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Troy and Jessica:
So far, we’ve agreed that the male leads in Apatow movies get to enjoy a gloriously self-indulgent protracted adolescence, while their female counterparts are more commonly portrayed as “uptight and domesticated,” personally or professionally unfulfilled, lacking a comparable support network — essentially relegated to a “no-fun zone.” There are exceptions, of course, like Catherine Keener’s character in
The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Aubrey Plaza’s in Funny People, but for now we’ll leave them aside.
Referencing David Denby’s 2007 article on the evolution of the romantic comedy Jessica asks how the slacker-striver paradigm “became the default romantic comedy relationship? And is it a reflection … of the real-life dating world?” Troy, for his part, thinks that while the male characters’ feelings about heterosexual romance imply a deep anxiety about the responsibilities that accompany family life, since “perpetual adolescence is not a viable proposition for most men. Unless they are, professionally, funny people.” And maybe not then, either: Even funny guys Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell, who built their careers playing variations on the incorrigible adolescent, have lately acquired a few chinks in their movie star armor.
Perhaps, as Troy suggests, Funny People’s relatively tepid performance does represent a collective exhaustion with Apatow’s preoccupations. But I think it has more to do with the fact that in these dispiriting times, audiences would rather sit through 99 minutes of escapist fare like The Hangover than a 146-minute serio-comic rumination on mortality and lost love. Moreover, as a number of critics have pointed out, it’s tougher to feed your fans’ appetite for everyman comedies when, like Judd Apatow, you’ve gone from Hollywood outsider to consummate insider. (The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis muses that the director “seems to have become uncomfortable with or perhaps immune to the messiness of life.”)
That may be true, but he hasn’t entirely lost his capacity for wry observations that resonate with uncanny emotional truths. Although Knocked Up was more overtly humorous and, in its contrasting depictions of men and women, more readily provocative than Funny People, one key scene in the latter film offers an interesting commentary on gender difference.
Late in the movie, as Laura (Leslie Mann) considers leaving her husband for former love George (Sandler), she subjects him to a kind of litmus test: She plays him a video of her daughter Mabel (Maude Apatow) performing in a recital. Mabel sings beautifully, but George is bored to distraction, and Laura sees it. His chance to win her back evaporates the moment he checks his BlackBerry (although the actual denouement comes later). What Laura wants in a prospective partner—and what George fails to provide—is validation for the choices she’s made. To a woman who’s opted to sacrifice her career so she can have a family, George’s disinterest in Mabel’s performance is especially painful; it’s tantamount to a personal rejection.
In a roundabout way, this scene from Funny People brings me back to Jessica’s question about whether the striver-slacker paradigm reflects a pervasive social trend. Arguably, it does. In recent years, the conversation over women’s life choices has been reinvigorated as we struggle to balance our personal and professional identities.
SNL: Equal Opportunity Objectifiers
Jon Hamm spent most of the Saturday Night Live episode he hosted last night shirtless.
Confessions of a Woman Comedy Writer
Allison Silverman accepts one from New York Women in Film & Television (and tells us why it's rare).
Comments
We have to
By: Mengembalikan J... | Sat, 09/26/2009 - 11:09
In my opinion everybody is facing reality. We have to
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Steve Carell
By: saiiyen | Tue, 08/11/2009 - 17:24
Unless I'm mistaken, nobody (at least in the columns, I haven't checked all of the comments) has brought up the fact that Steve Carell was the co-writer on "40-Year Old Virgin", and that this might have had the effect of separating that movie from the other Apatow-penned films in terms of the treatment of female characters. The female lead in "40-Year Old Virgin" helps provide the push Carell's character needs to become an adult, but she does it with him. She is ultimately the help and support he has been looking for, a family. In "Knocked Up," the female lead is more of a force of nature akin to the process of aging or graduating college, a forced maturity that is fought kicking and screaming, but whose inevitability must ultimately be accepted.
Times cover stories "confirm" nothing
By: alessandra_barbadoro | Tue, 08/11/2009 - 14:14
It should be pointed out that Faludi regularly criticizes so-called "movement shifts" reported by the Times, who are notorious for concluding nationwide trends from merely anecdotal evidence.
Apatow's movies aren't about women
By: scifun | Tue, 08/11/2009 - 10:48
The fixation about women's roles in Apatow's movies is understandable but a bit tiring, frankly. The movies are about the men, so of course the women play the "straight" part in the comedy, and that tends to involve being 2D characters that provide something to contrast the travails of the main characters. Ultimately, the question of whether the women come off as shrews or whatever doesn't register because they specifically are not the main characters. It seems like the criticism from female viewers jumps between the complaint that women are portrayed as too uptight (they are portrayed that way to provide contrast with the men) and what seems like almost jealousy that there's no women-centered Apatow comedies (not surprising seeing as Apatow and his buddies are, well, men). At the end of all the comedies, the women are shown to be grown up, and the men ultimately grow up themselves. That we don't see the women as 3D characters who still have fun, as the men are after they've grown up, is simply a product of the fact that the movies are about the men.
A more relevant discussion, I think, would be to question why there aren't female Apatows to make female-centered comedy. Certainly a large part of that is likely sexism inside Hollywood institutions, but the criticism of Apatow seems a bit off the mark.
And, lastly, my personal reason for not seeing Funny People is two-fold. First, the 3rd grade humor gets a little boring. I haven't seen The Hangover either, but at least there it seems like they were a little more creative in the gags. Secondly, I'm not really in the mood for a movie advocating the need to grow up--even already grown-up people can't just get up and get a job, so it's a bit too much of a stretch for me to believe that a loser pothead sitting on his ass for a decade could do the same. Frankly, I think Knocked Up, if released now instead of a few years ago, would face a similar new reality.
Apatow's *men* have to face reality
By: That Fuzzy Bastard | Tue, 08/11/2009 - 09:22
Okay, I see that you're writing this at 4 AM, so a certain amount of slack is to be cut, but... Your conclusion that Apatow's women have to face family responsibilities and men don't seems like precisely the opposite of what the movies are about. All of Apatow's movies have very specifically been about men learning that they need to abandon their adolescent bromance in favor of the domestic Whether its Steve Carrell abandoning his action figures, Seth Rogen leaving the flophouse behind, or Adam Sandler failing to appreciate children, the measure of a man in Apatowland is their ability to learn that dudeish fun is ultimately hollow, and taking care of your children is Where It's At.
Movies like the Apatow-aping The Hangover can be summed up as "Being dudes is a lotta fun, but you gotta spend time with your family 'cause chicks like that and dudes like chicks." What makes Apatow better than his imitators is that he's very perceptive about how ultimately unsatisfying dude-life is---the house in Knocked Up looks like a lotta fun for the first five minutes, and seems more and more purgatorial as the movie proceeds (culminating in the pinkeye outbreak that makes them look like junkies in a crackhouse).