"Nip/Tuck"'s Gay Paradox

afhickman

"It takes a village (to make Village People)"

I've tried watching this show a couple of times, and then something always happens to make me turn away in horror. The first time it was Matt (John Hensley's character, who is a dead ringer for Michael Jackson) beating up a transsexual. The second time it was Julian McMahon (who fits just about every one of Hollywood's gay sterotypes) beating up the gay-for-pay guy from the Richard Chamberlin story arc. Both scenes were so graphic as to make me physically ill. It reminded me of the revulsion I felt when Jared Leto beats up Christian Slater (who later turns out to be his father) in that movie I can't name ("Basil"?). Or when Jared Leto himself is nearly beaten to death in "Fight Club." Why does Hollywood insist that the only way to deal with ambivalence is to beat the crap out of somebody? "Nip/Tuck" is more than a guilty pleasure; it's quite often a hate-filled, ugly one.

Yeah, we hear that "Nip/Tuck" parodies eveybody spiel from the show a lot. Except certain groups sure come in as the target for the show's venom a lot more than others.

Women, for instance. A few episodes ago, for example, we had, on one episode alone, a psychotic woman who was biting children, a psychotic woman who kills people and stuffs them like teddy bears, and a woman who partially cannibalized her husband. Meanwhile this season, we have recurring characters of the psychotic 18 year old Eden, a vindictive slut; the sometimes psychotic AIDS survivor Gina whose funeral graphically celebrated what a slut she'd been; Kimber, slutting it up once again as a porn star (anyone sensing a trend?); the selfish, fickle Julia who played with being a lesbian but now cheats on her female partner with her husband's best friend; etc.

Any of these storylines taken alone might be funny or comically over-the-top, but mixed together (and presented as relentlessly as the show has in its last few seasons) they start to seem like real misogyny. I know camp, and camp isn't as constantly ugly as what this show's been handing us recently.

No, on the more recent seasons of Nip/Tuck, straight men are NOT presented by any means nearly as often as psychotic or objects of ridicule as much as straight women or gay men. Note on the episode mentioned above that Christian protects his son from the evil biting lady; Sean is the unwary potential victim of the evil teddy-bear murdering woman; and Sean shows disgust at the cannibalizing woman's admission.  The men here serve as either victims of psychotic women or as close to "the moral voice" as this show gets. Elsewhere this season, Sean nobly and unwittingly tries several times to protect the evil Eden despite his attraction to her; Kimber abandoins the meth-addicted Matt to run off with her porn industry Sugar Daddy, while Matt reforms with the help of a woman who's nothing short of a saint (the saint always being the misogynist's flip side of the slut); Christian wrestles with the moral decision about how to tell his son about Gina's death in a fantasy scene where the (male) toddler calls his mother a "skank;" etc.

Sean and Christian both have their own bad behaviors, but it's always tempered with various struggles with their moral compasses, usually ending up portraying them in a sympathetic light (often these struggles are caused by the crazy and conniving women in their lives). It would be nice if Nip/Tuck offered any of the female characters anywhere near this level of compassion. It doesn't. Julia, Gina, and Kimber used to be more rounded, actualized characters in seasons one and two, but those days are long gone.

Ryan Murhphy comes off like a somewhat stereotypical gay man with stereotypical notions about the gay community (what, straight people aren't looks-obsessed?) which is undoubtedly why the show sounds so completely screwed up when it comes to the subject of homosexuality. It's all too easy to dismiss the negative aspects of the show by saying it's all a parody or black comedy, but a truly intelligent mind can create lots of drama and humor without sending mixed messages. All in all, the show sounds pretty stupid, confused, and even offensive. I'm glad it didn't go so far as to suggest that sexual abuse, rape, or a bad relationship with a father "makes" people gay. Bad enough we've got homophobes spreading a lot of nonsense about the gay community, do we need dumb gay writers doing the same? The writers of the stupid soap opera Passions must have been big fans of Nip/Tuck however, as they borrowed the whole concept of the bisexual serial killer with one character, even going so far as to make him intersexed as well. It was clumsy, crude and offensive on every level. It's a shame that a gay writer/creator can't do a little better than the straight writers of a moronic soap.

I've been a fan of Nip/Tuck since I first started watching in season 3, and I've never seen the famed 'better' seasons 1 and 2. I've always said that the show isn't anti-gay or misogynistic, it's misanthropic. Ryan Murphy seems to hate everybody. I love their campy, over the top, do anything to anything attitude-for example,I loved the season finale and if that had happend on any other show I watch I'd have been pissed. But at the same time, while he makes his characters mean, selfish, vain, psychotic etc...it's not randomly so. Brent you're absolutely correct in that there is always more than just the surface. With a few exceptions for one shot characters we know the issues that lead to this behavior. Yeah, Eden is a psychotic bitch, but we're also shown what influences that. Rachel might be 'saintly' but it was earned. Gina's funeral celebrating her sluttiness ended somberly with the guy who gave her Aids speaking. 

I can certainly understand why a lot of people don't like it and can't watch it, but I'd pick it over the distasteful ladies of Wisteria lane or the really distasteful 'real' people on Survivor and indeed most reality shows these days in a heartbeat.   

 

"[Anyway, the characters on Nip/Tuck are far from the only gay people on TV these days. “If any of these [negative gay Nip/Tuck characters] were on TV fifteen or twenty years ago, we’d be having a different conversation,” GLAAD’s Romine said. “We’re in a different universe now.”]" 

I'm probably wrong... But is this really saying "It's okay to act like it's the 80's, simply because it isn't?"I don't get it. I used to like the show. But then it got waaaay too heavy for me to care. 

In it's run I'm pretty sure I can only recall a single instance of a gay character being shown in anything close to a positive light; a character who shot his "girlfriend" in the face while fulfilling a suicide pact although she couldn't pull the trigger because she loved him too much. She survived, disfigured, and he left her for another man. She later shot him after he told her he planned to commit to his boyfriend.