You don't want Rick Grimes as your boyfriend. (AMC)

Have you noticed that in the last several years, most of the "brilliant" TV shows on AMC, Showtime and HBO star these dangerous, psychopathic anti-heroes? From Dexter to Don Draper, Nick Brody to Rick Grimes, Walter White to the ultimate don, Tony Soprano, one gets the sense that while the rest of American culture is taking one step forward on progressive women's rights issues, our beloved TV shows are moving us two steps back.

And what's weird is how we love these horrible men. "I'm such a Carrie" no longer refers to the ultimate Bradshaw, but the bipolar Claire Danes on Homeland ... the kind of gal who falls in love with a terrorist, despite the fact that he ends up subjecting her to electro-shock therapy treatments after they have sex. And they are still in love, or something! How sexy is that, ladies?

But wait, it gets worse...

From Newsday.com:

A Williston Park man who police say shot his girlfriend in the back with a rifle after a heated argument over the television show “The Walking Dead” was ordered jailed without bail at his arraignment Tuesday.

Jared Gurman, 26, of 516 Marcellus Rd., is being held on a charge of attempted murder after the shooting at about 2:40 a.m. Monday at his apartment.

A single round from a .22 caliber rifle pierced the victim’s lung and diaphragm and shattered her ribs, police said.

It's a funny thing, too: a quick glance at the weapons used in The Walking Dead shows a lot of .22 caliber rifles ...

Twelve years ago, it seems, he collaborated with a man named Robert Baer, a budding screenwriter and former prosecutor who set up meetings between Mr. Chase and mafia experts during a tour of the Garden State.

Mr. Baer, in part, claims that he was not adequately paid for his services—assistance that may have led to the show’s foundational plot. Asserting ownership of the pilot’s core themes, Mr. Chase, a New Jersey native, told the judge that he has been fascinated with the mob ever since watching The Untouchables. (Whether he was referring to the 1959 TV series or the 1987 Brian De Palma feature film was not made clear.)

As if quoting Tony Soprano, Mr. Baer said he declined payment from Mr. Chase several times in 1995, if only because the series’ creator assured him that he would “take care of him” in due time. Likewise, the screenwriter has called the hired helper “self-delusional” in legal papers. [AP]

Fox includes The Winner in its Sunday-night post-Simpsons lineup starting March 4. Former Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry plays Glen Abbott, a now-successful businessman who discovers that Alison McKellar (Erinn Hayes), the only woman he’s ever kissed—a consolation prize after a sucker punch—has moved home next-door to care for her ailing mother. Abbot immediately bonds with her son, Josh McKellar (Keir Gilchrist), simultaneously celebrating and exploiting the notion that men mature at a pathetic pace compared to their female counterparts.

ABC is using its popular Grey’s Anatomy to lead viewers into midseason drama October Road on March 15. Road stars One Tree Hill’s Bryan Greenberg as Nick Garrett, a successful author whose hometown-based novel became a best-seller. When a case of writer’s block consumes him, Garret decides to move back home after a 10-year absence, gets a job at the local university, and finds that his novel has fractured past relationships. Self-absorbed writers all across New York will relate.

After 12 years on public radio, and boasting 1.7 million listeners a week, host Ira Glass—along with indie film producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Happiness)—adapts the stories of real American experience in a television version of This American Life. A breath of fresh air for “reality television”! It premieres March 22 on Showtime.

Calling Kevin Bacon …. That show is back! (Pregnant Bridget Moynahan, too!) Yep, the Six Degrees folks are giving it another go. Six Degrees, a Lost-esque drama by the same producers, takes place on the far more populated island of Manhattan and follows the intersecting paths of six characters. Based on a mysterious “theory” about six people, six episodes aired in September to lukewarm reviews. One good thing—the stars sure are hot. Six Degrees returns to ABC on March 23.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is leaping into the pool of big-screen actors settling down, temporarily at least, for the small screen. After carefully testing the waters as the King of Rock ’n’ Roll in the Golden Globe–winning miniseries Elvis, Mr. Rhys-Meyers now plays King Henry VIII in the infancy of his 40-year reign. The series chronicles the king’s coquetry with Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, as well as his relationships with philosopher Sir Thomas More. The Tudors premieres April 1.

On April 8, The Sopranos returns to finish what it started last year, concluding the series with eight final episodes. The first 12 episodes of season six, which premiered on March 12, 2006, found Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) in a coma after being shot by a delusional Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese), leaving his capos without a clear successor. When Tony wakes up, the world is even more intolerant of Jersey’s Cosa Nostra. Is this the end of our Tony? Will this season be better than last season? Please, Mr. Chase!

That same night, the Entourage boys return from their vacation to have what would seem to the rest of us like, well, a vacation. As his celebrity stock rises, Vinny (Adrian Grenier) finds that his relationship with agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) has become increasingly tense. Vinny will either stick with his super-agent, or leave him for greener pastures. But could they really get rid of Jeremy Piven? Come on!

Last night's season finale (which precedes a final season) offered one benediction after another, and just about every one felt unearned. The show played with the viewer. It hinted two or three times at climactic violence and each time delivered hugs-and-kisses instead. Notably, in the subplot where Christopher begins boinking the real estate agent whom his boss Tony Soprano had declared his interest in—then Christopher confesses the betrayal and his earlier lies about it to Tony without consequences. Or Tony squeezing his rival boss's hand in the hospital. On it went. The last scene was a happy united family at Christmas. In June.

I guess a drama is allowed to go on lofty jet-stream tangents when it has established the kind of success Sopranos has. (Seinfeld did it, and suffered.) Sopranos seems utterly removed from the reality that gave it life. Take the theme song of last night's show, the Stones' Moonlight Mile, a narcotic-delusion ballad. What's the connection? Maybe the producers used to get high on that, in college. But who can forgive them the greatest misrepresentation in the show: when a member of the federal organized crime task force in the US Attorney's office shows up at Tony's club to inform him that the Brooklyn family plans to knock off someone close to him, thus spurring Tony to reach out. Does that kind of thing happen? I doubt it. This feels like story heaven, the place stories go when they die.

Or maybe it's a dream sequence, with the producers (and writers, and actors) all snoozing on their laurels, resting up for what by every indication will be a bloodbath in the last real season. Then how will we feel about this false winter?

Her principle is demonstrated by Tony's visits to the therapist. "My shrink," he calls her. Well, you cannot go to a therapist and be as otherwise degraded as Tony Soprano, you cannot believe in therapy and disbelieve in homosexuality, the big theme of the latest episode. It is utterly implausible. But who cares? The therapy sessions are artistically necessary: they yield up Tony's interior life in ways that this shrewd, grunting action figure would not otherwise allow us to see, they make him reflective and sympathetic, in short, make him a main character. So we all go willingly along with the lie.

There are many complex reasons why advancing age is linked with infertility, but the explanation boils down to this: Your eggs go bad.

Perhaps it was all coincidence, but around this time, I came into contact with a whole different world of eggs and babies.

I know that extended winters can induce all manner of urban critters to seek refuge on city balconies, but nothing had prepared me for what I found on the terrace of our Upper West Side apartment during a bout of spring cleaning.

In the corner, tucked behind a bench, was an entire nest, complete with two small eggs and one live baby pigeon.

If this were any other place in the world, such a sight would give rise to feelings of wonder and admiration at the miracles of nature. But there was nothing pastoral about the nativity scene on my terrace.

Traditional nesting materials being scarce in my neighborhood, the pigeons had built their home from whatever they could find: bits of milk cartons, cigarette butts, scraps of the Sunday New York Times , a shoelace.

Aside from the stench of the garbage, and the ghastly sight of the featherless newborn, there were also countless deposits of pigeon crap that had turned our terrace into a revolting Pollock painting.

Now, I value life as much as the next person, but this state of affairs could not continue. So I did what any self-respecting urbanite would do: I hid in the bathroom while my husband Phil scooped up the nest, threw out the unhatched eggs, and placed the baby pigeon in a leafy area just behind our building.

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't. After all, we had destroyed a home and separated a family. There were consequences:

Day 1: The pigeons are back on our terrace searching for their young. I am filled with pity and self-loathing. I try to help by gesturing wildly to the area below where their surviving offspring has been left. "YOUR BABY IS OVER THERE!" I yell. The creatures blink uncomprehendingly and fly away. "Perhaps our pigeons are deaf," Phil suggests.

Every couple of hours, the creatures return and the ritual is repeated. It's always the same two birds: One is stout and struts paternally around the other, which looks more delicate and wounded. The latter bird, which I presume to be the mother, shoots me dagger looks when I approach. They go straight to my womb.

That night, I have a dream: A vulture is pecking at my ovaries. I awake in a cold sweat. I'm not thinking about the pigeons or even the baby. I'm thinking about the unhatched pigeon eggs that are now mixing with the city's garbage supply. How is it that I, someone so attuned to the issue of rotting eggs, could have participated in so brutal an act?

Half doubled-over with anxiety, I call friends who will still be awake. I am looking for affirmation, but all I get is pious disapproval. The conversations go something like this:

Friend: "You separated a helpless little pigeon from its parents?"

Me: "It looked like Satan's spawn."

Friend: "And you threw out the eggs?! Those were going to be living beings soon."

Me: "But you're pro-choice!"

Friend: "All I know is, I couldn't do it."

Day 2: I step onto the terrace before dressing for work, and it's like I'm Tippi Hedren. The birds are back and the terrace is strewn with garbage. They are rebuilding. "STAY OFF OUR TERRACE!" I scream. The fat father is especially persistent. He won't move unless I rush at him, arms akimbo, which I do at least six times before leaving for work.

Once out the door, I make a pit stop at the neighborhood drugstore. A guy with a neck like Tony Soprano leans conspiratorially over the counter as I explain my predicament.

"Look, girlie," he says. "Get yourself some Alka-Seltzer. The birds eat it and they can't digest it. Once they drink some water, their stomachs blow up."

I shrink back, horrified. "Works like a charm," he says, smiling.

Day 3: The birds are completely disrespecting the massive amounts of Alka-Seltzer I have scattered all over the terrace. They walk on the tablets; they shit on them; they do everything but eat them. At one point, they seem to amass the stuff in a third attempt to build a nest.

I throw away the nesting material, but as I return, I suddenly realize that the fat pigeon for whom I have particular enmity is not the paterfamilias. He is, in fact, a very pregnant mother. I stare at the bird with newfound recognition.

When you start feeling spiteful and vaguely envious of pigeons, it's time for some soul-searching.

Day 4: After spending hours scouring Web sites like birdbgone.com, I make an important discovery: The best advice on animal removal comes from 14-year-old boys. Schooled in sophisticated forms of animal torture, they are far more helpful than the faux-humane "bird evasion" companies. I don't know why it took me so long to realize this, having grown up with a younger brother who, when he wasn't making my life a living hell, was tormenting all manner of God's creatures.

Here's what I learn: Alka-Seltzer works on pigeons, but you need to pre-mix it with water and set it out for the varmints to drink. I head back to the drugstore and find the Alka-Seltzer relocated near the prenatal vitamins. Reading this as a clear sign of fate, I purchase both.

On the walk home, the irony is not lost on me. In my right fist, I clutch the very thing meant to make my stomach a healthy, nutrient-enriched place of growth and generation. In my left fist, I hold an agent of death, meant to literally explode the innards of another potential mother.

But my sympathy soon dissipates. When the pigeons aren't completely ignoring the chalky mixture I've set out for them, they seem to be mocking me by using it as a bird bath. Between popping prenatals, I vow revenge.

Day 5: I notice that when I approach the terrace door, the pigeons fly off before I even get a chance to flail my arms. Inspired, I construct an elaborate scarecrow out of a five-foot cactus plant that lies desiccated in the corner of the terrace. I drape it in towels, place my father's ambassador-style hat on top, and attach a pair of oversized sunglasses and a menacing grin.

Although my new scarepigeon keeps the birds at bay for most of the afternoon, by evening a fresh marker of pigeon disrespect decorates our terrace.

Still, there has been progress, and it has been achieved humanely. For the first time in days, I don't have nightmares about the Grim Reaper taking a scythe to my womb. When I awake at 3 in the morning for a pee, the events of the preceding day are a distant memory. Sadly, not for long: When I return from the bathroom, the shadowy form of the scarecrow-unable to frighten the most pathetic of bird life-succeeds in scaring the crap out of me.

Day 6: Phil has started calling me "Pidge." When friends phone, he passes on the nickname. Someone suggests I write about my bird travails: The Diary of Pidget Jones .

Day 7: The scarecrow has been disassembled. I am sleeping again, but so are the pigeons. On my terrace. In desperation, I call my brother. But at 33, he is no longer the Dr. Mengele of wildlife that he was. He suggests the anodyne remedy of a fake owl. This makes no sense to me. Even if I could get hold of such a thing, how would the pigeons recognize it as a natural predator?

But my brother, whose childhood penchant for animal destruction was inexplicably paired with a fascination for wildlife survival, gives me the answer for which there is no comeback: "It's instinct," he says.

I am skeptical, but go owl-shopping the next day. The results are miraculous. The birds have grown increasingly respectful and have ceased home improvement on our property, even if they occasionally pay a visit on their way up to our neighbors.

Things have settled down on my end as well. I no longer court gastro-explosion fantasies, and my vengeance-induced consumption of poultry is back down to its pre-spring levels. Indeed, I've gained new empathy for the procreating pigeon. I recently bought a basal body thermometer. Pretty soon, I may just start nesting.

Robert Iler, who plays Tony Soprano's troubled teenage son, has been spotted again-and not on HBO. An Upper East Side mother visited the 19th Precinct on July 9 with her 15-year-old son in tow and complained that the 16-year-old actor was on the scene in Carl Schurz Park when her boy was mugged on May 21.

Mr. Iler and a couple of buddies, TV fans will recall, were arrested in the wee hours of July 4 and charged with robbing two other teenagers of $40. The Sopranos star contends that he'd left the scene before the crime occurred.

In the Carl Schurz Park incident, the victim, a 15-year-old East 86th Street resident, says that he and a couple of friends recognized Robert Iler as the actor who plays Anthony Soprano Jr. as he stood among a group of boys in the park at 88th Street and East End Avenue. The complainant said that he talked to Mr. Iler and his friends. However, as he walked away, he found himself quickly surrounded by a large number of kids (his friends had already walked on ahead).

The teenager apparently didn't identify Mr. Iler as being among those who surrounded him. But he told police that one of the youths grabbed him from behind, placed his hand inside his jacket as if wielding a gun and stated, "Give me your money or I'll break your jaw."

The victim says he removed his wallet and gave the bandits $48. The first perpetrator then allegedly punched him in the face, while a couple of the robber's colleagues punched him about the head and prevented him from leaving.

The complainant was interviewed by the 19th Precinct detective squad. But a police official said that the cops were viewing the robbery allegation with caution (though he didn't put it quite that diplomatically) because the complaint was filed so long after the incident-and so soon after Mr. Iler was arrested on July 4 and his perp-walk picture splashed across the front pages of the city's tabloids.

"He saw the actor on TV and called the next day," a police source said.

Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan District Attorney, said the case had not yet reached the D.A.'s office-not that it necessarily will. "We don't comment on people who make complaints. We wait until the investigation is completed," she explained. "The only thing that [Iler] has been charged with is that incident from July 4."

The attorney for Mr. Iler, Michael Bachner, denied that his client had anything to do with the alleged robbery. "Iler certainly wasn't involved in that incident, and unfortunately, when you are someone of celebrity, it's to be expected that people will come out of the woodwork in order to benefit from other people's situations."

Time to Retire

The greatest deterrent to crime, experts will tell you, isn't community policing or the NYPD's celebrated COMSTAT conferences (in which precinct commanders are raked over the coals by the department brass), but encroaching age. The older people get, the less likely they are to commit crimes, the mind and body apparently unwilling to suffer the physical and psychological indignities a life of crime exacts on its practitioners.

However, there's always the exception to the rule, and that fellow was arrested on July 13 after trying to pick the pocket of a much younger man on the M2 bus. The perpetrator, who boarded the bus at 65th Street and Fifth Avenue at 4:25 p.m., was born during the Coolidge Presidency-more precisely, on Sept. 21, 1928. That makes him 72 years old, and one of the most senior of citizens ever to grace the 19th Precinct's holding cell.

The victim told police that he was sitting on the bus when the perp-a Broadway resident who was seated to his left-placed his jacket over his right arm and then, using the cover it provided, reached across his body with his left arm and into his fellow passenger's left front pocket.

But the pickpocket's skills were showing signs of age, and his intended victim felt his hand inside the pocket. The complainant, a mere sprig of 37, flagged down a couple of cops, who briefly canvassed the area, spotted the septuagenarian and arrested him for grand larceny.

Legally Blind

If there was any justice in this world (and who knows, there may yet turn out to be), crooks would get slapped with extra jail time for preying on the handicapped. Prime candidates would be the two villains who acted out on July 7.

The victim, a 71-year-old blind woman, told police that she was leaving her First Avenue apartment building at 2 p.m. when two males approached her and plucked her purse from her hands. One of them handed the purse to his co-worker, who removed $120 and then returned the bag to her.

Unfortunately, the woman's handicap conspired against her in more ways than one: The crime was so effortless that the cops were forced to classify it as a petty larceny rather than a robbery. "No force was used at all," explained a police officer. "It was too easy. She was blind."

It's not hard to see why a large (9.5 million) audience that certainly includes this correspondent has connected with The Sopranos. David Chase's HBO novel-in-parts (as we might think of it, today's version of a Dickensian serial) is a parable about the center not holding, about the Great Anarch drawing nigh with heavy, bloody tread, accompanied by a rough beast. That it's about a criminal enterprise is a concession to the postmodern thirst for irony but in this case, irony gives the parable added force.

Everything in the show flows from the memorable line of the first season, when Tony bursts out, "Out there it's the 1990's, but in this house it's 1954!" Back then, it sounded like bluster, but given all that's happened since in the series, you think back, and you think twice, and you see that what David Chase was setting us up for is that 1999, or 2000, or now 2001 is outside, rattling the windows, trying the doorknobs, howling to get in. It's like an extrapolation of that moment in Close Encounters … when the world outside fills with light and the doors rattle and the walls swell and the electricity goes crazy.

The song that Uncle Junior sang with such passion at the end of this season's final installment is exactly the kind of song people who think in 1954 terms, or cling to 1954 memories and values, will recall: sung back then by the likes of Roberto Murolo, Tino Rossi, Gino Bechi. The tears in the eyes of the elders listening are for themselves; they weep for the Old Country from which they emigrated, from which they sprang: as in L.P. Hartley's famous dictum, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." These people weep for the Old Country which is still in them, for its customs, language, ways of doing things. That they are thugs and gangsters is momentarily beside the point. In the American present, they have reverted to being foreigners.

None of this means a damn thing to the young; our young, for whom time present is the only time that exists, let alone matters. Which may be O.K., may be deplorable, but is the way it is. When Meadow Soprano hurls a roll and storms out, who is that but Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, slamming the door on what has been but can be no longer.

If I sit Francis down and play him my Roberto Murolo CD's, he'll look at me as if I'm crazy. Who needs this s ? is what he'll be thinking. The past is over. It can fight a rearguard action, can put up pockets of resistance sleek, clever, buff, ambitious, glib Jackie Aprile Jr., poster boy for Cosa Nostra.com come the day, is blown away by a goombah so fat he can hardly walk but resistance, we begin to see, is futile. There'll be other Jackies; there's Ralph, the Russians, and above all there's the money. Suddenly, there's not enough to go around. No sooner is Christopher "made" but he's in the hole, to Paulie, who's now thinking about selling Tony out.

When this series started, everything was pretty much fixed; now, all is relative; everything carries a dollar sign. These were people whose compasses and sextants were calibrated just so. Now the fixed stars have been rearranged and nothing makes sense. Not even the Holy Mother Church. Carmela goes to see a priest and finds herself dealing with an African padre who feeds her Mitch Albom bullbleep in a Geoffrey Holder voice: Tuesdays with Father Obosi.

And yet …

The success of a work of art like The Sopranos (Is Dickens art? Is Trollope? If so, why not Tony et al.?) suggests that people still want to connect, culturally, with something outside their own self-involvement. But let's look at the numbers. By television standards, the 9.5 million that HBO is boasting about is a fraction of the audience pulled by the final episode of Seinfeld. It's a fraction of those who watch Will and Grace or Friends, which are two really stupid shows.

Inside that 9.5 million is perhaps the core middle- and upper-brow audience of, say, three million to four million that, I suspect, are the people who keep the serious arts going in this country. On top of these are perhaps another five million to seven million who are plugged in enough to want to see what the fuss is all about and decide to stick around. At this point, we leave the orbit of The Sopranos and enter the astral void where dwell, culturally, the tens of millions to whom connection means having been there, done or seen that, too. Been to Tate Modern, seen the Jackie O. show and Vermeer or Disney World or the Mona Lisa. The urge to connect doesn't disappear; we may not bowl as much as we used to, but that doesn't mean we can live with being out of it, whatever "it" is.

I was up at the Met the other day to show my daughter's Italian in-laws the glories of the Met. We got in a little early and took a fast five-minute spin through Jackie O., and then went on to Vermeer before moving out into the permanent collections.

As deplorable as the Jackie O. show is in conception and principle, it's even worse in execution and fact. Given its sponsorship the Newhouses' decision to entrust Vogue to a badly dressed Englishwoman continues to amaze me and curatorial direction, who can be surprised? And, as Philip Weiss observed last week: the clothes are so bad! As one friend of mine said: "All those buttons!" Talk about niminy-piminy.

As for the potted history, bleeeah! Someday, someone who wants to let the word go forth to newer generations of Americans what the three-year Kennedy "era" was really about will put together an experience in which pilgrims will sit in a dark room and for, say, eight hours endure what the country went through or perhaps was put through over the weekend of Nov. 22, 1963: an endless black-and-white TV loop, Dallas, Ruby, Air Force One, John-John on the steps, the riderless horse, Cronkite haggard. Over and over and over and over and over again. In those three days, the box took control of our sensibilities, and the country was put into a quasi-hypnotic state of self-doubt from which we have never fully emerged.

Then it was that Jackie sold herself to the country. It was an easy sell if, as she did, you had the time, the money, the opportunity and the balls. After all, these were people who pulled off in 1960 in Cook County electoral scams what anything alleged with regard to Dade County in 2000 didn't come close to.

Still, there's this to be said for the exhibition: It is certainly the greatest achievement on record in cretin control. By late morning, the line waiting to get into Jackie stretched down through the drawings galleries ruining any chance to see what was hanging there back along the well of the Grand Staircase and northward along the balcony; thousands of people standing with their mouths open. Fifty feet away from the Jackie O. entrance, in a gallery hung with a dozen great paintings by Cézanne, a painter who is on everyone's Top 10 roster, there was no one!

Vermeer was doing boffo B.O., too. By my reckoning, some 550,000 people have seen the exhibition, or almost the same number as there are copies out (according to Jim Dwyer in The Times) of a novel called The Girl with a Pearl Earring, which is driving attendance. From what I've read, I'm sure it's a dreadful book, sort of an artsy Bridges of Delft County, but it's getting more people to look at Vermeer than Proust ever did, so let's look at the bright side

Maybe this is where the future lies: "hot' shows driven by extra-artistic interests that concentrate the noise which has become almost intolerable at the Met and the crowds out of the way so that others can look at the art. At the Frick today, such "crowds" as there ever are mass in front of the Vermeers, which the Frick can't lend, while down the hall is an El Greco show that teaches more about art, painting and genius than almost any exhibition I have ever seen anywhere.

So it's not all bad, and it could be worse. Some might not call this consolation, but there is a certain peace that comes from sitting on a bench in an empty Met gallery, studying a great Cézanne and wondering, as I'm sure Tony Soprano does, whatever the hell became of 1954.

pretty, too passive. It's male reviewers who've gone ga-ga over him as the

hippie pusher in Blow , rhapsodizing

over his delicate features and limp blond tresses. And of the exquisite

transvestite prostitute he plays in Before

Night Falls , John Turturro was quoted as saying he'd be available to play

love scenes with him anytime. He's cute, but … I'd rather play opposite a wet

mop. I find him more interesting as a sort of New Age Peter Pan, the epicene

elf of What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

and Edward Scissorhands , but a

turn-on? Hardly.

Ditto Jude Law. A male critic of my acquaintance, a lifelong

heterosexual and connoisseur of women, says he'd happily deviate from the

straight-and-narrow for the chiseled British star with the ice blue eyes. His

wife and I shrug. Too beautiful, too narcissistic. We'd prefer a man who would

fuss over us, not require that we worship at his altar. Perhaps a choice

between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant. The shy, awkward suitor and the sleazy

womanizer in Bridget Jones's Diary

bespeak a virility lacking in Mr. Law, a too-humid hunk. Does that mean we're

behind the times, not yet into chic amorphous sexuality, still hung up on some

antiquated notion of La Différence?

Or could it be that more and more, the men on-screen are a

projection of what men imagine they'd want if they were women? Lately we've

seen a cinematic revival of the supposedly universal androgynous seducer, the

person who walks into the room and has everyone begging for his bod. I say

"his" because this quasi-mythic embodiment of Eros is generally a man, thought

up by men for men. For men, the feminine male appears to offer some kind of

eating-your-cake-and-having-it-too fantasy, temporary relief (if a rather

disturbing one) from that primal textbook horror: castration anxiety. The

unabashedly feminine fellow is the uncastrated female-not woman as an

incomplete and threateningly "wounded" male, but man as woman with a penis.

While the male characters in films have become more sexual,

the women have become more miserable. Terence Stamp, in Pasolini's Teorema , walked into an Italian country

house with toxic effect on everyone in the family. Billy Budd, recently given

cinematic life in Claire Denis' Beau

Travail , is a triangulated male homoerotic dance. The Irish philanderer in

Gerard Stembridge's About Adam -a

chameleon who intuits the erotic needs of, in turn, three sisters and their

heretofore hetero brother-is a cannier and more bisexual version of Mel

Gibson's woman-attuned ad man in What

Women Want . In With a Friend Like

Harry , a mysterious stranger, claiming previous friendship with the

husband, descends on a household with homoerotic designs. But in The Talented Mr. Ripley , the filmmakers

had to create a new female character (Cate Blanchett's ditzy expatriate) to

offset the dreary doormat of a woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow and invented by

the profoundly misogynistic Patricia Highsmith. In Blow , Mr. Depp's harpy mother and druggie wife (Rachel Griffiths

and Penélope Cruz) are truly grotesque. And Enemy

at the Gates is really, as the ads suggest, a face-off between two

different kinds of rugged male beauty, Joseph Fiennes and Jude Law, with Rachel

Weisz as the beard.

These days the female enchantresses, few and far between,

are rarely as charismatic or pansexual as their male counterparts. Liv Tyler,

the none-too-persuasive cynosure in Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty and Harald Zwart's One Night at McCool's , has AC pull but no DC (or is it the other

way around?). And Hilary Swank's transsexual in Boys Don't Cry so threatens men that she gets herself murdered.

Where are the women-in-pants roles like those played by Dietrich, Garbo and

Katharine Hepburn, who dazzled men and women alike?

Suddenly, even on-screen, we are many people, many sexual

selves at once. But how to keep track? How to even know or acknowledge what we

want? The challenge to discover and explore one's innermost fantasies is set

alongside the binary impasse between men and women in Wayne Wang's absorbing The Center of the World . The title means

one thing for the Vegas showgirl (Molly Parker) and another for the computer

nerd (Peter Sarsgaard). The twain meet, their fantasies intersect, but briefly

and precariously.

At a recent dinner party, we spent the first half of the

evening talking about The Sopranos

and the second about transsexuals-a not-so-strange pairing of subjects that

push the envelope of spectrum-thinking into the grayest of the gray areas, one

making us morally queasy, the other physically so. With The Sopranos , we ask ourselves: How can we be charmed by this brute

who-contrary to fan-on-the-street responses-is not "a nice guy underneath"? One

layer of cruelty and brutality merely masks another, darker layer. Tony

Soprano's a bully and a bigot as well as a murderer; and yet, co-existing-another

self-is a man who loves his wife and children, fears for them, makes himself

vulnerable to his therapist and has sex appeal. On the physical front, with

transsexuals we can't help wondering what it feels like to be convinced you're

in the wrong body. And to be so desperate to get out that you'll put your whole

life at stake-job, position, family-to make the change.

These two border states are complementary. We are good,

law-abiding liberals who have no trouble endorsing the right of a person to

live as the other sex, but we're still uneasy with the brave new world of

sexual fluidity-while The Sopranos ,

for all its moral ambiguity, is clear-cut about sex: Its men are men and its

women are women, right out of the 50's. Tony sees himself as a

captain-of-industry type, while to the women in his life (housewives and

hookers, good mothers and bad mothers), he's a Rottweiler, a sadist, a dominant

alpha male, a thug. An old-fashioned guy of a guy. One who doesn't spend a lot

of time looking in the mirror.

I'll take Tony Soprano over Johnny Depp if I have to (my

husband doesn't look in the mirror either, though sometimes I wish he would).

But what does it mean that these are the yin and yang of contemporary maledom?

Does it mean that Tom Hanks' channeled World War II veteran is our only hope

for a resurgence of modest manliness?