In Which We Wanted To Hold On To The Feeling

Be My Husband

by DICK CHENEY

Outlander
creator Ronald D. Moore

This weekend's premiere of Outlander was the most fun I have had in years. Claire (Caitriona Balfe) returned from her time in Scotland during the mid-18th century and she was cranky as hell. The noise of airplanes and cars was absolutely disgusting to her, and she was astonished by the fashions of the 1948 season. After showing up in the middle of the street, she screamed at a passerby in order to find out who won World War II. Perhaps not surprisingly, she was left unsatisfied by the answer.

It got better from here. The husband she left behind in 1743 had a big penis (shockingly large IIRC) and impregnated her. So she tells her 1948 husband this, and at first he is all happy. Then you see his visage crumple as he realizes a number of key things: (1) he is sterile and (2) he is not the father of this child. His next move was most amusing: he balled up his fist like he was going to smash Claire's face in and looms over her. He backed off, but what a moment! I love this show.

It got better from here. Frank, her 1948 husband who is this douchy professor apparently prone to striking pregnant women heads into this old workshop that his buddy, a Scottish priest, has handy, and he's so angry that he smashes the entire place up. God Outlander is incredible; he was like this deranged guy feebly smashing boxes, and it went on for what felt like five whole minutes of just agony because his wife hadn't recovered from her ordeal in the few days he gave her to recuperate and acknowledge he was the most important individual in the world to her.

He gets with God and then returns to his wife for more tawking. It's obvious that she no longer cares for him. He tells her that he can give her time, but that they have to pretend the child is his. She agrees, and he burns all her old clothes. He asks her to move to Boston and she says yes to that too.

At that moment I knew this whole thing was bullshit or some kind of setup because a woman would never agree to move to Boston unless she had no other option. It got better from here. The setting shifts to France in the 1740s. Claire and her fertile ginger husband Jamie observe a man with smallpox coming in on a ship. Claire loudly shouts that she is a healer even though the man is already dead. They end up burning the entire vessel and its cargo, even though that seemed maybe somewhat excessive for one case of smallpox.

Claire is from the future, but unfortunately she knows very little about how to aid Jamie. She wants to prevent his people from being wiped out by the British, but she maybe glanced at a history textbook once ten years ago and forgot the rest. This is all well and good, but she could have aimed higher and stopped the Holocaust or the First World War. If you start actually thinking about this show it will make your head hurt.

There's actually a lot wrong with Outlander – the performances are not the best, and the soft lens they shoot everything with makes it look like Skinemax. But who cares, the B-movie feel to the proceedings just adds a certain flair missed from other dramas. The reason Outlander is so fucking great is because it does not shy away from going hard, verging on completely silly and overwrought. Most people would say a scene where a grown man flails about like a five year old just isn't realistic, but that is the brilliance of this entire endeavor. Outlander remains unafraid.

The world is likely flush with time travelers at this very moment. Most of them are trying to prevent Trump from becoming president; a select few were sent back to blackmail the press into giving Batman v. Superman bad reviews. This was a brilliant movie with a lot of subtext, and if you did not see it, at least google the scene where Superman slips it in Lois Lane (Amy Adams) while she's in the tub. I haven't been that turned on since I watched two lawyers who work for Paul Giamatti have really intense sex on Billions.

Someone once asked me whether or not all the things I write in my reviews are things I really believe, or if I am just exaggerating for pageviews. Hah hah. I am always serious unless I am talking about how Shonda Rimes' characters all talk and fuck the same. Then I am slightly tongue-in-cheek, but then again that is annoying. Especially the latter.

Outlander is my jam, but come April 24th I will be returning with my Game of Thrones reviews. I say reviews, but they will really be essais which weave in all the major events of our time: police brutality, my feelings on Ted Cruz's wonderful wife Heidi, the troubling rise of Russia, the anti-human rights legislation passed in the state of North Carolina, how I can't wait for Uncharted 4, and other such major news stories. I have gone on media blackout, since I want to experience it all fresh, knowing nothing, just like Terence Winter when he watches season two of Vinyl.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. 

In Which Her Mistake Was Waiting Six Episodes

Resemblances

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Just like that, it’s time to bid adieu to Outlander -- at least until April, when the Starz adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s beloved novel will return to screens with its first season’s final eight episodes. Seriously, whoever created mid-season breaks needs to be taken out and flogged. While that’s happening, let’s take a look at a few things we’ve learned from the show over the past eight weeks:

1

Explaining this story to people who haven’t heard of it never gets easier. Eventually the only solution is to dish up a healthy serving of black pudding, sit them in front of the telly, and make them watch it.

2

Or else pass them a copy of Gabaldon’s book and watch them fall into spasms of delight when they realize there are SEVEN MORE IN THE SERIES.

3

Speaking of spasms, if a group of ancient stones starts whispering to you, your vacation is not going well and you need to leave.

4

Should you get sucked into the past via the aforementioned stones, don’t fret: your life is about to get a whole lot more exciting.

5

People pay good money to have experiences like yours, Claire. Haven’t you heard of living museums?

6

Just think: if you travel back to the past, you start a never-ending cycle wherein you never really cease to exist.

7

Don’t trust Redcoats.

8

If the captain of the Redcoats, who looks suspiciously like the husband you left behind in the future, starts confessing his sadism to you, this is not your cue to let your guard down.

9

This isn’t Fifty Shades of Grey.

10

But it is a romance, so look alive, Claire!

11

When you have a completely unexplained but intense attraction to a perfect redhead who calls you by a cute nickname and wears a kilt, you need to do what God intended and jump his bones immediately. Don’t wait six episodes.

12

Then again, seven is the perfect number, isn’t it?

13

The wedding is pivotal, and not just because of its consummation. Every decision thereafter involves another person. Claire cannot escape through the stones anymore without facing the consequences. There are consequences, there is loss, on both sides now.

14

Outlander as a portrait of female desire.

15

Then again…

16

If you are a woman in the 18th century, you will narrowly escape rape in pretty much every episode.

17

By the end I wouldn’t have been surprised if Claire had just rolled her eyes and hiked up her skirts. “Let’s just get this over with.”

18

All in all, it has always been a drag to be a woman.

19

But that’s okay, because Jamie exists.

20

Behind every good woman is a well-written male character.

21

There are few greater male characters than ones who are written into existence by women who are obviously in love with them.

22

If you don’t believe me, read the books.

23

Scars are sexy.

24

Do NOT fuck with anybody whose last name is Randall.

25

If your name is Frank Randall, you’re boring but we still feel sorry for you. We’re sorry you’re boring. Somehow, despite being boring, you manage to be important, which probably wasn’t easy for Diana Gabaldon and certainly isn’t for Tobias Menzies, who plays you. He’s doing a great job, though.

26

Frank, your theme song is Fleetwood Mac’s “Secondhand News.”

27

Obviously casting Menzies as both Frank and his ancestor, Black Jack Randall, was a key move, if only because it gets us thinking about family resemblances, which aren’t just skin deep. Violence, abandonment, detachment, psychopathy… couldn’t they also be inherited?

28

The following things look comfortable: sheepskins, kilts, cloaks, Highland grass, those cozy knit caps all the guys seem to wear, not having to wear any panties under your skirts (!)

29

The following things do not look comfortable: corsets, any of the chairs, that weird roll thing Claire has to strap around her middle to make her ass look bigger underneath her skirts, saddles, putting a knife inside your boot, being flogged, wigs, those strips of cloth men had to tie around their necks for whatever reason, not having to wear any panties under your skirts

30

Everything else aside, ripping open a bodice seems pretty satisfying.

31

There are a lot of ancient euphemisms for sex and all of them are wonderful but they’re used in such distasteful situations that it’s hard to imagine asking anyone to grind your corn and have it sound even remotely inviting.

32

None of the food looks good.

33

Books aren’t just for smarts; they’re also for tickling the deep, abiding parts in all of us that want to fall in love. That want adventure, and risk, and a good, hot, long roll in the hay discarding 18th-century clothes. That want men who wear their kilts and scars with pride.

34

Romance is the only genre.

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording.

In Which We Have Sexual Intercourse In The Past

Sex and the Scottish Woman

by DICK CHENEY

Outlander
creator Ronald D. Moore

I recently curled up with Lynne on our recamier to revisit the 1986 classic Nine 1/2 Weeks. Kim Basinger plays a young woman who, when blindfolded, is able to consume an almost unlimited amount of fruit, vegetables, honey and milk. It stunned me that an ice cube could accomplish so much, and I remarked as much to Lynne as she began to lightly scrape my balls with her fingernail. She said, "A lot of weird things turn people on. Did you know that Mickey Rourke is completely smooth down there?"

They screened Nine 1/2 Weeks for 4,000 people in 1986. All but 40 walked out, and all but five trashed this masterpiece, from which 50 Shades of Grey is essentially plagiarized. Director Adrian Lyne went on to make Jacob's Ladder and Indecent Proposal, but outside of those two movies, his life in Hollywood was over.

It was in this spirit that I sampled the Starz! adaptation of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander. Claire (Caitriona Balfe) is a Scottish nurse who has hard sex with her history professor husband, but only when he is feeling particularly nostalgic about the fifteenth century. She lulls herself into a particularly emotional voiceover during penetration: "Frank and I always returned to each other in bed," she explains before she is abducted to the 18th century.

Women used to allow themselves to be touched by Mickey Rourke around the turn of the century.

There is nothing more boring than the 18th century in Scotland. I never really understood what Braveheart was about; I assumed it was just Mel Gibson's wet dream in which he dressed Jews up as Englishmen and murdered them in cold blood. Four centuries has done nothing to improve matters. Scotland is a lovely place, but the racial diversity is next to nil and there is absolutely nowhere to get good hummus.

Presumably Claire will travel to a variety of different time periods, sampling the penii of the area and reporting back to her husband, who will note her travelogues with clenched disdain before attempting to please her in the ways of various eras:

Ned Stark would not have done this.

Cinematic sex is nearly always dull, especially socio-historical depictions of copulation in the 1940s. As we see in Outlander, no exchange of fluids ever occurred in the wintercourse of this period. Women were only allowed to kiss their partners once or twice, and when men kissed their women, it had to be on the forehead, and they had to murmur "I'm sorry" as they did it. Homosexual sex was restricted to members of Parliament.

Women received a bottle of champagne at the conclusion of their menstrual cycle in the 1940s. What a decade.

All p & v was unprotected until the 1980s, when the condom was invented by Ronald Reagan as a subversive tool to quell population uprisings in Latin American dictatorships. When that failed, copies of Outlander were sent to Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile and all of Bill Clinton's mistresses in the 1990s. The book had the opposite effect of what was intended. Along with Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, it got all the women of these areas in the mood for love. Hearts and hinds.

It's like Thrones without the midgets or saying "Where do whores go?" every other sentence. Basically, if Thrones were written by a woman.

When Claire and her husband Frank find a Scottish Stonehenge and a coven that sashays all night around it, they hide in some brush and mutually masturbate until morning. Claire wants to go back with her husband to investigate further the next day, but he thinks of some errand he has to do because it's really awkward the day after they make love. She visits the site alone, and is transported to 1743, where things are even more excruciating, and where Claire details her reaction to them in an extensive, throaty voiceover. His lips touched mine, and slowly his head brushed my speckled clitoris. I tasted like almonds.

If a woman is wearing a shawl, that pretty much rules out oral.

All writing about sex, unless it is by Rachel Kramer Bussel or Shakespeare, is utterly prosaic, coming across either as so brief as to be nonstimulating, or essentially braggadocio. Showtime's Masters of Sex has gone to great trouble to prove just how unexciting sex is, especially in the Midwest. I have seen Lizzy Caplan's butt more often than I have my own. It's a nice posterior, but is it really good enough to carry an hour long drama? The answer is no.

After a promising first season, the show has descended into melodrama punctuated by scenes where Caplan is fucked in some new position; last week she got it against a wall, and in the trailers for the next episode, she shows her unadorned bottom to Lyndon Johnson.

The Peggy Olson archetype taken a diaphragm too far.

"Just once," Lynne complained, "I want to see sex in art the way that it really happens." This would be a more suitable kind of birth control for our young ones. An Oregon school district recently found itself with a 5 percent pregnancy rate across its schools, and took the modest step of offering condoms to any students who wanted them. When the community learned of this policy, not a single parent came forward in support of the decision. The Daily Caller article about this was the most embarassing thing I have ever read, and I read BuzzFeed. There's nothing more pathetic than grown adults getting upset about a couple of raincoats.

How about a pink shawl? Did they not have pink fabric in this entire fucking country?

If the adults themselves were having good sex with each other, they would naturally understand what an attraction the act holds and support the raincoat policy. We can only assume these parents are having the fumbling, two minute variety, or sleeping in separate beds like Lucy and Desi. Usually art reflects society, but in more discreet and, for some, shameful matters, it is the other way around.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"This is Tinder."

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