Hans-Sellout

Okay last night on a whim I took myself to Wedding Crashers. It's been getting bad reviews, but I like Owen Wilson, generally disagree with reviewers, and don't want to do schoolwork so what the heck, right? I should've gotten the new Harry Potter instead, it was lame. One of those movies where the funniest parts were the ones you already saw in the trailers. Too many musical montages, one of them ending with lots of partial nudity and several sex scenes.
And okay, I believe that homosexuality is a sin, but I was uncomfortable with the way the movie represented the token homosexual character. He was socially inept, poorly dressed, artistic, and very sexually aggressive, a total weirdo with sticking-up hair. On the other hand, pretty much all the characters were cartoonishly portrayed: the crashers themselves are selfish guys seeking to deceive women into sleeping with them, the women are naive, clingy and foolish, the grandparents are crazy, the father is protective, blah blah blah. So maybe it shouldn't have bothered me that they caricatured the gay guy- it was just a shallow movie.

There was an article in the newspaper recently about an undercover operation that the police did to trap homosexuals that were trading drugs for sex. They had someone pose as a gay man on an internet dating site, and then told a guy who responded to bring drugs and meet him, and then it was really the police. The article was all about pointing out how they were targeting gays and not heterosexuals with this sting, and it wasn't fair, and how the cops were a bunch of redneck fundamentalists who arrested the guy with a lot of unnecessary force, you get their drift.
The next week, a gay guy wrote a letter to editor complaining about the way they were portraying homosexuals, like scary sexual solicitors who are all junkies. This was a little confusing, because the article actually made the guy sound like this totally innocent victim of police brutality, you know, just exercising his lifestyle choosing rights. But I think the letter-writer's point was, gay people aren't all about drugs and random hookups, why are you contributing to the stereotype?

Sort of interesting, right? I don't think stereotypes are something that are inherently wrong, I think they are built on our experiences, are useful, and that they happen no matter what. They are helpful in lots of cases. In medicine, we use assumptions to diagnose problems, for example, if someone has a temperature, they probably have an infection. That's what our experience has been. It's usually a physiologic response to bacteria or viruses. There are lots of other possible explanations, though (they just drank hot chocolate, they've been under all the covers, they think you're cute.) In the same way, if I'm in a parking lot at 2 am and I see a homeless-looking guy leering at me, I'm out of there. I'm not going to stick around and see if he's actually a cool guy who just needs to take a shower. I've never been attacked by a homeless person, but I've also had very few positive experiences with them. And more bad things happen at night.

So actually now I'm being inconsistent, because I started out by saying I didn't like the way Wedding Crashers trafficked in stereotypes. And now I'm saying that they can't be avoided and that I'm glad they protect me from drunken homeless dudes. Maybe I can separate it out, and say that I just don't like stereotypes in movies. But that's not true either, because I loved My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Well, whatever. Maybe I was just having a liberal moment. I'm hungry now. So like I said, Wedding Crashers isn't that good. Go get Harry Potter instead, but don't spoil it for me. I'm waiting till after finals and the halfway mark in Brothers K.

P.S. Here's a picture from a much better moment in Owen Wilson's career, when he did Zoolander.