Dear Jesse Eisenberg: You’re not as smart as you think you are.
About a man crush.
Rewind the clocks about sixty or eighty years. First thing you notice is that men are not allowed to have man crushes on other men. Not in so many words. Men are allowed to be friends. Men are allowed to like other men. Men are allowed to like other men more than they like their wives or mothers or sisters or daughter or whatever other women might be serving to unreasonably restrict their lives.
This is before people realized that all folks is just folks. But it was also a long time after people realized that the only complete humans were men. It was in that sort of time period.
Basically, you weren’t allowed to be gay, but you were encouraged to think of men as your favorite type of people. That is the order of the universe.
What I’m trying to get at is that once upon a time, the rules were clear. Everyone knew who to shun and who to accept. You had the world explained to you at a young age, and you stuck to those rules no matter how uncomfortable everybody was.
Back then, I would have known what to do with the ambiguous emotion I feel whenever I see Jesse Eisenberg’s unattractive ironic smirk. I have a subtle fascination with the way that he stutters and his long, meaningful stares that look every bit as if he forgot what he was going to say and means to glare at you till you stop wondering.
I would have known what to do because my father would have explained to me that, what you do, is you say, “That is a fine man. Isn’t he a fine man?” And you say it loudly, so that everyone knows you are magnanimous and strong, and free of doubt in your own feelings. In this way, everyone’s machismo stays intact, and everyone goes home and demands dinner from their wives. But only after buying the fine man a drink, maybe getting him a cigar, taking him to a sauna, and making him feel as comfortable as possible, to prove that you understand what a man wants.
Which is not gay at all.
That was the way of things.
It has been so long since we short-sighted people of the western world invented this concept of machismo that we’ve forgotten what it was all about, I think. Because so many decades of insistent manliness has bred a culture of complete, incontrovertible homophobia.
This is not new news; as far as I can tell, a lot of people are aware of it. A lot of people suffer from it. And a lot of people are working through the larger issues involved, as they should do.
My problem is, how to cope with some of the slightly smaller issues that arise from this culture of homophobia?
I remember my first celebrity crush. It’s a bit embarrassing to tell you, but I’ll tell you.
It was on Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider. It was rather shallow, really, because I was only attracted to her because she was crass and assertive and strong and good at solving problems and vaguely British, and because her jubbly bits made my heart go woo.
That wasn’t the only reason I knew I was straight. I knew I was straight probably in a similar way to the way that many gay people know that they’re gay: I asked myself, “Are you straight?” and I answered, “Yes.” And that was an end of it.
As it should be for all such questions. Gay. Straight. Wobbly. It’s up to us, and only us, and that should be enough.
Perhaps I’m oversimplifying it. I’m not sure.
The trouble comes about, you see, because of a certain sort of hypnotic fascination that I experience. I find it familiar, because it’s the same fascination I found myself experiencing while watching Lara Croft steam-roll her way through her more aggressive version of Indiana Jones.
This new fascination is exactly like that, but it is a fascination that only becomes odd because I feel it while watching Jesse Eisenberg bumble and snerk around, doing…whatever that twitchy thing is that he does.
Now, to me it isn’t that much of a problem. I have just enough power of self-reflection that I don’t feel confused about how I feel.
The problem is how does this whole emotional landscape fit into the current climate of social interaction?
The basic answer is it can’t. It can’t, because if I run around saying, “Jesse Eisenberg fascinates me,” then it will be, in general, misunderstood. I might be viewed as suppressing my baser urges, or even if I’m not viewed that way I might be accused of it by people who aren’t comfortable confronting their attitudes about these things.
And I’m not saying I mind inadvertently misleading people into misunderstanding my sexual orientation. I don’t mind that. I can’t worry about that, because that’s the source of all this confusion anyway. So I just…let go of worrying about that. It’ll happen anyway, and I’ve accepted that. Sort of embraced it.
The problem I have is with the large-scale aggregate discomfort which promotes the climate where one man’s fascination with another man sends everyone spiraling into an emotional whirlwind where they don’t know what to say.
I think we’ve all experienced this, gay, straight, wobbly, and Jell-o-ed alike.
The thought at that moment goes, “Is he gay? Isn’t he? I’ll offend him either way! So I’ll say…change the subject! Ask about avocados! No! Bad idea! He’ll think I’m making a scrotum reference! Smile? No. If I smile and say nothing, he’ll think I’m making fun of him. Just…talk about happy marriages! Ach! No, wrong idea. What is this area’s current stance on gay marriage? He’ll think I’m being cocky! Aah! Poor choice of words! Can gay people read minds? Play it casual! Play it casual!”
And on, and on, and on.
There is no comfortable ground to stand on here.
I think that the only real way forward is honesty.
And I honestly would like to meet Jesse Eisenberg and take him out for drinks, just to talk to him for a while. From everything I’ve seen, I think he’s either got his mind sparking on all channels, or he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. Either way, I’m fascinated.
I shall probably have to kill him.
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