ERNEST HEMINGWAY
He had a butt that looked good. She grasped the butt with her hands. He was a bit put out but not too much. This was how things went between men and women.
JACK KEROUAC
His lovely ripe pectorals were barely concealed beneath his white nightshirt, and Dean looked at me as if to say, if this is America, I’d like to see more of it.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
He had been a big man once, but now his skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark or a statue or a monument to a cause that boys see not once but whenever they want it, so it’s always the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on a July afternoon in 1863, the brigades in position behind the rail fence, the guns laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags already loosened, every year for a thousand years.
THE TERMINATOR
Large but delicately framed, with a pinprick red eye that lights up when he enters a room. He stops the party when he walks into a room (by killing the party with his mechanized weaponry), but you wonder what lurks under that steely exterior.
TOY STORY
Possessing a promising body with hard, shapely curves, Buzz dresses older than his age, but manages to pull it off.
PULP FICTION
With silky dark hair and full lips, Vincent is a Greek god. He walks and his shoes slap on the floor. His mane of lustrous black hair and his turtle neck (not turtleneck, that is something different) poke up out of a boxy suit, like a prairie dog saying hello.
FERR IS BUELLER’S DAY OFF
Ferris isn’t the hottest guy in class, but he’s definitely top five.
STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE
LUKE SKYWALKER IS IN HIS LATE TEENS, PRETTY WITHOUT KNOWING IT.
STAR WARS: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
Darth Vader could be attractive if he tried, but he has instead settled for menacing. Tall, dressed in all black with a breathing mask affixed to his face—an outfit that screams, “LEAVE ME ALONE.”
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
Lawrence is strikingly beautiful with piercing blue eyes, but hides it in large, bulky garments.
E .T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
With a lithe, lissome neck and large, expressive blue eyes, he looks damn good on a bicycle.
JAWS
Wearing nothing at all, the shark emerges from the water. We can’t help but be fixated on this toothsome vision of beauty. Our eyes are drawn first to his mouth, large and sensuous, full of even, white teeth. But then they’re drawn along his body’s sleek curves—a body that throbs with raw sensuality and hunger, like an automobile that throbs with raw sensuality and hunger.
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
Indiana Jones is in his thirties, but he’s dressed like a much younger man in a half-unbuttoned shirt and a hat that he thinks too much of. He wears glasses, but would look good without them.
THE MUPPETS
With soft, peach-fuzz skin, Kermit the Frog intrudes on the viewer’s attention not gradually but all at once. Unaware of his impact, and stronger than he knows.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
The first thing you notice about HAL 9000, a glowing red boob in space, is that he’s a glowing red boob in space.
April 4, 2018
Surprise! I’m Back, and I Atoned
I’M BACK! I KNOW I admitted to doing some lousy things to women who trusted me and looked up to me. But don’t worry. I atoned.
I did Whole30. I walked across a lake of fire. I listened to some podcasts where people did not hold back. I did sit-ups. I lived in a hut. In a hair shirt! By candlelight! For a year! Well, less than a year. And not by candlelight. Or in a hut. Or any of those other things. But for a period of literal months, I did not do something that I wanted to do. Which is an extremely long time.
So it turns out that nothing you do actually has any consequences. Have you noticed this? I always felt like if you did something really wrong you would be stopped somehow, and if no one stopped you, it couldn’t be that wrong. Like, when your computer won’t let you click on something. Ding! Not allowed! Or like a video game. “Sir, that’s a wall. You’re trying to walk through a wall.” Oh, okay. Thank you, game, for looking out for me and not letting me walk through that wall. But if the game is like, obviously, it is frowned upon to drive the wrong way down the highway and murder the women you encounter, but, you know, we have programmed it so that if you want to, you can. That doesn’t feel like it’s on me! That feels like it’s a programming failure on the game’s part.
You know how if you leave a cat alone for three days with a bag of food, the cat will figure out how much food it should eat and pace itself, but if you leave a dog alone for three days with a bag of food, the dog will just eat the entire bag of food because there is nothing there to stop them? I resemble that second thing. You want me to—not do this thing? But nothing will stop me? And afterward people will offer to clean up? That can’t be right. This feels like a setup. I am offended. I think someone owes me an apology, frankly.
And if I did do a bad thing, can’t I atone? Like in the old days. When you could go and do a series of labors and then they would be like, oh, didn’t he murder his mother? No, yeah, he totally did, but he traveled a lot and then he touched the Shrine of Athena, so, it’s, like, fine. You know? Didn’t he light his spouse on fire? Yeah, but he went
