Fucking and punching Hank Moody

Hank Moody is always just one shag away from being Buddha. He engages with all of life’s large questions through rapid and sustained degeneration. It is in his acceptance of the inevitability of this degeneration i.e. death and the essential emptiness of life that he finds liberation. He does not seek relief from these facts through the possession of things and people or through belief in high-minded gods or ideology. He speaks without filter, he drinks without dilution, he fucks without feeling, he loves without expectation, he lives without anticipation. He seeks without the fear of rejection or loss. The way he picks up women I love. And the way he always, no matter what the consequence, speaks his mind. He is the most fearless person I know during these times. And fearlessness is very sexy. He takes nothing seriously, least of all himself. He finds company in the moment, whatever be its particular nature. He does exactly as is inwardly compelled, he gives play to all his perversions, all his habits and all his biases. He is also a revolutionary by accident. He has a militant conscience whose drums we hear beating with remarkable regularity. He does not explain himself neither does he expect life to be explained to him. He is, without resistance. It is this being based on nothing, in enjoying the free-fall without flailing for a rope that makes him attractive to people, including myself. This and the fact that he writes. Plus he is after all David beautiful Duchovny. We all want to fuck Hank Moody because we all want to be as comfortable with our own degeneration. We aspire, we dream, we plan, we do because we seek immortality. The measure of our ordinariness, the triviality of our pain, the fragility of our flesh, our sheer inconsequence is so unbearable to us that we must exceed ourselves surely, by reaching for the moon and cutting apart the earth, producing progeny, possessing all that is clenchable and more frustratingly, all that is not too. We are the tragic victims of our very own con-game.

Hank Moody writes. Most writers of fiction, write because, I believe, they are trying to tell their own story. Every significant character is a shade of his/her writer explored in different light. Writers are constantly trying to understand the fuel of their fires, the claws in their cruelties, the pain behind their protests. They write with the blood of their demons. They work hard to stay brutalised, they feed their demons, their trade requires it. Hank does this too. And why would someone develop beautiful expression if they have not previously been ignored. They punish that original pair of lazy ears through the literary loudspeaker of a published book. Listen, listen, listen they say, you bloody well listen now. I will never again be ignored. We love writers because, like them, we all want to be heard. We do so much to bring attention upon ourselves, to be counted, to exist. We all want to be told and we hope Hank will tell us like it is.

Then theres the thing about male writers. And here I am indulging gender stereotypes, may the feminists forgive me. They are more amenable to female reach, being as sensitive as they are to the tremors of every human emotion, as sympathetic to every private difficulty. I would contend that they are slightly emasculated by their choice of profession and that this is attractive, to a point. After all, a bulging brain bending over typed paper doesn't quite possess the same demonstrative masculinity of bulging arms raising 26 bricks over them. So warm yes but not wimpy please, intellectual yes but also street smart and it is this fine balance that Hank manages to steady upon at most times.

But Hank Moody is also a jerk. He hurts a lot of people. He owes allegiance to no-one and nothing - no person, no art, no philosophy, no negotiation. He makes few if any allowances for people’s expectations of him. He takes without giving and he gives without taking. Reciprocity is alien to him. He does cower into corners every once in a while to please his daughter and the woman with whom he conceived her but even by them, he can never be quite taken (case in point: season 4 last episode, I thought he'd reform after the close shave with prison, go sober and semi-celibate and family and all but hell no, he gets piss drunk and sleeps with his lawyer). He is part farce, his regrets at being an inadequate father, the self-flagellation for his excesses, his efforts at self-restraint are all part sincere and part pacifying those that demand it. We all want to also punch Hank Moody because since we like to possess, we all want him and he won’t let us have him. We are incidental to his life, amusement at the best of times, botherence at the worst.

We want to fuck and punch him, much like the title of his book.

Shards of Moodiness

Radio Show Host: What's your latest obsession?
Hank Moody: Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it's really given us is Howard Dean's aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People... they don't write anymore, they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it's just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people at a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King's English.
Radio Show Host: Yet you're part of the problem, I mean you're out there blogging with the best of them.
Hank Moody: Hence my self-loathing.

Hank Moody: So, not only are you a cadaverous lay, you also have shitty taste in movies.

Hank Moody: Alright, I wanna thank each and every one of you. Especially you, Sasha Bingham. You say you have great tits, and I most certainly concur, but that ass of yours is no slouch either.

Sasha Bingham: One you fucked my mother, my vagina pretty much sealed right up.
Hank Moody: Oh, so you're like a Barbie now.
Sasha Bingham: When it comes to you. Yeah.
Hank Moody: So you're smooth and hairless with little peachy cleft right there? I would very much like to see that someday.
Director: It's gorgeous. It's a gorgina.

Hank Moody: Oh, it's you again.
Nun: Back for another blowjob?
Hank Moody: No, no-no. Although that was very nice of you that other time, you give excellent head. For a nun.
Nun: Lifetime of service, Hank.

Hank Moody: There's no easy way to say this so I'll just say it, I met someone. It was an accident, I wasn't looking for it, it wasn't on the make, it was a perfect storm. She said one thing, I said another, next thing I knew, I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the middle of that conversation. Now there's this feeling in my gut she might be the one. She's completely nuts in a way that makes me smile, highly neurotic with a great deal of maintenance required, she is you, Karen.

Hank Moody: What the fuck do you want?
Mia Lewis: I'm late.
Hank Moody: What? That's not possible. I...I...I...I...I...I...I wore a condom. That's... that would be like, uh, the immaculate conception. And you, you're the one who... y, you... and then you left.
Mia Lewis: I'm late for school.

The sun is chirping, the birds are shining, the water is wet. Life is good, sweetheart! Life is good.

That is disgusting. That is not a possibility.
The open relationship does not exist.
It's like an oxymoron, like "jumbo shrimp" or...
So that's where you draw the line?
At open relationships?
That's thoroughly offensive to me.
The mouth-rapist who sleeps with prostitutes is offended.
No, come on. Look...
My ethical unpredictability is default proof of its hard-won vitality.
Because I'm not, like, by rote or programmatic about it.