Ads are everywhere. This we know. In addition to all the places ads have been since we were kids -- radio, TV, billboards, the sides of buses -- ads are continually turning up in entirely new places, like elevators, the sides of thirty-storey buildings, shopping carts, stickers on the floor at the grocery store, stickers on pieces of fruit at the grocery store, and pretty much everywhere you look on the internet. Naturally, we've learned how to tune most of them out -- which must pose quite a challenge to marketers these days. I guess that's why HBO was able to convince Esquire to turn their September 2001 issue into one giant magalogue to promote the upcoming mini-series Band of Brothers.

(You'll note I didn't say that Esquire had "sold out" in its apparently single-minded promotion of BoB, because that would imply I thought Esquire had any integrity worth selling in the first place. And obviously I expect that the magazine will be complimentary about the media products or personages it covers; I just admire the sheer totality of Esquire's commitment to whore BoB sufficiently and guarantee future double-page ad spreads for HBO's products in the future.)

If you've only spotted the latest issue on the newsstand, you might think, "So they did a cover story on Band of Brothers. So what? Entertainment Weekly did a cover story on Reese Witherspoon; does that mean her publicists bought the editor a car?" No, it doesn't, because Entertainment Weekly did not put Reese Witherspoon on the cover, publish a slavering profile of her, feature a double-page spread advertising her movie, Legally Blonde, devote their entire Movie section to said movie (comparing it to others in the same genre), and then, for good measure, run a six-page fashion story featuring Witherspoon and the other stars of the movie. If EW had, it would lose its status as pretty much the best mass-market entertainment magazine out there. Since Esquire is only in competition with GQ, I guess the editors figured they had nothing to lose by clamping their lips onto HBO's ass and sucking like a jet-powered Hoover.

The Band of Brothers love-a-thon kicks off with the cover. Spielberg and Hanks are seated in the centre, drawing our attention to them as the most important figures in the BoB story -- and not, say, the author of the book on which the mini-series is based (who does not show up in the issue at all), or Damian Lewis, Neal McDonough, Donnie Wahlberg, and Ron Livingston, who actually star in the show (and are arranged around Hanks and Spielberg, the better to frame them for our eyes). There's no mistaking the focal point of the photo, is what I'm saying. And, you know...fine. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are two of the most powerful people in the entertainment world separately; that they're working together (again, post-Saving Private Ryan) is definitely newsworthy. But does the entire issue have to revolve around the work of their hands?

You might open the issue, start to leafing, and get all the way to page 79 and think that maybe I'm mistaken in my assessment. But then you'll turn the page and get to the big, sexy, double-page spread advertising Band of Brothers. The all-caps tag line reads, "Was I a hero? No...But I served in a company of heroes." As far as I'm concerned, Ron Livingston has been a hero ever since he gutted that fish in his cubicle and threw its entrails on a stack of TPS report cover sheets, but no one asked me.

Each issue of Esquire is afforded only one TV column. This one tells us, in the dek, "Band of Brothers makes the sad demise of network TV obvious all over again." Does it? Then why does the actual body of the article admit:

Mind you, I don't expect Band of Brothers to be what you'd call bold. Masterminded by Tom Hanks -- or master-hearted, rather -- with Steven Spielberg lurking Rumpelstiltskinlike in the wings, this small-screen revisit to Saving Private Ryan qualifies as a risky venture only because of something unforeseen by its makers, namely that we're getting just a little weary of the Greatest Generation. Yep, from foot-kissing to "Go on and die" in three short years -- that's how we do things in America.

Dude, how did that copy get past the ad department? Ix-nay on the Hanks issing-day!

Then again, once you get to the Hanks profile, it becomes clear there isn't anything you could say to or about Tom Hanks that would diminish his immense love for himself. I mean, if that ridiculous teenage moustache hasn't had the effect of reducing the Hanks Smug Factor even by a degree, nothing will. (While we're on the subject of said moustache, I have a confidential to journalists around the world: you can liken it to Clark Gable's as much as you like; no one's buying it). At first, I thought maybe this would be the first Hanks profile ever that could do something to provide a counterpoint to the Jimmy Stewart/Henry Fonda/Last Noble Man on Earth mythos; the author -- veteran journalist and sometime biographer Bill Zehme -- confesses that when he first met Hanks, on the set of Nothing in Common, he thought Hanks to be "sort of a dick." Of course, then the author goes on to dismiss Hanks '85 as "seven movies deep into his Glib Wisenheimer Period." But...but that's the only Hanks worth watching! Come on! Splash? The Money Pit? Oh, Zehme. You had me, and then you lost me.

Zehme is, it turns out, in the business of writing the same old boring Hanks profile we've all read a hundred times. His thesis, in brief: "You know how Tom Hanks seems to be a really smart, funny, decent guy? It turns out...he's even more smart, funny, and decent than you thought!!!!" His thesis, at length:

This T. Jeffrey Hanks, at age forty-five -- well, damn -- he stands for something. Just look at him! He is substantial, a man for all generations who respects all that is truly respectable and has little time for that which is not. He is this: American optimist! Student of the world! Moral flame keeper! Celestial wonderer! Also: famous patriot, friend, husband, ex-husband, father, brother, son, actor, writer, director, producer, teacher, frequent flier, rich guy, box-office titan!

OH MY GOD! UNCLE, all right? Geez, fine, he's great, he's great -- stop hitting me! Okay, not. Because despite Zehme's assertion that what Hanks deems important is, on a larger scale, "where we need to be," I just can't regard anyone as the voice of every generation who declares, without irony, "We have to know where we've been in order to know where we're goin'....You have to adhere to the philosophy that the life unexamined is not worth living." Oh. Really? Yeah, I think I've heard that somewhere before.

In fact, my problem with Hanks is akin to my problem with Esquire as a publication. Esquire, on the cover of every issue, promises us "MAN AT HIS BEST" -- which is, I think, what Hanks (or, at least, his PR team) wants us to think he is. That's Zehme's point, at least. "He is morally redemptive, even when he's lawless!" "...Hanks must be self-effacing if he is to be Hanks...." "That a Hanks character [in Bonfire of the Vanities] even had a mistress is disconcerting enough." All of that is fine; it's not as though I have any objection to decent people behaving decently. I guess what I find so annoying is the constant insistence that Tom Hanks isn't merely a good and decent and admirable person -- it's that he's been anointed as the exemplar of a good man. You know? It's the difference between an Esquire and, say, a Vanity Fair. VF assumes that its reader aspires to the wealth or status or lifestyle of its glamorous subjects. Esquire assumes that its reader aspires to some specific version of heterosexual manhood, encompassing not just wealth and status and lifestyle but also morality and sexuality. So then, Esquire is not just a shallow diversion -- it's a document delineating men's wish-fulfillment fantasies. Likewise, Hanks is not just a highly paid movie star -- he's the embodiment of idealized male heterosexuality. So I must surmise when Hanks himself declares that, when he decided to end his "Glib Wisenheimer Period," he told his agent, "I don't want to play pussies anymore." And I guess it worked, since Zehme assures us, "He has been a man ever since." Is that right? Is that what he was doing when he played a gay man dying of AIDS who never once even pecked his lover on the lips, in Philadelphia?

Thus, since Hanks is the power behind Band of Brothers, Zehme makes it seem as though that's reason enough to see it, despite the fact that the TV critic's already told us the series is only okay. So, guys, I guess if you don't feel like watching a ten-episode mini-series in which the characters probably get picked off one by one and women are nowhere in sight, that makes you...oh, what was Hanks's word again? Right: a "pussy." Fortunately, I don't have a distaff Hanks to teach me how to be a woman, so I'll probably just watch Office Space again instead.