Arts
The Ugly Truth’s Cynical Rewrite of Sally’s Fake Orgasm
And what it says about modern sex lives.
Everyone remembers when Meg Ryan operatically faked an orgasm in the middle of Katz’s Deli in When Harry Met Sally. She did it to prove to the cocky Billy Crystal that, even with his apparently prodigious sexual experience, he couldn’t tell the difference between a real orgasm and one that was expertly faked. Sally’s open-air climax was an effort to puncture Harry’s cocky assumption that his partners “have a pretty good time.” Meanwhile, Sally replaces the pleasure she’s apparently not getting from sex with the satisfaction of making Harry squirm. First, she gets the upper hand. Eventually, after finally hooking up with Harry, she presumably gets her real orgasm and true love.
Twenty years after Harry and Sally’s lunch date, a hit, R-rated comedy is broadcasting a decidedly different attitude regarding the intersection of male ego and female pleasure. The Ugly Truth, a deeply bitter twist on the romantic comedy, has its own restaurant orgasm scene. This time the woman, played by Katherine Heigl, has a real orgasm. But it’s manipulated by remote control and happens in entirely embarrassing circumstances. The point is not her humiliation, exactly; it’s even more cynical than that. Whether it’s real or fake or manufactured doesn’t matter. It’s the good performance that counts. “A fake orgasm is better than no orgasm at all,” her love interest, played by Gerald Butler, tells her.
The plot of The Ugly Truth hews pretty closely to When Harry Met Sally. Heigl plays Abby, the uptight, blonde producer of an unsuccessful local morning show. In an effort to goose ratings, her station manager gives a regular segment on her show to Mike (Butler)—a Neanderthal whose specialty is recommending that women who want to land a man should focus chiefly on appearances. “If you want a relationship, here’s how you get one,” he advises on-air. “It’s called a Stairmaster. No one falls in love with your personality at first sight.”
The crux of Mike and Abby’s relationship is established in an early scene where, over coffee, he explains in detail What Men Want—and begins molding her into the woman he wants her to be. He tells her that it’s important for her to flatter a man with positive responses, but cheerfully admits that the authenticity of that response—whether she’s laughing at a man’s jokes or quivering at his touch – is “irrelevant.”
Sally broke through Harry’s apeish tendencies by teaching him to see past “first sight.” In the end, when he is trying to win her back, Harry makes a laundry list of all her faults and explains that he loves her because of them. In The Ugly Truth, the opposite happens. Like Sally, the Heigl character initially resists the oaf who is trying to seduce her. But then she begins to absorb his lesson. At one point in their coffee conversation, she giggles and he says, “That’s good! Real or fake?” With a dead-serious game face, she responds, “You’ll never know.”
"Real or fake" is the question that hangs over the movie. A real orgasm happens in fake circumstances, and a fake one during real sex. After she makes the mistake of admitting a lack of familiarity with orgasms, Mike buys her a pair of vibrating panties, which she “accidentally” wears at a dinner in the presence of Mike, her hunky would-be boyfriend and a number of business superiors. The remote control to the panties “accidentally” ends up in the hand of a curious child. Poor Abby is left trying to explain marketing initiatives mid-shudder, as Mike smiles bemusedly at the convulsions he’s indirectly responsible for.
Later, Mike poses the question “fake or real?” in bed, while he and Abby are still having sex. Again, she responds, “You’ll never know.” Both laugh like it was silly for him to ask in the first place. In the moment of her fake orgasm, Sally was being more honest with Harry than she’d ever been. She was taking control of the sexual dialogue and demanding that Harry—and by extension the entire male audience—acknowledge that female pleasure has to matter to both partners. In The Ugly Truth real pleasure is beside the point. There is no authenticity, only performance.
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
scepticism
By: toronto | Mon, 08/10/2009 - 10:00
The best discussion of all this is Stanley Cavell's work on romantic comedy (in the movies and in Shakespeare), based on the notion (to be very rough) that men are trapped in a kind of scepticism (e.g. is this really my baby) that women don't have (e.g. whatever this is, it's my baby), and that this bleeds into male-female relations more generally (e.g. women can fake orgasms, men can't). The whole purpose of the Harry-Sally scenes was for him to recognise that she was a real person whose inner life was, and always would remain opaque to him -- for a couple to be a couple, they have to be two, as well as one. The Ugly Truth destroys all this, and ends up with no mutual acknowledgement at all (a performance is not what it means to be two, as well as one).
The Ugly Truth - the real one
By: lynch | Sat, 08/08/2009 - 20:05
My only real comment is how did you manage to watch this much of the movie? Even after reading & hearing several bad reviews, I still shelled out $7 to see this travesty of film-making (primarily, to see if Heigl could salvage the film); for only the third time in some forty years of film going, I walked out before the end.
The attitudes presented in this film are presented in such an offensive fashion that no one could have saved this film.
The Value Of A Fake Orgasm
By: icurhuman2 | Sat, 08/08/2009 - 17:13
The real truth about fake orgasms is that most men know when a woman is faking it but are so flattered that a woman would do this for them that they go along with the act, however, a return "bout" is not necessarily assured.
The difficulty in attaining a complete orgasm for a woman is directly linked to the confusion between an external nerve centre spasm and a deep nerve centre spasm, and a complete orgasm which combines the two internal and external spasms, and, many women don't experience any of these.
As women need to be totally relaxed with a lover to "lose control" casual sex never leads to a female orgasm, this is the only "ugly truth" people need to be aware of.
Thank you
By: PoeStorm | Thu, 08/06/2009 - 12:49
I watched 'The Ugly Truth' last night for a bit of comedy and was uncomfortably disappointed. I immediately saw the public orgasm scene as a badly done remix of 'When Harry Met Sally' - a more demeaning one at that. Why are all the women in these new comedies so unlike any female heroine I've ever identified with? I loved 'When Harry Met Sally'!!!
I took notice of Heigl when she spoke up about her role in 'Knocked Up,' agreeing that it's portrayal of women was sexist. It was nice to hear an actress owe up to the facts of hollywood. Finally! A woman with a brain and some critical framework... maybe not.
For me, the saddest part was all the female talent behind this film. I laughed in parts and tried my very best to enjoy the film, but that isn't how I wanted to watch a romantic comedy. I don't want to have to make excuses for a film, just so I can finish it. I couldn't settle into the film because at every turn it seemed hell bent on offending me - and I'm not talking about Bulter's character, I'm talking about Heigl's. Can't someone write a funny women who's more well rounded and has a larger world view on men, relationships, etc? Or are only neurotic women funny?
::steps down off soap box::
Too much dribble
By: mesher | Thu, 08/06/2009 - 06:01
All this is too much.
No content.
Too many words
Drop it . Leave it alone
Start a new thread.
Art is to be respected. In this case the reactions are degenerative
shes been faking it all this
By: idletom | Thu, 08/06/2009 - 03:59
shes been faking it all this time? golly tom
Apatovia not as bad as you say
By: emmy134 | Wed, 08/05/2009 - 14:40
I'm going to have to disagree with the stinging assessments of female sexuality in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Superbad. Yes, the two women in those films do aggressively seek out sex, but it doesn't seem to stem from any particularly enlightened or empowered reasons. The titular Sarah Marshall is first competing with her ex-boyfriend to see who can get their best orgasm on in adjoining rooms, then trying to get back with said ex-boyfriend whom she's largely used as a handbag holder on the red carpet. And in Superbad, underage drunk Becca seems to be acting out a porn star-esque parody of sexuality. Her long-time crush Evan puts the breaks on their activity due to mutual intoxication and a rightful intimidation at the thought of jumping into sex after never having kissed before that night. The ugliness of The Ugly Truth aside, give the Apatow men a little credit.
The best romantic comedy is
By: Murasaki | Wed, 08/05/2009 - 12:47
The best romantic comedy is still Tokyo Gore Police.
There are no new stories...
By: shanendoah | Wed, 08/05/2009 - 10:52
Maybe all this says is that audiences are tired of seeing new versions of Taming of the Shrew or Much Ado About Nothing, and that instead, we're ready for new versions of Measure for Measure or Alls Well that Ends Well.
We're not the first generation to have plays/movies that follow all the comedy tropes (they end in marriage/couplehood, afterall) and yet still leave a bad taste in our mouths, make us question the validity of that final relationship.
With Shakespeare we call them the Dark Comedies or the Problem Plays. While in our modern world, dark comedies usually end in death, for Shakespeare they ended in marriage. (Only tragedies or histories end in death.) Why are we so flustered by a dark "romantic" comedy? And why do we feel like it has to mean something different, just because women wrote it?