Quirk in the Time of Cholera

From Gloss, one of my favorite new blog finds, on Judd Apatow:

Don't let the eye-dropper's worth of character development he gave the women in Knocked Up fool you, Judd Apatow treats objects like women, man. His female characters are at best goalposts, there to measure your male narrative arc against—motherly when you are ready to lose your virginity; pregnant and employed when you finally outgrow the stoner act; drunk and waiting to give you a blow job when you finally show up at the high school party, even though you've only talked to her once. The joyous parade of penises at the end of Superbad is exactly the point—this is the world we live in. Apatow's male character (really, there's just one) shows that it's painful growing into his role as penis bearer in the planet's last surviving empire. But guess what, tough guy, you still get to wear the penis in the world.

The rest of J's comments about quirk and gender are worth your time, but I gave this chunk the blockquote treatment because, while I wholeheartedly agree with his take on Knocked Up—irritating conservative commentary dressed up in an even more irritating stand-up performance by Seth Rogen—I hold Superbad in slightly better esteem. So long as we're going to explore male gender (and this I approve—my friend Sarah describes this trend as men, having internalized some feminist concepts, suddenly realizing that they also have a gender), it's worth doing so in a way that doesn't gloss over certain realities of penis-having at the sunset of American empire. Sure, Wes Anderson's films don't treat women so poorly, but they're also not illuminating, either. If you can look past the anti-feminist women characterizations in Superbad (which are gross and not worth actually skipping over, but bear with me)—you have a film in which the men basically treat each other terribly throughout. That's novel. In the high-school morality tale, brohem is such a firm rule governing male-male relationships that you don't ever have to establish the tenets of brohem—you only need to introduce the conflict, that single violation of brohem, whatever it may be, in order to confirm the obvious, absolute, unquestionably given and universal rule that is brohem. Superbad follows that track to a certain extent, and has the convenient happy ending, but it also features enough instances of cruelty to undermine brohem as this contour-free base state between men. Rather the movie reveals brohem as a strategy, a way to negotiate the intra-gender dynamic. I'm not just talking about the part where they hit each other in the balls.

MORE: One more thing. It's more than ridiculous that they cast this film with one fat guy and one skinny guy, with the skinny guy playing the character you're supposed to identify with (I guess) and the fat kid who's essentially his foil. Granted, they do much better than some in actually developing a narrative for the bigger kid, but we really ought to be beyond this point where the large guy only plays the fool to an attractive woman/skinnier fellow.

Posted by Kriston at September 10, 2007 5:32 PM