You Make A Beautiful Ranchhand, Pacey
by DICK CHENEY
The Affair
creators Habai Levi & Sarah Treem
Noah Solloway (a craggy Dominic West doing his usual terrible American accent) has sex with his wife on a Thursday. He is on top of her when she starts laughing. He asks what's funny? "You were making a weird face," she explains. They have three kids together, but he uses this as a reason to cheat on her with a depressed waitress named Alison Lockhart (the English actress Ruth Wilson, whose accent is better but barely passable).
I have always been kind of a Wuthering Heights guy, but the new Showtime series The Affair is entirely uninteresting until Joshua Jackson takes the stage. He plays Alison Lockhart's husband Cole, and he has kind of rapey sex with her in their driveway. Alison lost her child, and visits the grave often. It's clear she wants to be with the more English of the two men, but she can't because reasons.
Noah witnesses one of the more disturbing sexual escapades of Alison and Pacey as he is out for a scenic stroll on in the greater Montauk area of Long Island. "Cole and I had anal sex," Alison blurts out to her sister-in-law. When someone confesses one thing to you, they are nearly always hiding something more. Infidelity is only actually feasible in urban settings or beach towns; otherwise too many people see your car.
Noah masturbates in the shower while thinking of the borderline crime he has accidentally strolled upon. His wife (a gorgeous Maura Tierney) offers to join him, but since he has just ejaculated on the floor of the shower, he declines. Are you really all that surprised that Fiona Apple sings the theme for this show?
Noah and his wife are staying with her parents, and they are not all that nice to him, I guess because they think he is faking the accent? When he is out with the kids he sees Alison selling jam at a local fair and dramatic piano music starts playing. He is completely nonfunctional for the rest of the day. The Affair replays some of its scenes twice, once from the male perspective and once from the female. You only get to see Dominic West masturbate the once however.
But honestly who cares about all this, Pacey is back and he's a creepy ranchhand! I dreamed of this; I even wrote weird fan fiction where Pacey was the president of the United States and the First Lady cheated on him: it was so sad.
Even though Noah has a Macbook Air (2013 edition) and a loving family, this is still not enough for him. "I'm just bored," he whines to his wife. He has a lot of balls to cheat on her and complain about her, he should really pick one. He also tells his daughter her dress is too short, which I regard as inappropriate. The Affair feels like something that happened in the late 1990s; people are reading print books (wtf?) and no one has a Galaxy Note.
The irony of course is that Noah's wife is actually a great deal more alluring than his mistress. It is more that Noah is really tired of her parents, but that's the thing about dissatisfaction. It is incredibly contagious. The mistress actually has kind of a weird, off-putting set of lips and her shape looks like a smoothed out dumpling. "Marriage means different things to different people," Alison explains to Noah. "Not to me," he says, unaware perhaps that this makes no fucking sense at all.
It's amazing that white people have all this time to cheat on each other, or even that anyone would want to cheat on Pacey. "How many times have we had sex?" Pacey's wife asks him. "10,000?" Who would ever get bored of that smooth beard rubbing up against their thighs, except everyone Joshua Jackson has ever loved?
Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. Experience the This Recording mobile site at thisrecording.wordpress.com.
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