippe returns his gear, only to find out that he's being sent back to Iraq against his will - "Stop-Lossed," in the army's legalese-inflected jargon. He goes AWOL and decides to drive to Washington DC to plead his case to a senator. He's taking his time though - visiting a dead soldier's family, stopping by a military hospital to say hi to a particularly FUBAR'd compatriot, and more.

The road trip is the heart of the movie, and although most of the tension seeps out of it quickly, it's an unbroken stretch of brilliance. At one point, Phillippe meets another Stop-Lossed soldier on the run, living off the grid in shitty motels, so fearful of discovery that he can't even take his sick child to a hospital. It's like a demented horror film vision of modern day America - a man and his family on the run, for the crime of fighting an enemy who wasn't even attacking us.

In a sense, the road trip section of the film is almost like an updated version of "Apocalypse Now" - episodic scenes of devastation (emotional rather than physical) - except that Pierce's open-ended conclusion can't quite discover the near-mystical horror of Coppola's film. The film, despite a powerful set-piece in a graveyard, trails off, but you can't really imagine it any other way. This is a bravura B-picture that's more important, more vividly about the here and now, than practically any other film made since 9/11. Give it some props.

"Friday Night Lights" Gets Its Third Second Chance

Give this to the moneymen - they recognize how important closure can be to viewers of even the lowest-rated television show (if only to better package that show on the eventual DVD.) Used to be that shows would just kind of disappear, or end in midsentence - nothing was worse, for a TV fan in the primordial age of serial television, for a show to end with a cliffhanger.

There is something particularly thrilling about a last episode that knows it's a last episode but that was conceived in the trenches, quickly - particularly if it happens early in the season, with the studio cutting their losses due to low ratings. (This is a feeling particular to network television, since the series finales of "Sopranos" and "The Wire" and "Six Feet Under" could conceive of their endings from ten, even twenty episodes out.) Look at the series finales for "Arrested Development" and "The O.C." - there is something rushed about both of them, yet in a way that makes them all the more enjoyable. There's no "Seinfeld"-style excess, and the sensation of hastily forming an ending sends both shows off with a fleet-footed exclamation point.

So thank god that "Friday Night Lights" is getting a third season. The show was all over the map this year, but every episode had at least three extraordinary moments, and you could feel the show finding its footing in the last couple of episodes (in strike-emptied gray January, before "Lost" and "The Wire" returned, "Friday Night Lights" was practically the only thing keeping television worth watching.)

There's some crazy new deal involved in the third season which will see the show broadcast on DirectTV first, which could mean that it's safer than ever or that it's halfway through the door. I don't think the show will get any more viewers than it has right now, and I'm almost positive this will be the last season, but you get the feeling that, having renewed it for a third go-round, and lacking a writer's strike as an exit strategy, NBC will at least have the common decency to let the show die gracefully.

How Do Straight Men Love Each Other?

Entertainment Weekly just 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 is starring Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, Best Supporting Bros 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 (David Dumbfuck Denby among them), and 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 non-Stephen King writers who contribute to the back page (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, but rather, 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' argument, but at the same time, I wish that he carried the implications of his argument farther. 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 also played Barack Obama on SNL– is a terrorist), sexual issues, you name it. 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. "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 is at the Latin Emmys, surrounded by Hispanic Americans in tuxedos, and 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 they are?

There is no real answer to this kind of question, which is, I think, why Harris' argument really deserves much more than a one-page column. That being said, I also disagree with Harris entirely, although not so much with argument as with his platform. I don't think that "I'm Fucking Ben Affleck" is making fun of homosexual men as 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 who started talking sarcasm when they first saw "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 male-only -- see the recent 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 AM 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 - you 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 much fewer restrictions on the 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" episode (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 "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?

I'm probably setting up several dozen straw men in this argument, but I think everyone has experienced some aspect of this. One girl was recently telling me that, if anything, her and her girlfriends found it strange when a guy would pursue them openly demanding a relationship - there is something so violating about that, puncturing as it does the elaborate system of millenial 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 to really believe or express those feelings for their actual female crushes.

So although I agree in spirit with Mark Harris - it's wrong to make gay jokes out of some sense that we're past the point when those jokes can still hurt - I also think that, in it's over-the-top yet utterly direct way, "I'm Fucking Ben Affleck" is a completely accurate portrayal of how modern straight men love each other - at once more vocally and more sarcastically than ever.