But as you watch the pilot of HBO’s latest creation, what strikes you about all the strenuously off-color repartee is just how striking it’s intended to be. HBO has struck gold in the past few years with programming that’s too raw for networks, and it’s clear from the first few minutes of “The Mind of the Married Man” that the new show is going to exploit the freedom from censorship that cable programming offers. That may be what’s wrong with it.

The question that the new show really raises isn’t about what married guys think about their wives, or sex, or marriage, but whether the freedom to talk dirty is always necessary to creating more authentic television drama — whether every new HBO series will feel obliged to feature “edgy” and explicit bits, whether they’re appropriate or not. “The Mind of the Married Man” may think it’s concerned with sex, but what it’s really worried about is “Sex and the City.”

There are two big problems with the show. The first is that the married man in question isn’t so exceptional; despite the jerk-off jokes, the occasional arguments about anal intercourse and the glimpses of simulated fellatio and cunnilingus that it offers, “The Mind of the Married Man” is, at heart, squeaky clean. Mickey is a familiar TV type, a nice, middle-class, almost-middle-aged guy with nice, middle-class, almost-middle-aged problems.

And indeed, as you watch the series you find yourself wondering whether this is a mind you really need to explore. Mickey doesn’t feel like changing the baby when he gets home from work. He hangs out with his work buddies at a local bar. He has a crush on his luscious new assistant, Missy (who, in his fantasies, talks dirty to him while he’s in bed with his wife, and whom he fires, briefly, in the first episode because he fantasizes about her too much). He’s happy that a column he’s written riles the mayor. He’s protective of Doug, who’s the type to lose out on big promotions, and jealous of Jake, who likes to screw new hires in the elevator. He argues with Donna about whether their sex life is spicy enough. (“We should have anal sex right now,” the beleaguered Donna snaps back. “Because I’ve got to do the dishes and put the baby to bed.”) His friends are more sketchily drawn, but they’re not all that different in their horny middle-class ambivalence: Doug likes his wife, Carol, to dress in sexy lingerie, but then worries about the bills and makes her change into something more sensible.

All of this may be tarted up with some R-rated trimmings, but it hardly matters. If “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” and, more recently, “Six Feet Under,” have felt refreshingly textured and “real,” it’s because the rawness of what they showed you was organically connected to what they’re about. The frustration of watching network TV shows about, say, lovelorn singles was that they never could show you in any meaningful detail what the singles were thinking about, which was sex and how to negotiate it; ditto for crime dramas, which were unable to show you, except by means of a kind of directorial shorthand, either the crimes themselves or, to any realistic degree, the repellent nastiness of the criminals.

It’s for that reason that the sex on “Sex and the City” and the profanity and graphic violence on “The Sopranos” felt so satisfying: Those shows took advantage of the artistic license that cable programming offered to give you, at last, the full picture.

But “The Mind of the Married Man” is ultimately about as edgy as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was. Yes, you get to see Mickey go down on Donna in the third episode (she later returns the favor, and you get to see that, too), but moments like that are gratuitous, thrown in as a freebie; they don’t really add to your understanding of who the characters are, as people, or what their inner selves really look like, any more than the carefully styled interiors of Mickey’s apartment or office do. (The show is photographed in the same reverent sepias you associate with late-middle Woody Allen films — “Alice,” say — and has a reassuringly comfy, bourgeois, righteous solidity. It’s as if the characters from “thirtysomething” had decided to sublet “The West Wing.”) If you took the discussions about rimming out of “Sex and the City,” there’d be no show left — no story to tell; if you took the arguments about buggery out of “The Mind of the Married Man,” the episodes would just be a little shorter.

You could argue, of course — and I’m sure the HBO execs do — that what makes this show special, and worth taking a look at, is that it’s the guy’s answer to “Sex and the City”: in it, we get to see, in all its explicitness, the inner workings of a guy’s sex-soaked brain. “My mind just gets filled with a lot of really weird shit,” Mickey tells the luscious Missy after he sheepishly rehires her; a full-color picture of just what that shit looks like is the whole reason Binder’s show exists.

And it’s presumably the justification for two puerile new Warner Brothers sitcoms, “Off Centre” and “Men, Women & Dogs,” that are clearly knockoffs of Binder’s new series (or, at least, inspired by the same creative impulse). One is about two former Oxford roommates sharing an apartment in lower Manhattan and looking for chicks; the other, about a group of guys who try to meet women at a dog run. (Neither gets much above the level of jokes about farts or about women who eat desserts.)

This brings you to the second big problem with the new series and its clones. For we already know what the insides of straight men’s heads look like; they’ve been ramming it down our throats for the past 3,000 years. A lot, if not most, of the crackly, edgy energy that makes “Sex and the City” so popular is that it was the first TV show to represent, in graphic detail, the “really weird shit” that was floating around women’s minds when they thought about men and sex. It’s no accident that, however much the men in this show may rattle on about sex, the two funniest scenes in “The Mind of the Married Man” belong to the women: Donna’s madcap riff about anal intercourse, and a hilariously deadpan monologue by Missy about ball-licking. However licentious the culture has gotten, there’s still something subversive about women — but not men — being explicit about sex.

As long as that remains true, the allegedly brave new world of guy’s-eye television shows doesn’t seem all that brave. Certainly not as brave as what HBO has done with its other, genuinely innovative series, whose success the new one is so desperately trying to replicate, rather than just being what it really is at heart, which is a G-rated, prime-time sitcom. In ways that its creators can’t have foreseen, “The Mind of the Married Man” ends up shedding light on the oldest male anxiety of them all: whether the other guy is better equipped. To the mind of this unmarried man, so far it looks like Carrie is much better hung than Mickey.

With sincere condolences on your loss,

L.A. Chesis
Senior Claims Coordinator

- – - – - – - – - – -

Dear Mr. Rex:

We regret to inform you that your application for benefits related to your recent blindness has been rejected by our Claims Department.

As I’m sure you are aware, your FreeWill™ Contract specifies that benefits of any kind are not payable when the Covered Party’s injuries are self-inflicted. For the same reason, the Dependent Death Benefit you inquired about in the case of the passing of your Co-insured is not payable, either.*

With sincere condolences for the recent tragic events,

Mo Ira
Assistant Claims Adjuster

*We were unable to ascertain from your letter whether the “Mrs. Rex” referred to therein was your wife or your mother; the former would be covered automatically, but not the latter.

- – - – - – - – - – -

Dear Ms. Daphne:

Please forgive our tardiness in replying to your letter of last Arbor Day. I’m afraid it was rather difficult to read.

Although your LibertyPlan™ contract does in fact cover most known varieties of arthritis, I’m sure you’ll agree that your case is a most unusual one. Indeed, careful review of The Plan will make it clear that Covered Health Costs only apply in cases where the Claimant is human. I regret to reform you that in your case, this means that Coverage ended at the moment you turned into a tree.

I am so sorry we are unable to help you. On a more personal note, may I suggest plenty of sunshine and lots of fluids?

With all good wishes for the Holidays,

C. Lotho
Administrative Assistant to Ms. Chesis

P.S. For reasons of professional ethics, we are unable to accept the kind enclosure of the fragrant homemade wreath, which we are returning herewith.

- – - – - – - – - – -

Dear Mr. Prometheus:

As Claims Coordinator here at OlympianCare™, I’ve reviewed a great many claims for cases of hepatitis and cirrhosis, but your recent claim was a first, I must say!

Unusual as it is, a condition as grave as yours would, typically, still be considered to be covered under your Unlimited LibertyPlan™. However, since you mention that the organ in question in fact grows back each day, I’m sure you’ll agree with us that no treatment is necessary, and hence that your claim is not valid.

With all best wishes,

A. Tropos

- – - – - – - – - – -

Dear Mr. Phemus (after so many years of correspondence, may I just call you “Poly”?):

I am happy to report that your application for coverage of expenses related to your recent injury as been approved by our Claims Department.

Indeed, in addition to covering the cost of the prosthetic Device you now require, as covered by your Plan, we are paying you the Benefit normally payable in cases of Total Blindness, even though you lost only one eye in the incident you mention. Hence you will receive the full 50 head of sheep instead of 25. Payment will be delivered as soon as the voucher has been processed. Does your island have General Delivery, or is there a street address?

I am afraid, however, that there is very little we can do about the slowness with which your prescription is being filled, as mentioned in your note. It is no doubt difficult to find, or manufacture, glass eyes in your size.

With all good wishes,

E.U. Tuchia
Distributions Coordinator

“The Red and the Black” follows the career of one Julien Sorel, a French peasant boy who has a sharp mind, a cute face and a talent for worming his way into the affections of powerful men and into the boudoirs of their voluptuous female relatives. In the novel’s first part, Julien manages to get away from his crude woodcutter father and insinuate his way into the affections of the local bigwig, M. de Rjnal, whose children he has been hired to tutor; for Julien, it’s a big opportunity to bury his low past, and he seizes it with an alacrity that is, typically, unalloyed with warm and/or fuzzy emotions. (“The children adored him, but he didn’t like them at all; his mind was elsewhere.”)

It goes without saying that the voluptuous and rather naive Mme. de Rjnal soon falls for the pretty young peasant, who plots his passive-aggressive seduction with the sang-froid of his idol, Napoleon, on the eve of a battle. After a good deal of furtive hand squeezing and sudden high fevers, Julien is soon happily cuckolding his benefactor, occasionally with the help of tall ladders. The first part of the book ends soon after M. de Rjnal discovers his ill fortune: Wearing little more than his gottkes, Julien flees the household as bullets whiz past him.

In the second half of the book, there’s more betrayal and erotic shenanigans. After a brief stint in a monastery, where he buzzes away with his dour companions in Latin, Julien gets the early-19th century equivalent of the ultimate temping job — as the secretary of the immensely rich Marquis de la Mole. M. de la Mole is one of the most charming characters in the 19th century French novel: an intelligent, indulgent, shrewd, fond old man whom Al Gore’s hero betrays and destroys. For Julien soon proves irresistible to the marquis’ beautiful teenage daughter, Mathilde, a moody, romantic girl who makes the Winona Ryder character in “Beetlejuice” look like Mary Poppins. Among other things, Mathilde fetishizes the legend of an ancestor of hers who was the lover of Marguerite de Navarre: After the ancestor was decapitated, Marguerite carried around the severed head, kissing it. (Later events in the novel suggest the extent to which Marguerite is not a good, um, role model for impressionable teenagers such as Mathilde.)

Naturally, Julien soon finds himself between Mathilde’s sheets, to say nothing of other of her possessions, and she gets pregnant. To his credit, her papa allows them to marry, finagling a noble name for his soon-to-be son-in-law. But at the very moment that things are looking good for the erstwhile peasant, disaster strikes: Mme. de Rjnal (remember her?) gets religion, and denounces Julien to the marquis on the eve of Julien’s marriage to Mathilde. This proves to be the dernier straw for the old man, who forbids the marriage. Julien does the only logical thing — which is to zoom off to find Mme. de Rjnal and shoot her in church. Although the wounds prove not to be fatal, Julien is tried, imprisoned and sentenced to death by guillotine. You can imagine what happens next. (See above under “Marguerite de Navarre.”)

Adultery, betrayal, necrophilia, illegitimacy, attempted murder, hypocrisy, moral vacuity, social climbing — who wouldn’t love this book? As a book critic, I’m delighted to find a candidate who can read complex and juicy classics; as a Stendhal enthusiast, I’m thrilled that Gore loves “The Red and the Black”; as an American voter, I’m relieved to find a candidate who can wrestle polysyllables to the ground. The only thing about Gore’s enthusiasm for Stendhal that worries me is how he’s going to explain it all to his wife.

But whatever I told them, and myself, I soon felt at home here, against all expectations. Here I would go to the parties attended by fair-haired boys so attenuated that their khakis and pink Oxford-cloth button-down shirts would flap about their bodies like flags as they talked about the places they came from, places familiar to each other but strange and beautiful-sounding to me, who grew up in a place that had not existed until the month before I was born. They talked about towns where their families had lived for 10 generations. I visited their houses, houses that had family cemeteries on the grounds, saw over the mantels the portraits of handsome dead soldiers wearing the uniforms of a defeated nation, understood that for the women (whom I did not desire but whose carefully tended beauty still had some effect on me) the elaborate standards for beauty and social comportment that they applied only slightly more harshly to others than to themselves were not detachable from the rest of their lives, but were, like their houses and the family names they kept passing on, the means by which they asserted who they were, what culture and history they belonged to. Here was a culture I could understand, one that had created a great romance out of a great defeat, a civilization that had been able to endure loss and real privation because it believed in its own myth of lost beauty, the possession of which, however brief and however long ago, elevated the lovely and effete vanquished far above the crass, practical victors. This was a fable I had heard before, at my grandfather’s knee, as he told me about his family, a family of delicate beauties victimized by war, by unexpected poverty, by the cynical maneuverings of more practical, less genteel relatives; and it was one I would unconsciously seek out again, here at college, in studying the Greeks, another defeated nation that clung, through misery, to the belief that she was superior to her victor. Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes / intulit agresti Latio, the Roman poet Horace wrote: “Captive Greece conquered her savage captor, and brought the arts into wild Italy.” Southern culture, I found, made sense to me.

So here I stood in this cemetery by the thick wood, staring at this boy. I had seen him before. Around campus, in classrooms, at parties, he would appear like an optical trick, or a symptom of some strange new disease of the eye, seeming to exist only at the periphery of my own field of vision, edging his way out of a lecture hall just as I entered, or unfolding himself from a narrow plastic library chair precisely at the moment I’d pass by, making my way silently through the stacks as if the thing I was looking for was a book. It was in the library that I’d see him most often, and whenever I did pass him there, only to see him leave moments later, I’d be careful to express ostentatious disappointment at not having found the volume I was supposed to have been looking for — just enough to convince anyone who might be watching that it was, after all, merely a book I wanted. I’d gesture impatiently at an imaginary space on a stack, or shake my head as if confounded by the incompetence of the staff. At the time all this took place, when I was 19 and 20 and then 21, I may have convinced myself that all this show was meant to fool other people — people who might have some sly, secret knowledge all their own (upperclassmen? faculty?) and who were sure to have guessed at the motives for my furtive movements through these many miles of books. But now I am not so sure.

What I did realize, even then, was that after a few months of these seemingly chance meetings, I’d developed an ambulatory tic. Each time I entered or left a class or dining hall, I’d suddenly slow my steps, as you would slow down a film, in order better to pinpoint the precise moment when this tall and unknown boy — whose friends were not my friends, whose dark hair always falling over one eye left me feeling choked, both elated and needy — would suddenly appear.

I knew he knew I was watching him. During the spring of my second year, there was an early evening when I was at a party in a garden charged with the surprisingly green and oniony smell of magnolia blossoms that have been crushed underfoot. Under the trees you could see duos and trios of undergraduates, their voices uneven with drink and the anticipation of sex.

From where I sat, on a bench nearly hidden among some low shrubs near an undulating serpentine wall — only one brick thick, the students who were University Guides would knowingly point out — I could focus, without being seen, on one group of three. They were two boys and a girl whose back was to me. She had on an off-white dress; blond tendrils floated from her damp pink neck. Beneath one of her creamy shoes there protruded the pointed edge of a black silk bow tie, like an unhealthy tongue under a pale upper lip. One of the boys was kneeling in mock supplication, yanking at the black tongue: Whatever the game was, it was clear that she’d won. As he bent to retrieve the tie he suddenly looked up, straight at me. Obviously it was he. His eyes were no particular color — dark without being actually brown, the color of seaweed when it’s still wet with the ocean. These eyes and my own locked so emphatically you could almost hear the click.

All of this took a few seconds, but it was enough; in the moment we looked at each other, there was a perfect complicity between us, clear as speech. Afterward he suddenly rose and, turning away from me, handed the tie back to his friend. But the gesture was slack; the fun had gone out of their play. I alone was satisfied, because I understood then that another game had just begun, and that he and I were the only ones playing.

Now, six months later, he was standing at the edge of a graveyard whose neglected headstones staggered above the October mud like crooked teeth in bad gums. It was the time of year when midterm exams were given, but no one was ever quite sure whether it was this, or the fact that during this season the rain fell so unrelentingly and the sky lost its sun, that had inspired several generations of students, but mostly freshmen, to dub these wet Shenandoah autumns “suicide weather.” Everywhere there was mud: on the elaborately patterned brick walkways that took you to the brick-and-plaster neoclassical buildings where classes were held, on the floors of dorm rooms and dining halls, caked on your shoes (Top-Siders, duck boots), licking your socks through the soles, plastering the cuffs of your pants. We first-year men thought suicide weather was a joke until halfway through that first autumn, when a sophomore in a dorm called Bonneycastle — or maybe it was the dorm next door, the one that housed the student radio station where I deejayed from six to nine in the morning — shotgunned himself after midterms. Our jokes became warier, and we worked harder.

I’d come to the graveyard on an errand that hadn’t struck me, at the time, as being macabre — an assignment given by a classics professor. He was a young but already failed man who wore his razor-pleated khakis and Harris tweed coats, with their careful decorative elbow patches, as if they could somehow armor him against the indignities of the tenure process. Young as we were, those of us who sat twice a week in his second-year Greek-prose seminar reading Socrates’ elegant and fruitless speech of self-defense already understood that this man was somehow a failure, and the knowledge occasionally made us cruel; not everything we muttered as we made our agonizing way through Plato’s “Apology” was a translation from the Greek. This man — whom I did not like then and who has since died, still fairly young, bequeathing his library to the graduate students of the university where, as it happened, I would eventually go to do my graduate work in classics, and where, with a complex emotion that my fellow students could not share, I hauled away my allotted share of books from this bequest (Drees’ Olympia, Frdnkel on Horace), no less greedy for my secret guilt — this man had challenged us to locate a tomb. It was the grave of an eminent 19th century classicist whose epitaph, we’d been told, was a line from a tragedy. We were to find the grave and copy the epitaph; then translate it. I can’t now recall whether there was a reward for doing so.

I didn’t see my classmates creeping around on this particular Saturday afternoon as I was doing, struggling with medicinal-smelling ivy that sucked at the headstones and left tiny brownish hickeys on the rock when you finally pulled it away. But then, the professor’s request had probably struck me as less odd than it might have seemed to the three other students in our intermediate Greek class. By that time I’d grown used to graves. A few years earlier I’d spent a summer scraping ivy from the headstones of my relatives in some very different cemeteries, in the vast and overcrowded Jewish graveyards that form an immense, almost pharaonic necropolis that straddles the border between Brooklyn and Queens. Mount Judah, Cypress Hills: I eventually came to know the biblical and classical provenances of these names, but until then they seemed apt enough captions. Indifferent trees and dead rock were all you could see here.

Yet in the cluttered profusion of these high, narrow stones, now addressing their bilingual eulogies to the exhaust fumes of passing cars, it was as if you could glimpse a shadow of the tenemented lives these dead had lived. As, for example, there had lived my grandfather’s sister, dead in 1923 at 26, a week (so the story went) before her wedding. There is a monument to her here, toward the back of our large family plot. Of gray granite, it takes the form of a tree trunk whose few incipient branches are cut off abruptly at the top, a couple of heads higher than a tall man stands. At eye level, in a groin formed by two sculpted branches, an oval piece of porcelain is set; onto it a photograph of this young woman had somehow been transferred. It is the same image that had hung, much enlarged, in my grandfather’s Bronx apartment, until his adolescent daughter’s protests brought it down. (“Why always pictures of the dead?” my mother would complain.) In the three-quarter pose that best advertised her famous deep-set eyes and overripe Edwardian jawline, my great-aunt, more than a decade younger in this picture than I am now as I write, looks pensive, though not unamused — as if she’d known all along what it was she’d been posing for, and hadn’t, in the end, really minded.

Already at an early age — 11, 12? — I was drawn to this grave, with its overdetermined iconography of beauty and loss, the intact porcelain and the truncated stone. Although it was always the last on the list of those we must visit each year — other, more recent griefs had priority — it was nonetheless the one I’d examine most eagerly. Slowly, with pleasure, my fingers would trace the crisp undulations of the Hebrew characters, which in contrast to that ironic and eloquent face would remain mute until the day when my grandfather hastily translated for me the rock’s brief advertisement — that this was the grave of a virgin, ha’betulah, of a girl who had died before her marriage. The stone doesn’t report what my grandfather, who carefully taught me his family’s history and its myths, later told me, many times: that the marriage was an arranged one, the bride given to her rich cousin in exchange for ship’s passages to America for the rest of her impoverished family; that the bride was tall and beautiful and the groom hunchbacked and scarred by smallpox; that after the bride’s unexpected death her younger sister was later forced to marry the same man, thereby acquitting her family’s debt to his family; that this sister would also die too young, tragically. These were messy lives; the inscription maintains a stony decorum.

Years after these visits to the cemetery, when I was a graduate student making guilty use of the books left by that other, less loved teacher, I would write a dissertation about, among other things, the figure of the “bride of death” in Greek tragedy — about girls who (like Sophocles’ Antigone, for example) die just before marriage, sacrificing themselves for their families, their cities, sometimes their honor. I can’t think, now, why I’d never made the connection before. And at the same time that I was unconsciously pursuing the figure of my dead and beautiful Jewess in pagan texts transmitted first by Alexandrian scholars and then by Greek Orthodox monks, I’d begun writing about gay culture, too, and so would spend a great deal of time looking at images of, and reading texts by and about, young people, mostly men, who had also died too soon: the beautiful dead “Greeks” of our age, Mark Doty’s latter-day Alexandrians. But clearly it was much earlier, before my taste for the classics or indeed for other men had budded — the two are intertwined in my mind, the pagan culture and the pagan acts — that I first knew the allure that clings to the histories of beauty and loss. It was here, in this overcrowded ghetto of the immigrant Jewish dead, that I first knew the pleasure in deciphering narratives, in unraveling charged and secret meanings from the sinuous scripts in which they’d been furled.

So I did not find my Greek professor’s challenge strange, that day in 1980. It was just after I found the inscription I was looking for, partly obscured by earth that had risen, like a loaf, around the base of the stone, that I saw the boy standing at the edge of this Virginia graveyard, and knew that he was waiting for me to follow.

In television series, it’s true that some famous pairings between
attractive men and women have gone unconsummated for a long time. But this
imposed celibacy (which almost always leads to wedding bells, or at least a
night of bliss) owes less to a desire to explore the phenomenon of
just-good-friendships than it does to something far more practical. Sexual
tension generated plots and maintained audience interest for everything
from “Get Smart!” to “Moonlighting” and “The X-Files.”
(When the male and female leads finally do get down to business, ratings
tend to go down, too.)

Perhaps in response to the inevitability of sex on the big and small
screens, on records and CDs, in your face and in your ear, a mini-spate of
recent movies has discovered a built-in obstacle that even Viagra can’t
cure. In last year’s “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and, even more explicitly,
last month’s “The Object of My Affection,” the male half of the leading
couple has been gay. (In the 1997 film “In and Out,” neither the guy nor
the girl realized he was gay, but oh well.)

Straight women and gay men have been forming fast friendships for years:
Both, after all, are faced with the annoying dilemma of just what to do
about men. (Or with them: A 1997 book is called “Sex Tips for
Straight Women from a Gay Man.”) Hollywood’s recent interest in these
straight girl-gay guy pairings suggests, at least superficially, that
despite our cultural obsession with sex, and “relationships,” many of us
dream secretly of an erotic demilitarized zone in which we can just relate.

What’s frustrating is that these three films don’t do their potentially
interesting subject real justice. Each, in its own way, avoids the issue,
as if sexless male-female friendships were something terribly dirty,
something we have to avert our eyes from. Perhaps that’s because all three
of these movies are crypto-fag hag stories — films about a special subset
of straight girl-gay guy friendships, those well-documented (if only
informally) relationships between gay men and women who, for whatever
reasons — some subconscious anxiety about male sexuality, presumably –
prefer to be around men who aren’t interested in them as sexual objects.

The cliché about fag hags is that they’re overweight or unattractive in
some other obvious way that betrays their subconscious desire to avoid
sex with men. But a movie about a fat girl who prefers the company of gay men,
however psychologically on-target, would be doomed from the start in
Hollywood, which is even more nervous about unattractive female leads than
it is about sex. As a result, each of these movies has made its heroine a
svelte beauty. “My Best Friend’s Wedding” asks its audience to believe
that Julia Roberts’ character was having such a hard time getting laid that
she spent all her forlorn free hours hanging out with her gay pal, played
by a just-as-improbably desexualized Rupert Everett.

But why is Julia spending so much time with Rupert? Yes, he’s outré
and sardonic and tries on funny hats in stores — everything we’ve come to
expect from gay best friends in films — but the picture fumbles its
opportunity to investigate the deeper currents in the friendships between
straight girls and gay guys, why it’s Rupert and not the straight-arrow
leading man, Dermot Mulroney, who’s obviously Julia’s real best friend. It
would have been fun to see them bonding in some grittier or more revealing
way, and not just comparing blow job techniques, say, or reading to each
other from “Sex Tips for Straight Women From a Gay Man.” What is it like
when men and women meet and connect emotionally in a territory free from
the land mines of sex and romance? “My Best Friend’s Wedding” is never going
to show us that.

“In And Out” circles around the straight girl-gay guy friendship thing
even more frenetically, by making its hero, Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline),
totally unaware of his homosexuality until halfway through the movie.
Howard’s fiancée, Emily, played by the adorable (and still underused) Joan
Cusack, didn’t mind not getting any sex during her three-year betrothal
because Howard was “smarter, more sensitive, more interesting” than all the
other guys, and because he taught her about “art, life and magic.” (Huh?
She didn’t know he was gay?) When you learn that Emily used to be 75
pounds heavier, you get a tiny whiff of the other, more interesting movie
that’s buried here — the one about fey, gay Howard the English teacher and
his intense friendship with his fat-but-pretty colleague Emily, a movie
about the things that men and women may want from each other (art, life,
magic?) when sex isn’t an issue. But even with a funny gay screenwriter
like Paul Rudnick, this is Hollywood, and the real movie here, the fag-hag
movie, gets buried under “In and Out” just as surely as the real, fat, fag
hag Emily remains buried underneath the cute, slim Joan Cusack.

But the most frustrating of these three movies, the one that raises the
most interesting interpersonal issues and then refuses to really deal with
them, is Nicholas Hytner’s “The Object of My Affection,” from a Wendy
Wasserstein script based on the 1988 novel by Stephen McCauley. “Object”
keeps promising that it’s going to break out of the old Hollywood mold and
find out what happens when the cute girl, Nina Borowksi (Jennifer Aniston),
and the cute guy, George Hanson (Paul Rudd), are never going to be more
than Just Good Friends.

But, although the movie’s characters may have their theories about
the psychological core of the straight girl-gay guy relationship (“You’re
not a threat to her, right? — that’s the attraction,” Nina’s boorish
boyfriend, Vince, patronizingly asks George), its screenwriter doesn’t seem
to get it. Soon after Nina and George meet, the telltale signs appear: They
giggle with adorable, photogenic self-consciousness while taking tango
lessons; they go on rides at amusement parks while breathlessly exposing
their flawless teeth; and they have serious talks at night while eating
expensive ice cream. In the movies, this is shorthand for Budding Romance.
It’s not long before Nina’s smashing dishes into the sink when George goes
off with another … man.

McCauley’s book — which, like its non-comic counterpart, Michael
Cunningham’s lyrical 1990 novel “A Home at the End of the World,” came out
at a time when the tantalizing new possibility of a post-nuclear,
gay-straight family hadn’t yet ossified into Benneton-ad cliché — focused
on complex people in unconventional situations. (After Nina gets pregnant
by Vince, George agrees to stand in as the child’s father.) But even though
the movie pays lip service to the book’s interest in new kinds of
relationships between independent-minded people — “We can make this up for
ourselves,” George says in the movie — Wasserstein’s adaptation, which
makes Nina the heroine, bizarrely refashions the story, willfully
re-sexualizing the dynamic by having Nina fall for George. The
Wasserstein “Object of My Affection” is, unsurprisingly perhaps, all about
a cute, funny Jewish girl whom most guys are too clueless to appreciate.

The provocative and elaborate questions raised by the gay boy-straight girl
coupling in the book end up as moot points. This “Object” becomes just
another Feminist Lite single mom comedy, in which Mom finds herself
standing alone when the boys run off to play or get laid — in short, just
another movie about guys’ inability to commit. “I want Paul,” George
responds to a besotted and increasingly bitchy Nina’s impatient “What do
you want?” He tears up guiltily as if he, rather than she, was demanding
something emotionally unreasonable.

Wasserstein just can’t imagine the new kind of emotional world McCauley’s
book tried, however breezily, to envision. That’s most obvious in the
movie’s climactic confrontation between George and Nina, which takes place
at the lavish wedding of George’s serially affianced and crudely womanizing
brother, Frank (Steve Zahn). Painfully aware of her desire for George,
overwhelmed by sexual frustration and hugely, uncomfortably pregnant
(men!), Nina waddles away from her table into a deserted room; a solicitous
George follows. “Look at this,” she says, gesticulating angrily at the
wedding, the fancy-shmancy guests, the food, the band, the Manhattan
skyline in the distance. “This is real. We’re not real.” Why not?
Because George and Nina haven’t registered at Bloomies? Because their
relationship won’t culminate in a $100-a-person catered affair and Aunt Ida
dancing the hora in a walker? If George and Nina’s dream of gay-straight
co-parenting isn’t “real,” that’s simply because Wasserstein has made it
unreal. She’s stacked the dramatic deck.

I’ll come clean here: I’m helping a straight single woman raise a child –
admittedly sans roller coasters, sans tango lessons, but also sans broken
dishes in the sink. A lot of other gay men are, too. Any time Wasserstein
wants to see what “real” looks like, she’s welcome to join us for our nightly
7 p.m. rendezvous with the potty (bring rubber gloves). Whatever its
pretensions to exploring new emotional and social territory, this version
of “Object of My Affection” just keeps backsliding into an entirely
conventional, nice-Jewish-girl, Upper West Side fantasy of what life’s
supposed to be like. (You could say the same for the way Wasserstein fobs
the lovelorn Nina off on the black cop who rescues her from a
purse-snatching: Once again, the schwartzers are left to clean up
the mess.)

Earlier in the movie, at the point when Nina has her final argument with
the horrible Vince and tells him to get lost, there’s a moment when Vince
gets belligerent with George, who has sprung to Nina’s defense. George draws
closer to Nina; Vince looks from one to the other and realizes he’s been replaced.
Finally, Vince snaps. “You homo!” he snarls, two inches from George’s face,
and things look like they’re going to get physical until Nina breaks it up.
The scene bugged me at the time, and I couldn’t think why; it wasn’t until
much later that I realized what was wrong with this picture. When straight
guys get pissed off at gay men, they don’t say “homo” — they say
faggot. (There’s something more satisfying about the consonants.)
Wasserstein’s inability to bring herself to use the N-word of gay culture
is a kind of symbol. It’s a symbol for this movie’s failure of will.
Despite its liberal trappings, “Object of My Affections,” like other
Hollywood movies about gay men and straight women, takes the conservative
way out; it prefers looking nice to being real.