The Sanctity of Dudehood in Apatow World

This is the second entry in a dialogue about the films of Judd Apatow and the state of the romantic comedy among Double X Managing Editor Jessica Grose, Slate critic Troy Patterson, and Variety contributor Lael Loewenstein. Read the first entry here [2].

Colleagues:

Thank you inviting me into your ladyspace to talk about the movies. I will try to remember to put the seat down while I’m here. Also, I will try to get us wondering whether these shaggy Apatovian riffs on the problems and pleasures of male friendship are symptomatic of a crisis in American masculinity. I will begin by encouraging us to look beyond the three features Apatow has directed and take a gander at bromantic cinema in its broader context.

No meaningful discussion of the genre can be had without mention of two comedies put together at Apatow’s production company from scripts by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Superbad and Pineapple Express. The first (which to my mind would be insufferable without the balm of Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s McLovin) is less a reflection on adolescent anxieties about becoming a man than a reflection of them. Superbad concerns the codependency of two uncool high-school seniors whose fear of girls is surpassed only by their passion for one another. Not the kind of passion that would encourage greater than friendly interests in each other’s genitals, the film insists between intermittent bursts of penis talk. No, no, no—the girls are there to deal with your penis. That is the point of them, and that’s why they’re so scary, and if you can just act cool, then you may be able to exchange liquor for fellatio.

The stoner-flick action odyssey Pineapple Express is a far more satisfying experience, partly because it demonstrates a reasonable level of maturity. That is, the film is mature enough to celebrate male intimacy without awkwardness and also immature enough that the celebration involves preposterous gun battles. There is much sweetness in the way the protagonists—played by Rogen and James Franco—learn to trust one another, work as a team, and express their mutual affection. They are man enough not to go into a code-orange cooties panic when they touch skin. And yet Rogen’s Dale Denton still behaves like an infant whenever his cardboard girlfriend—who is still in high school, even though Dale is in his mid-20s—makes the scene.

These two films point us toward I Love You, Man, which arrived this spring, manifestly embracing bromance as its central theme, thus emerging as the most Apatovian of all these movies even though Apatow does not actually have a credit on it. No matter: Its stars, Paul Rudd and Jason Segal, are fixtures of his universe, and its director, John Hamburg, worked for him on the T.V. show Undeclared. (In reviewing the movie for Spin, I posited that I Love You, Man shares with the Apatow oeuvre a crucial perspective on guy humor: hating jocks while loving locker-room jokes.) Rudd plays a socially inept hero achieving self-actualization through the companionship of Segel’s mellow dude. Rashida Jones plays his fiancée, a role requiring her to behave like a cute barrier to a beautiful friendship.

This is all to say that, no, Jessica, I don’t think that these and other Apatow-related comedies are sexist because they leave women out of their main storylines. I think that they’re problematic because of the particular way they treat women as obstacles to be cleared, and problems to be solved, and threats to the safety of Guyville. In Apatovia, women are not so much characters as plot wrinkles.

Funny People—unserious and incoherent, plagued by flimsy characterizations and narrative bloat, its missteps crowned by the director’s lame-o choice to cast his own children to provide a cuteness infusion—is so fundamentally malformed that its structure can only bear so much analysis on its own addled terms. What is clear is that the big difference between lost love Laura and the use-and-toss groupies George discards is that the latter, being tossable, provoke no worries. What matters is that Ira is less concerned with the possibility of George ruining Laura’s marriage than with the possibility of Laura ruining his own friendship with George. Apatow seems to endorse Ira’s point of view, an endorsement that might amount to a comedian’s argument in favor of retarded adolescence. Ira and George are funny people on a professional basis, and the playpen of their writers’ room is a sacred space and special clubhouse, no girls allowed.

Thoughts?

Troy

Read Lael Loewenstein's response here [3].