THE OTHER GUYS

Marky Mark is so smart, he’s so vulnerable and articulate in I Heart Huckabees you can’t stand it, but why’s he have to ruin it, producing douchebag Entourage? I wonder what he and Donnie were like as kids, what fantasies articulated themselves to his punk mind, NWA or something blaring in his ears, while he wrenched the 199^th and 200^th crunch from those compliant abs in the Wahlberg’s half-finished basement. If he could see beyond drugs and ass to the big stage before him, to the lifework. He’s the male, here, unaccountably angry, floridly homophobic, incapable of communicating without sowing strife. In frustration he pulls the Sony Vaio—they’re really ramping up their placement this year, good luck with that—loose from cords and desk and dashes it against the office floor. And in the movie’s most lyrical sequence takes naïve partner Will Ferrell out drinking, an escapade rendered as a series of increasingly outrageous tableaux vivant. I hate to say it, but Hot Tub’s got some competition.

Ferrell plays a police accountant reviled by all for being “feminine”—the other cops call his Prius “a vagina,” while he speaks politeness and decorum to their absurd aggression. But busts out sometimes, in a bad-cop hissy fit and a flashback to his college career as a pimp called Gator. When MM insists he floor it in the car, Ferrell shouts “America” and promptly crashes. He’s inseparable, still, from the George W. Bush impression, or really, we see Bush through Ferrell as one iteration of the American man, which the movies this year remind us is the most pitiful, and therefore dangerous, creature on earth.

Is that very man, in his darkest soul, not a john but a pimp? Enslaver, purveyor, caretaker, vessel, bodyguard, administrator, the one who, when action occurs, and so that it may occur, stands and guards the door? Not to indulge in pleasure but to dispatch it, manage it, and scrape from its inflated surface the ooze of exchange. The pimp’s cathectic dream: let the other guys do the wanting. As if those exhaustions could be mitigated or abridged.