Chasing tale: The (actual) man show

Until Hank Moody came along, my television had its testicles in a vice. Every tube-viewing species seemed to have a voice what with all the spanking new shows being pumped into local cable, Net downloads, and the dibidis that Al’Hamimi, my entertainment go-to guy over at the neighborhood piracy encampment, would prod me to snap-up from his stall, but until David Duchovny breathed forlorn fellow into a televutionary gem on modern male-centrism called Californication, primetime bachelorhood seemed non-existent.

Television needed a stand-up guy, and little did we know that almost a decade after the X-Files — and his career — had disappeared mysteriously into by-order box set space, Duchovny had the balls to rise up and throw his people a much-needed bone. After a way-too-candy-coated Entourage (the Ari Gold nuggets of shameless wit and f-bombs can get old) and a machismo-stuffed meatball like The Sopranos had, respectively, died down and been offed by its producers altogether — the two shows playing their parts in unleashing the fury (and buffoonery) for guys who were looking for more sex and violence from the comfort of their couches — Hank Moody takes it all to the next level but with loads more of intelligence to keep even channel-blocking conservative Catholics considering that maybe Californication has a lot more to it than just a lot of bare booby shots and pubeage.

Hanky-Panky

You can’t separate the bachelor from what is undeniably his recreational raison d’être. What drives the single male species, of course, is the primal and utterly physical pursuit for woman, which fills Moody’s days after his ex-girlfriend Karen, who’s also mother to his precocious Wednesday Adams of a 12-year old daughter Becca, leaves him for a dry dolt named Bill. Spewing enough sardonic and utterly self-aware dialogue to keep any guy clutching his throw pillow like a tween girl witnessing a cheesy teen drama sequence, Hank Moody becomes the frat-tastic bachelor every single guy aims to be, one who has reaped the rewards of his success, being an accomplished novelist who has “man-birthed” several best-selling novels — the most current entitled God Hates us All, which, much to his chagrin, has been turned into watered-down rom-com called Crazy Little Thing Called Love — and takes to the routine of bedding most any female admirer (everyone from Starbucks baristas to pretty much any unavailable woman) he encounters as he does each cigarette he smokes: with a deep breath of bittersweet enthusiasm.

As its title connotes, the show kicks its pilot episode off with just that — Moody entering a church as atheist seeking Christ’s help for writer’s block and encounters an attractive nun who, after recommending a few requisite Hail Marys, unflinchingly offers fellatio. Maybe not the best way for the show to be picked-up in our censorship-hardy country (and why you’ll need to pay my man Al’Hamimi a visit), but before any of you decide to rip this column to shreds and cry out sacrilege, the scene is set in Hank’s subconscious, for its protagonist tends to find himself in these ludicrously erotic dream sequences just as any normal person — hot-blooded male, chiefly — does. Sure, the show does have its hefty share of higher-than-PG scenarios: Moody’s book agent becoming hard-spanking dominator to his S&M-loving secretary; Bill’s 16-year old daughter socking Moody in the face during intercourse; Moody and another woman vomiting from post-pot vertigo as they engage in the nasty — but all of this, believe it or not, is to deliver a cold shock to its audience in order to ready it for the Magnums of morality that conclude each episode.

More than a whiskey-swigging Narcissus devoid of all things good, Duchovny’s character is the product of a world that batters its men with the ideals of its romantic comedies, reverse misogyny waiting at every conversational corner, and enough TMZ footage of Britney ditching her kids to get locked on stripper poles and loaded on shooters — leaving its men to harvest disappointment from trying to thwart the stereotypes that chain them. Moody’s nihilistic nature stems from the burden of being a man in the 21st century as he takes on a few of its ironies as well, namely the painful but necessary job of writing a blog for the magazine Bill owns while struggling to get a new novel off the ground and doing his fatherly best, schooling his beloved daughter in on the complexities, and yes, insanities of male-female relationships. Indeed, there is no excuse for being a middle-aged Casanova even if you’ve, more or less, got all other priorities straight, but how can you keep your wang in your pants when the mother of your child cheats on you, making you realize that when your heart doesn’t seem to amount to anything, the twig and dingle berries between your legs become your last bastion of masculine comfort?

Moody’s Point

Indeed, the man who plays by the rules and ends up a total schmuck is hardly a new concept. Jay McInerney fanned the flames of d*ck lit when he penned Bright Lights, Big City and Model Behavior, two novels that illustrated the downward slope every guy relishes and detests when he gets the girl of his dreams who gets to dump him out-cold later on. McInerney is a master of the play-by-play accounts of men unraveling in bachelor limbo — not hell — since every liquor-fueled, per-chance lay is a stab at filling the void left by that one girl he couldn’t keep ’cause of his inadequacies. In Rick Marin’s brush-off bible CAD: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor, its protagonist’s belief that “Shallow men run deep” speaks volumes about why a man reared on respect for the opposite sex and the fruitful concept of a monogamous relationship regresses into his animalistic appetite for mating with other women after learning that the one woman he could spend the rest of his life wasn’t on the same page in the first place. More than mere coincidence, all these characters are writers, either because of their creators’ personal import or that they can invoke male sentiments effectively, rendering every half-hearted sexual encounter into delicious metaphor just so readers and viewers realize how much of a tragic hero the modern man really is. It’s the reason why, despite Don Duchovny accumulating those one-time shag notches on his bedpost, a viewer can’t be hasty in labeling him an emotionally vacant jerk. Not just yet, anyway. Not while Hank Moody’s still reliving happier times with his ex and daughter in heart-rending reveries or as he edges his way into winning the former back — a few brow-furrowing will-you-marry-mes — in-between all his meaningless romps; dreams as good as any in Los Angeles, the city built on dreams and disillusionment that Hank has begrudgingly left his native New York for.

Don’t get him wrong. Moody knows how indefensible his bed-hopping actions are to the point he becomes gleeful when he considers his daughter might be a lesbian (“I think we could all agree by and large that men are assholes — thank God, she likes the fairer sex.”), but wagging his tongue at every female whose pupils catch his is just his way of consoling a deeper yearning for the more traditional and romanticized dream: a secure and committed relationship. Bottom line is that even if, like Moody, you’ve got an all-encompassing knowledge of what women want, our tragic flaws as modern men stipulate that you just can’t give the one girl you’d actually marry and who’d take you in with all your factory defects what she really needs.

But then a series wouldn’t be a series without continuity, and despite all of Hank’s burned bridges and ho-hum hook-ups, he allows us to reinvigorate that innate male characteristic that keeps us keeping on — a little faith when you’re down and out in bachelor limbo, pushing away the women who might actually want you and laying it on thick on those who don’t. ’Til all inner demons are quelled in the show (which is highly doubtful) and the male species (ever more so), we’ll all be enjoying the Californication rays of humor and pathos emitted by our TVs and asking ourselves what McInerney, Marin, and now Moody, has asked time and again as they lay in the bleak darkness of their male lives: To be a better man, that is the question — and for whom?