I decided to hide out last night and get my Friday night dose of testosterone from Netflix.  Last couple of weekends I'd gotten it straight from the spigot, but it's a lot of work going to the source for it.  Jake was having his girlie over, so the fireplace and bearskin rug was booked anyway.  So I picked up a six-pack, popped some popcorn, turn the bed to vibrate, and streamed Spartacus: Blood and Sand, the Starz series that picks up where 300 left off, gaywise, if not abswise. 

What I mean, of course, is that  Spartacus tries so achingly hard not to be gay, that it becomes gayer than anything gays themselves could ever dream up.  It's like using too much antibiotic hand sanitizer — you eventually end up with a super-mega-bug that is utterly resistant.  Spartacus is super-mega-gay.   They have toned down the abs a bit, though.

Aesthetically, there is no attempt at visual realism, which is somehow refreshing, given how ridiculous every line that is uttered is.  Its chick-flick corny moments look chick-flick corny...


Its Playgirl porny moments look Playgirl porny...


And when it's bloody, it's bloody damn bloody...


This is video-game violence.  It alludes to actual violence in the opposite way old-school film violence did.  That is to say, it's so vehemently overstated it becomes abstract, and like everything else in Spartacus, sheer spectacle.  If the character getting thwacked above (redonkulously hunky Andy Whitfield in the title role) had actually lost that much blood, he could not have gotten up and made minced meat out of, like, seven more seasoned gladiators afterward.  Oops.  Sorry.  Spoiler alert.

The first episode is alternately tedious (the "I'm not gay! I'm not gay!!" chick flicky bits) and titillating (the blood-as-semen-substitute gay-as-shit meat-markety bits).  We owe this formula to James Cameron, who's two mega blockbusters Titanic and Avatar blended When Hairy Met Sally and Die Hard into one big swirly Hollywood hot mess.  Now every epic is hermaphroditic.  It has to have girlie bits and boy-y bits both.

The overarching theme here is: how can faithful Sparty get his woman back after she's stolen away from their nuptial bed and they're both pressed into slavery by the sniveling Romans...


Throw in a little Passion of the Christ — but this time Christ fights back! — and you have a... just really weird big gay-not-gay spectacle of bloody beef- and cheesecake. 

As I watched the big, butch, Jesussy Spartacus getting his ass whupped, and then turning the tables on his persecutors...


... I thought, wow, well there's a twist that'll appeal to those wacky evangelicals, eh?  Kind of "my Jesus is bigger than your Jesus!" — "Well, my Jesus can kick your Jesus's ass any day!"  But then I saw that in future episodes Whitfield is clean-shaven with a crew cut (easier to clean all that blood out of your hair), and everybody knows that had Jesus lived he would not have gone around like that. 

So, I decided: can the social commentary.  This is the very definition of "hot mess."

The other movie on my list last night was Tyson, which was surprisingly compelling, given that it's about, as the title suggests, former on-again-off-again heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson, who is just a mess, period.


Tyson is basically Tyson telling his story.  He starts out lucid but his narrative unravels pretty quick once he's underway.  In fact, this is what's sort of fascinating about peering inside the mind of Mike Tyson.  That tangled inner logic — the little boy weakness and confusion the heavyweight champ still carries around. 

Tyson was bullied as a boy, and got into boxing because of it.  But he candidly describes the fear he felt before every fight, and his transformation into "a god" in the ring.  There is something still bewildered about him, as if those two personae — the scrawny kid who liked nice clothes and jewelry and got bullied all through school, and the naked animal who destroyed other men in the ring — have never really been reconciled.  In fact, most of his troubles in and out of the ring could be attributed to one of those personae showing up on the other's territory at the wrong time.

These odd juxtapositions were captured in a scene where Tyson reacts to a heckler who's shouted "Get him a straight jacket!" with a bizarre stream of invective...

Put your mother in a straight jacket, you punk ass white boy. Come here and tell me that ‘fo I fuck you in your ass, you punk white boy, you faggot. You can’t touch me. You not man enough. I eat your asshole alive, you bitch. Fuck you, you ho. Come and say it to my face. I fuck your ass in front of everybody. You bitch. Come on you bitch. You scared coward. You not man enough to fuck with me. You can’t last two minutes in my world, bitch. Look at you.  You scared now, you ho. Scared like a little white pussy. Scared of the real man. I’ll fuck you till you love me, faggot.

"I'll fuck you till you love me"?  And who's he calling the faggot?

It's kinda hot, I have to admit, but weird. 

But maybe that's just where heterosexuality is at this cultural moment.