the gay great happening

my batman fixation is flaring up again whoops

an old (clueless) friend wanted a primer, then asked me to cast it like a Chris Nolan movie.................. so i made this silly thing

I watched all of Love, Victor because it’s Pride and I’m not a monster and because I, too, am a boy and gay and I’m from Atlanta and because I have seen the collective bits and bobs of Love, Simon what amount to something like four or five times total. (A flashbulb, that movie: like the bridge of a song — it carries you through.)

And then here is Love, Victor, Disney’s Hulu spinoff, which is very very very straight despite nominally being about a gay teenager who has moved to Atlanta and is coming to terms with his sexuality.

One wonders why the switcheroo, exactly, and one can imagine. But then even so: Its 10-episode first season is almost entirely about straight people or straight-acting charades!! Its grandest romantic gesture in the finale is saved for a straight couple, as is part of its final twist.

Good TV can’t be reduced to score-keeping, but bad TV leaves you nothing else to do. Love, Victor is written as though from a word bank: Here is the “funky best friend sidekick who everyone will pretend is ugly and annoying” and there is the “angsty sibling who we can build some B plots around” and over there are the “lines of dialogue that have the lilt of comedy but no actual punchlines,” like how characters interrupt each other in the middle of something stupid and you laugh because there’s a pause of silence.

But stick with it, I dare you. I will.

The finale stands in better as the pilot (they should have scrapped the first nine episodes) even though Michael Cimino, as the titular Victor, is mostly led too far astray by scripts that play to his worst porcelain-faced acting.

A monologue in episode nine caught me off-guard, a bit of surprise catching in my throat; and the kind of snap-ish We Are Writing Funny Dialogue thing the writers do has its intermittent appeals.

Leslie Grossman shows up for a bit in red pumps, too. Plus Natasha Rothwell, for a smidge. Ali Wong! And Bram, for a whole episode. Mason Gooding, late and so deliciously unusual in Booksmart, blossoms near the end of the season as you always expected he would. Why doesn’t he make out with any boys!!!

We must, inevitably, circle back to the straight people because that is what most of this season of TV is about. Some of them are in love! Most of them engage in hijinks, criss-crossing each other endlessly.

Sophia Bush, at one point in the finale swaddled in a soft blanket, looks up toward the door and croons in her river-pebble voice and it made me happy.

And so you might be thinking and here is a movie about a group of strippers who rob rich men. You are right! Wrong, too. Money makes everything about itself — in expanding, it collapses. Hustlers, a movie so much about how money strangles the imagination that it leaves you crying for any other kind of dream, is perhaps a little ... underlined, here and there. But then who promised any softness in the grinding gears of the economy?

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria — late of the exquisitely light-touch bruised heart dramedy The Meddler, even later of the inexhaustible Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, that look-there-just-on-the-horizon teenage rom-com — punctures you from the side just when you have been lulled to distraction. She has a card shark’s sharp shuffle: the playfully smashed atomization of editing as states of matter shift, liquefying or freezing, shatter lines spidering outward.

Stranger Things’ third season continues the conjuring of the first 17 episodes so that, by now, you’ve forgotten the spell ever had seams. It surrounds you. The magic, at heart, is not really for me — a nostalgist, decidedly un-transformist, mode of storytelling that does not let you out unless you’ve never been invited (or wanted) in in the first place. The flavors are dopey, sweet, simple and immune to criticism. Don’t you understand what they are doing? What did you expect? That we are then pinned against the memories mainstream culture imprinted on us already, 30 years ago, is the only measure of success.

To reduce the criticisms against it to it’s too devotional and derivative and self-involved and white and male and straight is to miss the point in kind. It’s not what Stranger Things leaves out but that, in the leaving, we aren’t really left with all that much.

Like I said: Not for me! But quite garrulous, spindly, with the pleasantly dawning buzz of things being knit together right in front of you. People darting to and fro. Some nice, Cronenberg-y goo, in a fun Canadian kind of import way. If that is your jam! Teens and young adults, thrills and chills. A particular moment from a particular decade, yanked from every corner so that this tiny sliver into some people’s lives is stretched to become the only thing we are allowed to see through.

Maya Hawke’s Robin, near the end, in coming out to her jockishly good-hearted co-worker, in finally revealing the emotional paucity of that lie — the charmless anxiety of stasis beneath the axioms from which The Duffer Brothers cannot liberate themselves — does at least give us some room to breathe. And she tugs Joe Keery into the second-best acting of the season, behind her own.