'Entourage': The Man-Love Problem
As you may have gleaned from the sudden proliferation of stories about why Entourage feels so real (hint: they go to actual restaurants frequented by the kinds of people the show lightly satirizes!) or taking deeper looks into the series' puzzling self-censorship, the show's fourth season premiere finally arrives this Sunday, just in time to provide agents running out of abusive material with fresh insults to hurl at their homosexual assistants. The NY Times reviews the upcoming episodes, in which Entourage's exploration of the homoerotic undercurrent of its characters' emotionally complex bro-on-bro love seems even more pronounced than in previous seasons:
As the season wears on, the spectacle of Ari's heartbreak over losing Vince becomes wrenching.
This relationship has been the central romance of the series. And now beautiful Vince is indifferent to Ari's agony. This season is about how men love men, and how they hate themselves for loving men, and how they worry about loving men, and how they need to stand up to men so they can love women, or stand up to women so they can love men.
This, of course, seems to provide an answer to the "But where's all the fucking?" question bedeviling the show's devotees; only when Vince and Ari confront the tension between them, no doubt rooted in a still-undramatized moment in which the agent first saw his future client in a commercial and promised to make him a superstar in exchange for the Hollywood-standard blowjob in the back row of the Sunset 5 (an actual local movie theater!), will Vince be able to enjoy a normal, HBO-quality act of sexual congress with one of his many female admirers. Perhaps this is the season we'll finally get to see a day-player whose only scripted line is an orgiastic taking of her Creator's name in vain bounce up and down on a bored Vince's knob, while his famous, puppy-dog eyes communicate that he really wishes his best buds were around to high-five him as he enjoys the ultimately empty spoils of fame.
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