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What’s Wrong with Being Sexy?

For the moment, I’ve abandoned Rolling in It: The Movie. It’s still there, waiting to be completed, but a new idea has hit me. Idea-wise, I work in two different ways: either I have a vague notion that I have to pound and force into something resembling a story, or I have a swarm of vague notions that all amount to a story that’s, basically, fully fleshed out. That is rarer for me, but in the cases that it has, the scripts have required the fewest number of rewrites. They just kinda pull together—no story problems, no character problems, just a lot of minor nudges.

This new idea is a swarmer.

At first, it concerned me a bit. I’m rarely known for political correctness, but at the end of the day, I want to be fair to people. If I’m going to hate them all equally, it’s hard for me to go ahead with a misogynistic, LaBute-like pile of garbage. In this case, it’s not even terribly misogynistic; it’s just a bit sexist. It doesn’t try to be, though. I don’t want to divulge its secrets because, frankly, I feel like it’s a pretty fresh take on the dying romantic-comedy genre, but I will say this: it plays with a lot of ideas involving manhood and womanhood.

Part of me thinks that, as a man, I’ll be labeled as hostile or sexist for going with this. The underlying theme, though, is that the clinical, psychological dispositions of “male” and “female” behavior are bullshit. So now I’m in trouble for being anti-intellectual, but the point is: people are people. If you want to trace back everything they do to primal urges, that’s fine; if you want to say, “Because this is how the majority of men and women behaved in a clinical study, then all men and women behave this way.” I just happen to think that’s what we in the artistic community call “a huge load.”

So to me, it’s not anti-intellectual; it looks at psychological precepts — limitations, really — on the understanding of male and female behavior and saying, “Yeah, maybe we need to dig deeper to get at some real truths.” And it’s not sexist — you have a guy being assigned labels because of the way he acts, but in the end he learns to embrace that kernel of individuality instead of rejecting it and trying to change.

But that’s just me. I’m a little concerned about what people who aren’t me will think.

And, okay, you caught me: it’s called Tranny Surprise and the title does not refer to transmissions.

Posted by Stan on July 11, 2008 11:14 PM  | Permalink | Career-Based Rambling, Creative Works! | Digg It