#doc loves garbage

Oh my god, I don’t think I can do this because 

The feelings are running so high about the goddamn Odyssey right now, I would be calling down the curse of the gods on my head. I’m not interested in :faithfulness” and even if I was, I’m not arguing with people who think Epic is the “faithful” representation. 

Apparently other people are reevaluating this movie and come around to claiming it is good, actually? Lol. Lmao even. Say you love garbage trash that sucks like a real adult. 

You have both an INCREDIBLE memory and THIS IS YOUR THING, so I’m gonna say something off hand and you’ll be like, “Actually that was only in Virgil and even critics of the time took it to be massively out of character, it slips mostly in as a misremembered line from this translator..” and then I’ll have to be like “Well. I guess I have nothing.” ahahah

90% of what I have to say about Troy is that it got me to read the Illiad as an eighteen year old out on my own, despite my to that point total lack of interest in Classics outside of what I knew I would have to endure to get my Lit degree someday. I saw the movie and was like, “This kind of fucks, actually” in a way that I can only assume is what is happening with sales of “The Odyssey” right now. It was an open door that led me to reading stuff I thought was completely separate from my understanding of how to be a person and was the beginning of my passionate ideas about the way that we are all very similar and the choices we make are impossibly shaped by our time and place, and life is fucking complicated. I can mostly thank Troy in the way you thank the base coat of your nail polish. 

Also Eric Bana’s big, sad brown eyes.

So I am about to lose all motherfucking credibility about food, and you are right to do it. I don’t think anyone should ever trust me again. I have made my fucking mouth water in writing this because I want Taco Bell so bad, suddenly. 

And I would say so many things about myself! I would say I am a discerning taste when it comes to food, that I don’t really eat things that don’t taste good. I turn my nose up at fast food, if I am going to eat something that I don’t find to be a culinary experience, it will at the very least be healthy. I prefer to cook for myself most of the time, I’m simply better at cooking than the average mid-tier restaurant line and so places that are essentially, “Applebee’s or Olive Garden but local though*” hold no interest for me. I’m just beyond that sort of thing. 

I say all this and then Taco Bell comes through the wall as if to say, “Oh yeah, bitch?” 

I quite literally made my best friend in the whole world go pick me up fifteen dollars worth of Taco Bell (Not nearly as gluttonous as it sounds. Thanks Obama, who instituted global tariffs and fucked up the Strait of Hormuz) and she did it because I am a special birthday girl and there is nothing I love more than, two or three times a year, pounding back an entire bag of cheap fats and carbohydrates that vaguely invoke the name Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, in a way that is nearly an insult by way of homage. 

I have perfectly replicated Taco Bells sloppy-ass ground beef with TVP, and I think it actually might taste more like a beef product than whatever they hell they are practically piping into these shells like some kind of granulated meat frosting. It’s salt packed into a crispy taco shell. I’m not actually even sure it’s ever crispy, the bottom of each taco is like some tortured fault line in a 70s disaster movie, begging to rend themselves like garments of the mourning. 

Look at this. Look at this “Cripsy Chicken cantina Taco” Here it is on the menu. Beautiful, browned, crisp, nearly glowing with health. Here is what was delivered to me by said best friend in what would rightly be considered a form of violence but was in fact the exact thing I asked for: 

Look at that. The word crisp should come nowhere near that. Soggy shells bound together by plastized cheese over tiny bits of chicken, all gently swirled in a kind of cilantro-avocado soup. 

I ate every last bit of it. Consumed it like Saturn devouring his children, the green blood of it dripping down my chin. 

And it doesn’t even have the long-held excuse of being cheap! It wasn’t cheap at all! I bought two crispy tacos (tiny, line of meat, mostly salt), one crispy chicken cantina taco (donde esta la cantina all I see is a green-tinged mess), and a chalupa supreme (Add chipotle sauce and jalapeno, sub chicken, girl it’s wrapped in a deep fried piece of bread who are you even kidding) and it was FIFTEEN AMERICAN DOLLARS and THIRTY FIVE CENTS. 

You know what I could have done? Went to the store, bought 2 pounds of chicken thigh (4.98), a box of hard shells (2.29), shredded cheese (2.99), shredded lettuce (1.99), two taco seasoning packets (2.00), and SIMPLY STOLEN THE SAUCES FROM THE LOBBY. I would be out ahead and have leftovers, even. If I really wanted to splash out and make my total 17.24 I could also get the gordita shells to deep fry. It would be better, cheaper, and probably healthier. 

I won’t do that. I will never do that, because Taco Bell awakens something low and animal in me, something that can’t be replicated by actual food you can purchase in the store with nutritional value. I don’t like who I become next to Taco Bell, but as the moon must monthly change in her circled orb, I come back to it again and again. 

I ate like eight soft tacos at @rosepetalrevolution’s wedding and smuggled more out in my purse. 

So I need to start all this by noting that the first fanfiction I ever wrote was about Top Gun. 

It’s true that I really cut my teeth on writing A LOT of Pippin x Merry (lore drops abound today), but my very first fanfiction, assuming we don’t count “My OC daughter of Doc Holliday” was a written in one of my journals as a kid, and it was Maverick x Iceman. I stand by that, by the way. It is far and away the most compelling sexual thing happening in the entire movie. 

But I tell you this so you know where I’m coming from when I say I fucking love this movie. I have streamed this movie for people multiple times. I have seen it in theatrical rereleases. I could probably recite certain parts of the movie. I went as Iceman one year for Halloween. 

And it sucks, guys. It sucks so bad. 

You would think this would be about Top Gun: Maverick, but you would be wrong. Top Gun: Maverick was just bad, and not at all compelling and also--I can’t believe I’m complaining about this--didn’t hold together the aspects of the character that they seemed so invested in keeping. Maverick didn’t grow as a person at all from the original Top Gun, and it cost him exactly nothing. He’s sitting there going #myrut and the movie treats this like we’ve just been putting him in bubble wrap for twenty-odd years. ANYWAY, this isn’t about my feelings on Top Gun: Maverick, it’s about how much the original Top Gun sucks ass and I adore it. 

I do love when people say Top Gun is military propaganda like A) I’m supposed to be surprised by that, I did not roll out of a cabbage leaf this morning B) gaddman near every movie made in the  1980s wasn’t some weird one-sided chess game about the cold war. The central thesis of Top Gun is, “Dogfighting is cool as hell,” and I do not for even one moment believe that the writers had a single solitary thought beyond that. The entire thing is a flimsy framework to gawk at how cool military planes are and how intensely demanding the Top Gun competition is. This is basically the State Alchemy exam, but it’s fighter planes though. 

And for once I do not actually think we can blame this on Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is a complete fucking weirdo in real life and I have no desire to be around him, but I’ve seen him act at least twice (Born on the Fourth of July, Magnolia) so I know that he is capable of it. I’ve seen Val Kilmer act well multiple times. I defy anyone to download the script of Top Gun, and read those sentences like a human being might be saying them. The fact that Cruise and Kilmer are both hyper-intense weirdos actually almost bends the fucking script back to working, because instead of being like, “Has anyone who wrote this movie ever heard another human being talk?” you think, “Oh, Top Gun is only for Certified Unwell” and it kind of works out. 

This movie mostly exists to tap into the common fantasy of, “If I am talented enough, I can get away with anything,” that long-held dream that sailed one thousand ships more than Helen ever dreamed. Maverick is so good he can skirt military policy to the point of any reasonable person eyerolling into the sun. He would have been brought up on charges so fast he wouldn’t even have time to get his helmet off. But he is the Special Boy, and so we have to believe that he can do a flyby and not be grounded immediately because there are nebulous Russians in the air (This aspect of the film is made much worse in noted piece of shit that isn’t even entertaining, Top Gun: Maverick) 

Possibly one of the most fascinating and terrible aspects of this movie is the ‘’’’’romance””” between Charlie and Maverick. They should study in a lab how you can possibly have so little chemistry between two leads and still manage to put an actual movie into theaters. When I saw this in our historic theater as one of their reopening celebration movies, it was great. It was an electric evening, everyone sung along to “That Loving Feeling”, we all cheered at “Danger Zone” but this was the moment that made the entire theater laugh.

. Don’t worry, none of us were thinking that.  I mean this scene is a much more sexually charged moment than literally any time the two of you are on screen together.

Basically the redeeming factor of this entire movie is the relationship between Goose and Maverick, which to this day I will go down maintaining is actually fantastic and one of the better relationships in any 80s movie, AND, it is the emotional linchpin for Maverick. Goose’s death changes everything for him and is the source of the major change we see within him by the end of the movie. (Immediately all undone by Top Gun: Maverick, a movie that sucks and is not compelling) Maverick is the stereotypical ‘lone wolf’ except for the fact that his best friend has folded him into his family and his wife and kid love Maverick too. It’s a shockingly sweet and healthy thing that comes out of fucking nowhere in the steel-dicked masculinity of the entire movie. 

Does it save the movie? Well, in a word, no. You would have to do a lot in order to save this movie, and at the end of it, it would be a thing so changed that it would no longer be recognizable. So we’re left just dealing with the absolute trash pile that is Top Gun, whose existence is mostly justified by one of the most absolutely asskicking soundtracks of the 80s and some real fucking cool dogfighting that make you desperately attempt not to look to much at the story and by god avoiding listening to the dialogue. It is a place of great despair for anyone looking for even the slightest verisimilitude in human interaction.

Back in my day, HBO was the hub for prestige television and I think there's an argument to be made that they really pushed the concept that TV could be art in the same way film could be art, in ways that those of us watching television shows made for syndication in the 90s couldn’t really have conceived of. There’s a reason I call my desired adaptation, Sailor Moon: An HBO Original Series. We got legendary shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire. It was a shorthand for a show with complex arcs, detailed character work, and excellent acting. 

Okay but like, imagine that’s an overwrought soap opera. And imagine I rewatch it once every three years or so despite having shows of much higher quality on offer. 

There is no defense of Big Love that can rise above, “A pretty well-written soap opera.” It’s about three women all married to one man who used to belong to a polygamist compound, but is still practicing polygamy. One is a standard issue Molly Mormon in her 40s, one is a former resident of the compound in her 30s, and one is a nonreligious and sort of flighty former employee in her 20s. All of them have to figure out how to get on with each other as sisterwives while also navigating the fact that they want to fuck Bill Paxton all day every day.

This is a major point of contention within the show, this and who works and who stays home, and sometimes grocery shopping. You would think this would be enough drama to sustain any kind of show. As someone who lives in a close-knit, incredibly entangled family, planning a vacation should be enough to last an entire season.

You would be wrong. 

It’s not even a question of, “Did the show go on too long?” that plagues so many television shows, no, nay, even, we’re engaging in attempted murder and extortion in season one. It is a show that immediately engages in the highest levels of “would you get a load of this shit” and mainly exists as a way of gawking at people whose lives are lived differently from your own. It’s sensationalist even while it tries to remain grounded, immediately abandoning the low-level dramas of three women from vastly different backgrounds trying to share a home and a husband for, “The heir apparent son of the current prophet is hiding a gay lifestyle.” There is a whole storyline where a man gets branded by another polygamist sect. 

“Should we slow down?” The show thinks to itself, briefly, “we’re only in our second season. It’s not even the season finale.” 

No, fuck you, shoot the prophet in the street. 

As you might imagine it does not take much time for this show to have nowhere to go, and so by the time we come around to season four, we’re indulging in Bill’s political career in DC when we could be arguing about whether or not we buy the bagged cereal instead of the boxes. Barb tries to run a casino on tribal land and is forced to lead a sensitivity training that culminates in this.

The fourth season is such a turkey that it SINGLEHANDEDLY pulls the average critic's rating out of the 90s. "Doc does that mean you skip it in your rewatches?" Oh no, I watch it every single time. I watch it even as I start screaming at the screen "What the fuck is even happening here?" One of the wives marries another man on paper to keep him in the country--a man who is the fiancee of the proposed fourth wife of Bill, it didn't work out but she got pregnant with Bill's baby and so they don't want her to go back to Serbia. I started laughing as I wrote that out. No one should take my taste in media seriously.

Okay and yet, for it--Big Love is probably the reason I was notably more fine with polyamory than your average farm fag as a youth. The show does such a good job of showing all four of them as humans in a relationship style that is absolutely the fuck not for me, but even while it showed the incredible struggles of it, it showed the benefits of it, too. It never shows them as freaks, and in fact is extremely humanizing. It felt a young me with the impression of, "Sure, whatever, leave it alone" which is a ringing endorsement in my land.

And no matter how much someone sucks in the show, the show will manage to eventually make you feel for them. I have watched this show all the way through multiple times and I always feel actively ragebaited by the fact that it can make me come around on every single character. One of the wives ends up with 60k in credit card debt that she hides from her family and by the end of the season you almost start crying because she wears a normal dress to help out another one of her sisterwives. All of this sounds ludicrous, because it is ludicrous and I would never actually defend this television in a court of law, but you know what it is? I’ll tell you what it is.