Man Talk

During a discussion this afternoon, Devon and I explored the phenomenon of the junior high heartthrobs. Dev talked about her favorite episodes of Dr. Quinn featuring that pouty-lipped fellow dressed in suede (see her blog for an illustration), and a couple other film characters she had a crush on during the junior high years. It reminded me a great deal of Marcie's young crush on Charlie Sheen's character in Courage Mountain, which she relived when she forced the whole college gang to watch it with her. It was painful, but at least we were able to riff on the movie, which made the bad acting a little more tolerable. (Sorry, Marcie love, but it was pretty corny)

This got me thinking: where were my adolescent crushes? I racked my brain all evening, trying to remember any scenes from movies that I dreamed about during the lonely, awkward years of junior high, and I've come up with only a few fragments, none of them substantial. I guess I was just a late bloomer in the teenage crush department, although it certainly wasn't due to a lack of education. My brother and I both received our first major sexuality-according-to-Hollywood lesson from the old James Bond movies with Sean Connery; we became fans of the movies while still in grade school. Mom and Dad often worried that we were too influenced by the Bond-style approach to relations with the opposite sex: fast, hyper-sexualized, and often ending with the bodies of beautiful women dotting the landscape like blown roses. Luckily, neither of us seem too damaged by this early influence.

I didn't really have any crushes on movie stars back then, I guess. The first time I thought a movie star was truly attractive was when I saw Kevin Spacey's performance in The Usual Suspects. Perhaps my lack of proper training in the discernment of male beauty during those crucial formative years has come back to haunt me, because my current concept of attractive men strikes most of my friends as odd at least, and at most downright bizarre. A study of my current crushes a few months ago led me to sum it up for my friend Emily in the following way: "I like them tall, dark, and eccentric." A rough (and incomplete) list of my favorite film characters will help to illustrate my point:

The Usual Suspects' Verbal Kint/Kaiser Soze (Kevin Spacey)
Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester (Timothy Dalton)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' title character (Basil Rathbone / Jeremy Brett)
Pride and Prejudice's Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth)
Rebecca's Maxim de Winter (Sir Laurence Olivier)
Cyrano de Bergerac's title character (Gerard Depardieu)
Oedipus the King's Oedipus (Christopher Plummer)

Well, what does this say about me? Heaven knows. Maybe I just have unconventional taste. If you find it disturbing, just go the route my parents did and blame James Bond. You'll feel better afterward.