![]() ![]() He needs to answer it with a force that doesn’t come naturally to him at all. Even when Jesse takes him to some dark corner of the ministry to man up, BJ has to absorb an insult about his “limp” wrist and is told to “Go off, Queen.” It’s not enough for him to be hurt by his wife’s semi-infidelity. What’s more, the people around him, like Jesse and his posse, are not at all surprised that he’s been cuckolded, and he’s acutely aware of it. Judy’s weird dry-humping entanglement with her tour guitarist - “a no-sex affair,” as she describes it to her father - has fractured the marital bond between her and her husband, but there’s more to it for BJ than betrayal. The theme of dumb, destructive masculinity has been a through-line of McBride’s career since the strip-mall martial arts of his 2006 comedy The Foot Fist Way, and now it comes for BJ, a character whose manliness is called into question constantly. In a fight that’s about two men reclaiming their dignity, there’s no room for shame. Thus, a lot of male nudity is really funny, from the initial shock of a portrait-mode erection sliding into the frame to the brazen spectacle of a bloody beating that spills out into the open. At bottom, the fight really just exploits a long-standing comic rule: Male nudity is funny. And it’s entirely fitting that a Danny McBride show would be the one to pull it off, given the blunt-force vulgarity that’s carried him and his co-conspirators through shows like Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals, and now this. The other, relevant to this dual, is the scene in Sideways where Paul Giamatti sneaks into the home of a woman his friend slept with in order to retrieve his wallet, interrupts her and her husband having sex, and runs off with this gigantic, naked man chasing after him.īut these are mere throat-clearings for the aria of unsheathed wangdom in this episode, and now the possibilities are wide open. The most obvious is the naked brawl in the bathhouse in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises when Viggo Mortensen takes out two thugs who try to catch him at his most vulnerable. On film, other than the Euro-provocations with unsimulated sex that pop up regularly at festivals - hello, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn - there are a small handful of other examples. Where have we seen anything like that before? On television, there doesn’t seem to be much precedent at all for the fight between BJ and Stephen.
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