The Ineluctable Accrual of Time and Fantastical Experience: A Meditation on the Hills of Mulgore

I have no idea why I signed up for a 10-day trial for World of Warcraft on Friday. I would like to say that I was bored, but the truth is I'm bored all the time at my job, and I usually manage to coax my boredom (or perhaps harness it) by writing (a long email to friends and family), or reading (a novel, or the newest Taibbi), or sometimes even addicting(games.) Maybe it was because I'd had such a good work week - a great forward leap in all my many schemes had taken place. So, in much the same way that I feel good about eating sloppy and drinking nasty after a full week of Whole Foods and 24 Hour Fitness, so perhaps, after a week of such peak efficiency, I saw no reason not to delve into that wide world of personal inefficiency, video games.

Or maybe it was because I visited home last week - briefly. About a year ago, I put away my Playstation 2 and all my video games into a box, and that box was put into our new storage shack out back, which looks a little bit like a gigantic dollhouse, and so full of dust. But I was home, and I was bored, and I realized that I had never beaten the last level of "Kingdom Hearts." Like an addict discovering an unspent hypo, or perhaps more happily like a retired badman coming out of retirement for one last score, I put the fragile CD game (how long can those things last? Are they like fairies, dying away when no one's left to believe in them?) into the even more fragile PS2 (those things used to look so new and chic; now, they look like the wreckage of Manhattan in the background of the "Escape from New York" poster.)

Hooked again, I barely managed to stop myself at 2 in the morning from quitting right before an apt-to-be-hours-long final battle began. But the feeling stuck around. I don't know what that feeling is - I'm talking about why it's so fun to play video games in general, but why it's especially fun to play a gigantic fantasy game, with the bizarre set of reality-dominating rules, the steady build-up of yourself and your abilities and your outfit, and the inevitably horde of dragons.

But maybe that was going through my head, on Friday, when I pulled my desk against the wall and darkened my screen so that no passersby could see when I entered in my screen name and password.

Here's the thing: Warcraft works in a way that's somewhat different from any other game I've ever played. I'm not talking about what's specifically happening, since almost all of the specifics fade from memory almost immediately unless you're a complete mouthbreather, and even mouthbreathers who play Warcraft aren't usually monobrained enough to actually care if you kill Ramshackle Stirling of the attacking Beetlebum Castratos who reside in Tweedlepork Canyon or whoever the fuck was the chief of that tribe of weird man-beasts I killed in hour 4 of my great experiment.

No, the reason Warcraft works - at least at first, and I think also over time - is the steady accrual of spectacle and experience. When you begin, you're in a tiny little village - 4 or 5 little huts. You get sent out to fight annoying little birds and fearsome coyote things. After a little while, you kill enough coyote things to buy a new weapon. You think, "This weapon is the coolest fucking weapon ever." Using that weapon, you go after a new target: humanoid things. Along the way, you run into those birds and coyote things, and you kill them so much easier now, you can't believe they were ever a problem. The humanoid things are harder to kill, though: maybe, at one point, you get attacked by two at a time. You manage to kill them, though. Your village elder tells you: it's time to go to the next village.

You think: Well, what the hell, I get it. But the next village is bigger, and the enemies are fiercer, and slowly, you begin to get a sense for the deeper story. I'm a Minotaur-looking creature residing in a valley of Minotaur creatures - that's just about the whole world that I know now. But the whole valley keeps being attacked from all sides - dwarves to the west, goblins to the east, and I think I ran into a couple of centaurs at one point, appearing in my tiny little world like monstrous giants in Lilliput.

I can remember a similar kind of feeling in one of my favorite games ever, Final Fantasy VII. Early in the game, although for me it was many weeks in, you come upon this gigantic moat. Inside the moat, you can see a gigantic shape moving around. You go into the moat, and the shape comes towards you. You go into battle mode, and you're facing off against the largest creature you've ever seen - a gigantic sea serpent. If you're lucky, it kills your whole party in one move; if you're not lucky, you have long enough to get one hit in, which barely dents him.

Here's the thing: much later in the game, when your party has swelled, when you've gone through any number of new weapons and armor, when you've basically crisscrossed the world seven times and gone to hell and back, you may find yourself back at that little moat. And you step in there, and the shape comes towards you. And there you are again, facing the gigantic sea serpent. And if you strike first, no shit, you kill it completely. In one. And if it strikes first, it barely even dents you. The master become the pupil. The serpent become a lamb.

Here's another picture of my boy:

A Tauren Named Crogart

"Seven Days in May" and "The Bourne Ultimatum"

"The X-Files" and "The Train"

It's not fair to say that the new X-Files movie (variously described as a sequel to the first movie, a bigscreen adaptation of the TV show, and the hopeful beginning for a new franchise) is bad, because that's missing the point. It's actually the worst movie of the year, but more than that - it's one of the worst movies of any year, and joyfully so.

Follow here: the TV show ended with Mulder and Scully on the run from the FBI and the aliens and perhaps also the Flukeman. The movie begins with Scully working in a hospital run by Catholics, treating a boy named Christian for an incurable disease. Mulder has been hiding out in a house in the middle of nowhere, cutting out newspaper articles which hint at the fantastical events, and pinning them on the walls, ceiling, and floor of his study. He may be investigating these mysterious events, but that's left vague. He's called back to work for the FBI by a special agent played by Amanda Peet, an actress who's been nearly famous for almost a decade now. (Her partner is played by Xzibit, who shouldn't even keep his day job.)

The reason that he's called back - the reason why the FBI is willing to pardon him for crimes which are left vague in the movie, partially so franchise newcomers won't be confused, but also because those crimes were vague to begin with - is that one of their agents has been abducted in Virginia, and a local man claims to be having visions of said woman. That's it: some guy in Virginia says he's a telepath, and the FBI has no one to turn to but Fox Mulder. Movie, Go!

I should point out that said telepath is a former Catholic priest who's also a convicted pedophile. This is potentially interesting, but the movie obscures his crime behind a PG-13 veil of moral indignation and murky plotting. Everything about the movie is vague. In the middle of the movie, Scully and Mulder are lying in bed together - are they sleeping together, or living together, or what? Their relationship used to be predicated on will-they-or-won't-they; now, it's more like are-they-or-aren't-they, which would be an interesting tone if the creators even realized it existed.

Nothing about this fucking movie makes even shitty sense. People appear randomly in countryside that might be Virginia, in a city that might be Washington DC, and in other settings which all look like Canada. I'm not downing the fact that they shot in Vancouver - in fact, everything that's memorable with the movie has to do with the exteriors, with people walking and driving through gigantic snow drifts. You begin to wonder what could be buried under the snow, and what it might dig up.

The problem is that everything ABOUT this movie is snow. After 90 minutes, I still don't really know much more than I knew from watching the trailer. There's a character who's obviously the villain, because he's played by Leoben from "Battlestar Galactica" and is the kind of guy who hangs around pools and grins at pretty girls while holding his breath under water. Because this is "The X-Files," you're waiting to find out something cool about this guy - is he a ghost? A merman? A werewolf? A Wendigo? None of the above - not even close. The reveal is so anticlimactic as to make you doubt whether this movie actually happened.

How can I put this? No one involved in this movie understands how to write a screenplay or how to film a movie - yet, even worse, no one seems to understand what made "The X-Files" such a great show. There's not one single moment in the entire movie which comes close to capturing the magic of an episode from the show's boom years. There is a strange and utterly non sequitur moment early in the film - Mulder and Scully are back in the FBI Headquarters, and while they stand in the hallway, they notice a picture of George W. Bush. The camera lingers on him, and the theme music - not even the theme music, just the little whistle - sounds on the soundtrack. The camera moves right, and lingers on another picture - that of J. Edgar Hoover.

It's a silly moment - so ambiguous that it's not really offensive to anyone - but it reminds you that the "X-Files" was, above all, a funny show, built less on the two leads' eventual romance than on their simple exasperation with each other. Neither of them were really noble - Mulder was a closet psycho more concerned with proving aliens exist than saving people from them, and Scully was officially trying to get Mulder fired and unofficially trying to talk some sense into him. The movie buys Mulder's argument hook, line, and sinker. It's right there in the title: "I Want To Believe." That's not the theme - that's the whole entire thesis.

Belief is an interesting idea, but the way that the movie plays it is farcical. Part of belief - particularly Christian belief, and particularly Catholic belief, and this movie is so Catholic you'd think the Reformation never happened - comes from faith in something that can't be proved - "Blessed are they who believe and have not seen," the Messiah told Doubting Thomas. Well, in this movie, some random guy manages to track down bodies and limbs buried in the middle of the Virginia/Vancouver Icecap using nothing but vibes; he also cries blood, and does a few other things outside the ken of reality, also. What's not to believe in? The show was mysterious; the movie is just purposefully undefined, and by the end you're demanding a huge twist just as an explanation for why nothing makes any sense.

I was thinking about this awful movie while I watched a movie from the 1960s, "The Train," a trim little actioner by John Frankenheimer which has the distinction (according to Frankenheimer, at least) of being the last action movie filmed in Black and White. (I'm not counting "Sin City," because a) it had color, and b) I remain unconvinced that it's not just a fancy star-ridden screensaver.) "The Train" is not great. It's set towards the end of World War II, and features characters who are French and German, but everyone speaks English, especially Burt Lancaster, who doesn't even bother to affect a French accent in his leading role. The film moves slowly and deliberately - it takes awhile for the central plot to kick in, and even then, you're not totally convinced that you're not watching a B-grade heist movie with a semi-serious theme (towards the middle of the movie, one character even says, "This is the last job.")

Yet "The Train" is a movie - you get absorbed by the shots even when you're watching it on a TV screen, whereas most of the shots in "The X-Files" movie are so dull and rote and chopped together as to make you stare directly the ceiling of the movie theater. There's a weird magic to the way that Frankenheimer shoots actors - it's the black and white, it's the wide angle lenses with deep focus backgrounds, but it's also how effectively he hints at the turbulent emotions going on behind their brows.

Frankenheimer had one of the strangest careers in Hollywood history, but for about two decades there, he was making eye-popping little films with bigtime stars who were neverbetter. Frank Sinatra in "The Manchurian Candidate," Lancaster here, Rock Hudson in "Seconds," Gene Hackman in "French Connection II" - all of these roles are, in one way or another, about men trying to figure themselves out. Sinatra is brainwashed; Rock Hudson is an old man in a young man's body; Hackman is a celebrity cop who turns into a junkie; and, most subtly yet perhaps most effectively, Lancaster in "The Train" is a man who's just trying to do his awful, awful job, and somehow that job turns him into a hero.

Here's the setup - the Nazis are leaving Paris, and one Colonel wants to take the great art of France with him on the titular Train. The opening credits sequence sets the tone perfectly - soldiers arranging boxes with names like "Miro," "Picasso," "Dali," "Renoir," etc. The stakes are simple - that art is the glory of France, and it can't be taken. Not to worry - you don't have to like art to enjoy this movie, since Lancaster, as the rebel leader, definitely doesn't. (He regularly suggests blowing the train up.) The movie wanders around in its opening hour - the Nazis are trying to leave Paris, and Lancaster, as the railway inspector, is trying to delay them long enough so that the Allies can come in and bomb them all to hell.

More things happen - I don't want to go into detail, not because the movie is particularly twisty, but because the tiny aspects of plot are so essential to how this movie becomes what it becomes. More or less just by not being blown up earlier, the train with the art onboard becomes a strange kind of MacGuffin - nobody who's protecting it particularly wants to protect it, and everyone who tries to ends up dead. The person who most appreciates the art is the Nazi Colonel who's willing to kill everyone - even his own men - to keep the art for Germany.

The movie flows along organically, partially because, at the beginning, no one's role is particularly clear. Whereas all of the characters in "The X-Files" feel like mouthpieces for a particular theme, here the characters are normal people in doubly fantastic times - because of the War, which is actually getting worse the closer it gets to the end, and because of the Train, which supposedly holds the glory of France. ("Have you ever seen the paintings?" Lancaster's friend asks him, right before they go off to sacrifice themselves yet again. "When we're finished, I think we should take a look.")

The last twenty minutes of "The Train" are some of the most tense of any movie. And yet, they're desperately slow. Lancaster is hobbling - he's been shot in the movie, and in real life he suffered a knee injury while playing golf. The tension is unbearable. At the end of "The X-Files," Mulder is also hobbling from an injury or two, but I think there's one main difference. In "The Train," we see exactly where Lancaster is - he's climbing over a hillside, and there's a shot that's so wide that you have to watch it two or three times before you notice the tiny little moving Lancaster dot. We can feel every step, because we're there for every step, or at least it feels like it. In "the X-Files,' Mulder emerges from a wreck and then starts runwalking. We cut, and he's somewhere else, doing some more runwalking. At one point, he's attacked by dogs, but the film cuts away from him just as the dogs attack. We cut to inside the evil secret lair, where people hear dogs barking and run outside. There, they find a dog which appears to have two heads, and one of the heads is dead.

It's an intriguing image, but why don't we get to see Mulder fighting the dog? Well, because Mulder needs to magically appear inside at that very moment. Surprise! Christopher Nolan is good at this sort of thing, but he's the exception - and since his characters almost always have secret identities, perhaps he's the exception that proves the rule.

What I'm saying is that there's hardly any magic in any single shot of "The X-Files," and "The Train" is full of magic. Why is that? Why is it that an old slow movie with hardly any memorable characters somehow, in its final moments, turns into one of the greatest standoffs in movie history? Why is it that such a movie can be much more fine-tuned than a movie whose creators have had more than a decade to finesse the character dynamic, to figure out what stories work and what stories wouldn't?

In "The Train," characters rarely talk about anything but how much they want to survive, and the movie somehow feels filled with ideas. In "the X-Files," characters rarely talk about anything but ideas, and the movie somehow feels emptied of everything. Why is that?

"The Dark Knight"

The Dark Knight solves crime. The Dark Knight cures diseases. The Dark Knight prevents sunburn. The Dark Knight investigates Abu Ghraib. The Dark Knight turns bad mofo Staten Island men into geeksturbating incoherent sad-happy undevirginized men. The Dark Knight creates the sun, the moon, and the stars, Encolpio. The Dark Knight was one opening night, on IMAX, in capital letters, for two and a half hours, playing at six AM, for the first time ever, in CAPITAL LETTERS, because you can't say it enough. The Dark Knight fights fascism. The Dark Knight is what you talk about when you're around people you don't know and you need to talk about something. The Dark Knight makes you attractive. The Dark Knight works wonders. Wonders beyond our human ken. The Dark Knight is Christian Bale. He has three voices in the movie. One is a loud whisper, which he uses when he's wearing the mask, except for one little moment, which you only notice when you see it the second time (and yes, you have to see it the second time.) One is the douchebag billionaire voice, which when he uses you remember that he is a british fellow talking American, but it's okay, because every syllable the man named Bruce Wayne uses is so practiced (because every moment he lives he is imagining himself as someone else [because he, a character conceived by two people about 70 years ago, when his name had a hyphen, and the Great Depression was, you know, happening, just so happen to be the very image of a modern man)]. One, the final one, is the voice he uses when he is speaking to someone who knows that both of the above voices are fake - his butler Alfred, usually, and occasionally his galpal Rachel, who is his affair of the heart, who was played by Katie Holmes and is now and forever played by Maggie Gyllenhall, who is too good for this movie (her role is an awful, awfully noticeable downer in this great movie about men trying to do good and thus[ly] betraying everyone they tell themselves they love.) This is the greatest performance Christian Bale has ever had - impressive, when you consider that he also blew your mind in the preview for the new "Terminator" that played before this audio visual global event, and that he was competing with the image of Dr. Manhattan in the trailer for "Watchmen," which, unless that movie is capable of defeating this one in being the greatest ever, will be fundamentally disappointing (because the "Watchmen" trailer is, for some of us, the greatest not-the-actual-thing thing, ever, in all history, of humankind, ever.) And even more impressive, when you consider that Batman is the fifth or sixth lead in "The Dark Knight," which (we all didn't notice until we saw the movie) is a film with "Batman" not even remotely in its title.

Yes, this is a movie about Harvey Dent - played awfully by Tommy Lee Jones, and briefly by Billy Fucking Dee Williams, and now perfectly wonderfully endlessly by Aaron Eckhart - who says his own epitaph (which actually happens often in bad movies but here happens quitely in the greatest movie), "You either die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain." And it's also about Morgan Freeman, in a real role ("The Dark Knight" helps us all understand that "Wanted" is dogshit.) But wait, you're forgetting Gary Oldman, who frankly make you cry, with happiness, again, and again. And again. He's so good that you could call the movie Jim Gordon, and it would be the greatest crime sequel since French Connection II. Which it is. Except erase sequel, and crime, and underline greatest, in bold, with gold.

The Dark Knight opens up China to the west. (True.) The Dark Knight has a brief yet immortal scene in Hong Kong. The Dark Knight involves a Hong Kong controversy. Tangentially. Abstractly. It's conversation worthy. Every line in this movie is conversation worthy. There will be discussions about cadence. There will be agonizations over missed chances for The Sequel. (Spoiler alert - the Joker does not die. Spoiler alert - he will live forever.) "There Will be Blood" - and by the way, this movie is utterly that movie with superheroes. What I mean is that you feel the same way watching it. Horrified. Yet laughing, endlessly, horribly (because you're laughing at Armageddon), splendidly (because you laugh about the same jokes twice and thrice and whatever word rhymes with those two that means a billion million), and wonderfully (because this movie makes you believe in movies, and comic books films, and life after death, and fiction.)

The Dark Knight makes critics write the greatest reviews of their lifetimes. Go here. Read this. Read it out loud. Read it on the street. Read it until you memorize every word. Why haven't you seen it? What is going on in your unfortunate head? Why aren't you and I talking about The Dark Knight right now, together, you quoting your favorite line and me quoting mine (no doubt initially being words spoken by Heath Ledger, who is amazing, who is not dead, because he lives on, today, in theaters, not just everywhere but more everywhere than ever before.)

This movie solves problems. This movie examines modernity. This movie recreates situations recognizable from unenjoyable new broadcasts. This movie features news broadcasts. This movie involves Anthony Michael Hall, and Cillian Murphy, and the guy who played Zeus in "Friday." If I tell you he gives the best performance in the whole film, will you believe me? What if I tell you that he's only onscreen for maybe three minutes? And what if I tell you that that means that the same guy who played Prisoner #2 in the third Austin Powers and who voiced a role in that fucking 50 Cent shitfest game has now given the greatest role in the greatest film ever made?

The Dark Knight is it. The Dark Knight makes you cry. The Dark Knight makes you laugh. But only at dirty bad things. The Dark Knight ends perfectly. It does lots of other things perfectly, too. It can't help it. It's the greatest movie ever. Made. Conceived. Performed. Filmed. Edited. Scored (you will love the violins [I insist.]) Released. The Dark Knight is its own industry. The Dark Knight is its own country. The Dark Knight is itself. It's wonderful. It's memorable. It's a sequel. It's the "Chinatown" of superhero movies. It's the "Chinatown" of this decade. It's "Chinatown" with a Bat-cycle. It's "Chinatown." Forget it, Jake, this is Gotham City. Every movie that came before can't compare. Every movie that comes after will try to. They will all fail, and miserably. Because this is it. You can tell. Because you see it twice, and still want to see it. Again. Again. Again. Please.

"Sex and the City" - Season 3

Samantha meets a male version of herself twice in Season 3. At a nightclub, she runs into Tom Reymi, "the male Samantha," who utters the immortal line, "We know the same people, we should go to dinner, blah blah. Wanna fuck?" (Another great Tom Reymi utterance from ten seconds later - "You haven't fucked till you've fucked in the swing.") Later in the season, she meets "Sam Jones," who's not so much a cross-gender duplicate as he is a bizarro-world altar ego: young, obsessive, and virginal. Gender twisting is everywhere in season 3: Carrie briefly gets cast adrift in a subculture of pansexuality (meeting her boyfriend's ex-boyfriend, kissing Alanis Morrissette); Miranda becomes the man in her relationship with Steve, choosing when it starts and when it ends; Charlotte, meanwhile, just becomes a man, for a photo series made up entirely of women dressed up to look like men (she looks remarkably like Orlando Bloom.)

"Sex and the City" always flirted with the weird flimsiness of modern gender - recall, in the very first episode, when Carrie says she wants to have sex "like a man" - and so it's worth pondering a simple question: What is the male version of "Sex and the City?"

The question itself holds a wealth of implicit gender assumptions which the show either broke down or built up, depending on your perspective and which season we're talking about. Is "Sex and the City" really a women's show? People talk dirty and make jokes about things you aren't supposed to make jokes about. There's copius female nudity and at least two or three sex scenes per episode - in fact, all that anyone seems able to talk about is sex and, more to the point, fucking.

From Charlotte: "Don't you ever want to be just pounded hard? Like when the bed is moving all around, and it's all sweaty, your head is knocking the headboard and you feel it might blow off? Dammit, I just really want to be fucked. Just really fucked!"

How is this not a schoolboy fantasy come to life?

Sure, women are the stars, but from start to finish, this is a show about men - landing them, screwing them, figuring them out, trying to ignore them, and ultimately loving them. (That's with the noteworthy exception of the strange, flawed, short, boring, yet kind of wonderful Season 5.) In the same episode where Samantha and the world meets Tom Reymi, Carrie is struggling with her conscience - she's cheating on nice-guy Aiden with bad-guy Big. Desperate for a happy ending, she tells Samantha, "You've heard stories about affairs where people realize how great their other relationship is and end it without anyone being the wiser."

Samantha retorts, almost angry, "I don't watch 'Lifetime Television for Women.''"

If this is a "women's show," then you have to point to Quentin Tarantino as the pre-eminent "women's director" of the last decade. Sure, he became famous for two guy's guy art flicks - the all-male cast of "Reservoir Dogs," the testosterone-ridden palookas firing guns and bible verses in "Pulp Fiction" - but "Jackie Brown" is all about Pam Grier, and "Kill Bill" features a cavalcade of strong, albeit twisted, female types (Vivica A. Fox is the suburban mom making war in her kitchen; Lucy Liu is a business woman who rises to the top of the most male-dominated business in the world, the Tokyo Yakuza; Uma Thurman is the knocked-up girl burnt by her ex who seeks vengeance on his new girlfriend and ends up as a mother to his child), and "Death Proof" is basically two episodes of "Sex and the City" plus a twenty-minute car chase.

But the show did become a true cultural phenomenon for women (and an anti-phenomenon for men.) And, in some ways, I think that Season 3 is the last time you can really watch the show as itself and not as its phenomenon - in fact, there's a point in the season where the show explicitly deconstructs its own cultural impact, and I don't know if it ever fully recovers (that would be Matthew McConaughey, playing himself as no one else can, begging Carrie to let him turn her column into a movie.) The first twelve episodes of the season, from the fireman's fashion show through Charlotte's wedding in the show's 42nd installment, represent the absolute peak of the show's powers - after the wedding, the gang flees to Los Angeles, and settles in for three more seasons of diminishing returns.

Truly, this is the Golden Age of "Sex and the City" - after all, this is the beginning of Carrie's relationship with Aidan, and more importantly, the Aidan/Big duality which dominates Carrie's personality and may, in fact, essentially symbolize women's relationship to the male race. When people think about "Sex and the City," I would venture to assume that they aren't thinking about the later seasons, when everyone is in long-term relationships and everyone has health problems and Baryshnikov tries acting; nor, for that matter, are they thinking about the early seasons, when Carrie talked to the camera but almost never mentioned shoes.

All TV shows that last several seasons, especially those which can be said to change the face of television, are really radically different within themselves. Usually, they're at least three different pieces, loosely but obviously divided across the show's run. The first season of "Sopranos" is completely different from the last season of "Sopranos" - the whole visual look of the show has changed into something more noirish, half of the supporting cast is dead, Anthony Jr. is a main character, no one ever has any fun, and Tony has become the villain. "Lost" is also miles away in season 4 than where it was in season 1 - in its primary narrative and thematic concerns, in its main characters (how could the show last so long without Ben?), in the length of its seasons and the level of production design. Even "Entourage," an ode to SoCal decadence, has become radically different in scope - less about Hollywood glamour and more about Hollywood business.

Yet still, we consider a TV show to be a single work, and when we think about the show in abstract, I would argue there is some precise period in the show's history which we consider. And this is it, right here, the vague eternal moment we talk about when we talk about "Sex and the City," the exact point when the show was equally funny and serious, equally about long-term relationships and one-night stands, equally focused on the women's relationship with their men and their relationship with each other. The show was occasionally better, but it was ever quite as perfect again.

This is, after all, the season in which Carrie asks "Are We Sluts?" That question (which is also the title of that great episode) is never quite answered by Carrie, and it's rarely repeated when people talk about the show, which is ironic, since most of the columns which criticize "Sex and the City" (especially ones like this, which draw comparisons or contrasts between the show and the fall of Hillary Clinton) are basically dancing around an answer: Yes You Are.

Are they sluts? That's a loaded word - like bitch or cocktease or whore or the c-word, you can make the argument that, because there's no similar derogatory term for men, the word is patently unfair, and should not be used in reference to anyone. Several vague statistics were thrown around the talkosphere after the Sex and the City Movie came out, to the effect that, although Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte sleep with more men in the show's run than the average American female, they sleep with the exact average amount of men for a New York woman. (Which doesn't really change the question - fundamentalist preachers and investment bankers would argue that that just proves that ALL New York Women are sluts.)

This all brings us back to the question - what is the male version of the show? The usual shorthand is to point to shows about a group of male friends having and talking about sex - "Queer as Folk," "Big Shots," and most specifically, "Entourage." After all, "Entourage" is basically the great American young male wet dream - hanging out, smoking weed, playing video games on a bigscreen projector, getting bottle service in clubs, hooking up with Mandy Moore, and best of all, getting to call it all Work.

Certainly, "Entourage" has been as much an essential Los Angeles monument as "Sex" was for New York; certainly, the interplay of the four friends on that other show seems to mirror the interplay of the four friends on this one. Vince is Carrie, the head of the group and the face of the show, who's also the least interesting character played by the least talented performer; Eric is Miranda, the most realistic character with an actual job and realistic relationship troubles, played with rueful sarcasm by the most subtle and poker-faced actor; Johnny Drama is Charlotte, lovably old-fashioned and lusting for an impossible dream (fame for Drama, true love for Charlotte); Turtle is Samantha, the extreme personification of the show's already extreme treatment of its respective gender (he: chubby, stoned, freeloading, unshaven, talks like he's listened to too much hip-hop; she: thin, fashionable, independent, endlessly sexual, refusing to age past 35.)

But the comparison doesn't quite hold. "Sex and the City" focuses its eye closely on every new man who comes into each girls' life, even if it's only to explore one particular detail; the women on "Entourage" are essentially the same hot early-20s model wannabes, except for those rare occasions when they're actually models. The relationships on "Sex and the City" are all about flirtation, where most of the relationships on "Entourage" skip straight to the sex. More generally, "Sex and the City" asks big questions - about gender, about city life, about modern day America - where "Entourage" lives in a zone of blissful ignorance. You could argue that it's precisely these differences that makes it "the male Sex and the City," just as you could argue that those differences make it "The West Coast Sex and the City."

In the middle of the third season of "Sex and the City," the whole gang goes to Los Angeles. They hang out at wild parties and meet famous Hollywood actors playing themselves (Matthew McConaughey) and playing other people (Vince Vaughn as a Hollywood douche, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a Hollywood douchette). Everyone they meet is incredibly good looking. They even go to the Playboy Mansion. Is it any coincidence that this is basically sums up "Entourage?" And it is another coincidence that these are the worst two episodes of the entire series?

Still, beyond the content of the shows, I think they're drastically different in the nature of their evolution. The first season of "Entourage," and especially the second one, is all about lovable decadence - it's not really about anything, and there's never really any major tension (both season finales hint at tension - will the group be broken up? - only to break that tension after a few moments, setting everything back to right.) Oddly enough, as the show become more dramatically intensive - with the ongoing Medellin plotline, with failure for the characters - it became less interesting, as if somehow the whole genius of the show was in its pop escapist vision of a world without consequence. It evolved as a show, but the phenomenon ended.

In Season 3, "Sex and the City" takes a similar move, becoming more dramatically intensive and moving away from the relatively flighty narratives of the first season. Season 3 truly starts to test the nature of the show: Charlotte gets married, the beginning of the end for the show's sexy-singles phase; Samantha and Charlotte quarrel, briefly breaking apart the friendship circle; Samantha gets sick, the first time we've ever seen her demonstrate any real weakness and the first time she ever seems to consider the disadvantages of singlehood; and, most importantly, Carrie sleeps with Big, cheating on Aidan, at the exact moment when everything in her life seems to be perfect.

"Sex and the City" had to evolve to become a true phenomenon, because after Carrie's affair with Big, the show gained an added heft, and a whiff of danger. The glam fashion-show image that tends to be propagated by the media doesn't quite do the show justice; nor, conversely, does the sexual-anthropological-analytical concept (Sex Columnist Debates Modern Female Issues) really get to the core of why the show is a true epic narrative, and not just a fuck-of-the-week. When Carrie sleeps with Big - doing it dirty, first in an elevator, and then in the bedroom, and then lazily smoking tobacco just before the credits roll - she becomes, briefly but effectively, her own show's villain.

This plotline is the show's greatest argument for itself, and also against itself - for once, Carrie's analytical mind (the invisible narrator, the columnist whose columns we never see) is not given the last word. I suspect this is because this is one of the few times that Carrie, or anyone on the show, does something truly dangerous, and sinful, and unforgivable, and yet also touchingly human. This is the first time that Cheating will play a major role in an ongoing plot arc - and considering how little screen time is devoted to Charlotte's dalliance with a gardener and Samantha's uncomfortable top-floor bonus screw with Richard, you could make the argument that this is truly the one Cheating Plot in the show's history. With the Carrie-Aidan-Big plotline, the show didn't just nail modern gender politics - it found a way to question our own preconceptions of the show and the show's initial concept.

I know many people who can't stand Carrie. I can't decide if that's because they don't like her as a character or as a person - that is, if they can't stand her for who she is or for what she does. True, she's a whiner, and so painfully into fashion as to basically ruin her bank account, and in later seasons she's got the most utterly painful habit of talking in cutesy black talk (we get our first taste of this quirk in the season 3 finale, in an exchange with trannie hookers.) All of that is why most men hate her. But she also makes poor decisions, and dates the wrong men, and complains to them without every really solving anything. That's why most women hate her - but only as friends hate friends who do stupid things. In fact, I don't think it's wrong to say that although all the girls on the show make bad decisions often, Carrie makes the worst decisions constantly.

The thing is, Carrie is a writer. Although we never actually get a look at her column, we can extrapolate that it is largely autobiographical. Her voiceover narration often bleeds into the writing; once her book is published, Mr. Big teasingly asks for his own name; at the beginning of season 3, her affair with a politico gets an anonymous tell-all, with the awful title "To Pee or Not to Pee." So she writes about herself and her mistakes constantly, and despite the fact that the end of each show is structured as an epiphany, she essentially learns nothing. She continues to make the same mistakes, in fact, makes even worse mistakes the further she goes (the downward trend from Aidan/Big to greedy ineffectual Berger and finally to the remote Aleksander is fine evidence of that.)

We should not forget that the entirety of "Sex and the City" is set many years after the golden age of these womens' lives. They are no longer in their twenties; it is a long time since sex, or even romance, was something new and unique; their bodies are beginning to fail them, in small ways (cellulite) and in large ways (infertility.) This shines a weird ironic light on all those college girls who idolize "Sex and the City," since the characters on the show hate college girls. (There's a great episode later in the series when Samantha hosts a party for an adolescent socialite who drinks, smokes, and fucks; the result plays like a pre-satire of "Gossip Girl," except played more realistic than anything on that other glam New York show.) The essential themes of "Sex and the City" are loneliness, frustration, confusion, and awkwardness. Girl power!

This is why, beginning with season 3, the real "male version" of "Sex and the City" becomes, undoubtedly, "The Sopranos." (Preface: It's true that "Sopranos" had its share of main female characters, but the show was always focused on a man's world. Notice how, whenever a woman tries to stand against the preconceptions of the mob men and of the show itself, the male hierarchy forces her back in - Adriana gets killed, Melfi gets raped first by a man and then by the system, Carmela tries to divorce Tony but gets trapped by him at every turn. Even Angie Bonpensiero gets absorbed - in season 2, she's talking about leaving her deadbeat husband; by season 6, she's "one of the boys.")

On one level, the two shows shared a basic thematic characteristic - they were all about analysis, and specifically, a pointed analysis of modern gender roles. "The Sopranos," for most of its run, got its main power and focus from the scenes between Tony Soprano and his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi. Their ongoing dialogue put everything else on the show under microscopic examination - Tony's relationships, Tony's work, Tony's self-image, Tony's dreams. Those scenes were the gateway towards the show's dissection of modern America, and you can learn nearly everything you have to know about contemporary manhood from six and a half seasons of "The Sopranos." In season 1, Tony wonders, "What happened to Gary Cooper?" as he considers the sad state of his own medicated, manic depressive generation; by season 6, he's admitting, "I hate my son," when he considers the overstimulated, intellectually undernourished, lazy generation represented by his son.

True, Carrie only goes to see a psychiatrist once, but I would argue that, where Tony requires a a (female) psychiatrist as a medium in order to examine himself, Carrie needs only her Apple Computer. Those scenes of her, alone in her room smoking a cigarette, while Narrator-Carrie rhapsodizes on the soundtrack, serve the same function as the Dr. Melfi scenes - they take you, briefly, one step back from the show, into the MST3K-style audience, to consider, well, what it all means.

The two shows come to radically different conclusions about "what it all means," but they follow remarkable similar avenues for getting there. Both shows improved throughout their entire run, until a certain point (probably season 5 of "Sex" and season 6 of "Sopranos") where the shows became steadily more intelligent but also steadily darker, and weirder, and much less fun. Season 6 of Sopranos features an endless amount of funerals; by the end of the show, there's scarcely anyone left of the old gang. Similarly, by the end of "Sex and the City," the show has morphed completely from a show about single women to a show about women in relationships (two are even married!)

This is a natural progression, and for TV it is a decidedly modern one (nothing ever really changed in 20 years of "Gunsmoke"), but it also makes both shows far more difficult to like. Just as it's easier to enjoy "Sex" when it's all glam and one-night stands, it's easier to like "Sopranos" when it's all guns and fights and drugs. Yet the endings of "Sex" and "Sopranos" could not be more different - the modern-fairy-tale ending of Big and Carrie is miles removed from the ambiguous, bleak ending of "Sopranos" (which isn't, technically, an ending at all.)

Of course, there's an important difference between "Sopranos" and "Sex and the City," although I think it may say more about the difference between women and men than between the two shows' styles. Tony's analysis on "Sopranos" circles endlessly around his parents - first his mother's horrible emotional abuse, and then his father's even more horrible moral abuse. It's an openly Catholic notion - sins of the father, original sin, dicks dicks dicks. So much weight is given on the show to where people have come from - the interlocking family relations match the importance of "family" in the real-life and movie mob.

On "Sex," conversely, Carrie only mentions her father once. It's in season 4, when she starts working at Vogue, and reveals to a man her father's age that her dad left when she was only 5. This is thrown out at the end of season 4, and I've read at least on review that calls this as a left-field revelation, but it's not handled that way, really.

After 7 seasons of the show, it's remarkable how little we know about any of the girls and their lives before 1999. Miranda's mom dies so quickly that they didn't even hire an actress to play her; we never catch a whiff of Charlotte's or Samantha's parents (perhaps they were born at the beginning of the creation and split in two, yin and yang, slut and prom queen.) We get occasional tidbits of background - Samantha lost her virginity when she was 12, Charlotte was in Kappa Kappa Gamma and rode horses- but those tidbits merely confirm what we'd already expected.

What I'm saying is that, for these characters, for their lives in New York, their past simply doesn't matter. This is a show with its focus entirely on the present; and it is also a show with a profound understanding of its own bullshit. It is telling, I think, that Carrie decides that going to a psychiatrist is not for her after one episode, EVEN THOUGH her psychiatrist was right; comparatively, Tony Soprano spends seven years hating psychiatry, often leaving or threatening to leave (or threatening his psychiatrist), before finally pleading, when Melfi kicks him out, "We're making progress!"

So perhaps when we are talking about the show's feminine quality, we are talking about it's uniquely feminine strength - the way in which disappointments are conquered, and sins are forgiven, and cancer itself fades away over the coffee table with friends.

And so perhaps the "male version" of "Sex and the City" is a show with the exact opposite quality - uniquely male weakness - in which the sins of the past, and particularly the sins commissioned by parents upon their children, are revisited over and over again in the present, with the implication that the future will never be any better. Whereas "Sex and the City" has the quality of constantly starting over - a new column, a new man, a new chance to find love, a new apartment in the Meatpacking district, a new marriage for Charlotte, new shoes for Carrie, a new guest appearance by Miranda's Steve - this other show would have the quality of endless repetition, of fighting the same battles. Like "Sex," this show would also be essentially analytical, attempting to discover some essential "truth" (with any number of tertiary truths along the way) - but unlike on "Sex," where the women are ultimately as confused as ever, this show would focus, fetishistically, like Oedipus, on the search for that truth, and it would keep going, no matter that every new answer resulted in a hundred other questions.

And whereas "Sex" is set in the modern city - New York in the new millenium, with a truly infinite array of relationships to form and social circles to navigate - this male "Sex" would strip down its worldview to primordial society, away from the thousand distractions. A world where men can be men, where the individual reigns supreme, where everyone starts out equally and can become King. Unlike "Sex," there would be considerable eye candy - in fact, the eye candy would be the protagonists - but also unlike "Sex," there would be precious little actual Sex. Just as "Sex" evolves, in its run, from focusing on the women's relationships with men to focusing on their relationships with each other, this other would would steadily focus in on its male characters, and their fathers, and the games they play with each other.

At the very beginning of season 3, Carrie and friends stare at Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry. Someone says, "Who would've thought that an island that tiny would be big enough to hold all of our old boyfriends?"

Is "Lost" the male version of "Sex and the City?"