The New Yorker’s David Denby recently published a long essay in consideration of contemporary romantic comedy. Because it’s Denby and it’s the New Yorker, he’s able to wank off for 600 words or so before getting to his not at all uninteresting thesis: “For almost a decade, Hollywood has pulled jokes and romance out of the struggle between male infantilism and female ambition.” Citing Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up as “the culminating version of this story”, Denby then traces a history of the male-female relationship through romantic comedies of the ages, and five pages later concludes that Apatow’s film “represents what can only be called the disenchantment of romantic comedy.”
Denby certainly makes some preposterous statements in the piece–the idea that Vince Vaughn is some kind of second coming of Cary Grant who “has displayed a dazzling motormouth velocity, but” has never found “an actress who can keep up with him” was my personal favorite–but I don’t really have a problem with his methods. A lot of other people do. Of the commentary I’ve read, Emdashes is home to the most interesting/infuriating. The self-professed reader of “The New Yorker between the lines” laments that Denby “doesn\’t seem to have faced what\’s happened to dating”:
Throw in comics, MTV, Sex and the City, reality shows, Neil Strauss, Seinfeld, porn, online dating, and social networking sites, and you\’ve got part of a picture of how fucking romantic (to quote Stephin Merritt) the world seems to be. I\’m not saying no one ever had a sleazy thought before or failed to come through for their sweetheart. What I\’m saying is that just as screwball comedies were shiny fairy tales for the eras of disappointing early marriages, stock-market crashes, and limited opportunity for personal expression, There\’s Something About Mary is a shiny fairy tale for ours.
All well and good, but then Emdashes lets her argument lapse by posting “an email conversation a (female) film-minded friend.” You’ve seen this kind of thing on blogs before, surely, and as usual, what should probably have remained a joke amongst friends takes on a whole new life of its own once posted on the blog. Here’s the part that really rankled me: Emdashes and her friend conclude that Denby has failed to acknowledge the real-world state of contemporary romance. Emdashes’ friend cracks, “Also, if a woman had made Knocked Up, it would have been called Abort It, and it would have been a very short film.” Emdashes responds: “Ha! So true. Especially with Seth Rogen, who is no one’s idea of a catch. I laughed often during Knocked Up, but that’s a premise I couldn’t get over no matter how hard I tried.”
When I hear that kind of argument coming from women, I honestly wonder what kind of lives they lead–as if every 20-something woman in America just has loads of abortions, no big deal. Beyond the cringe factor of the joke, it seems like they’re confining this Abort It fantasy to a realm in which all women who unexpectedly become pregnant are easily able to have abortions–”able” both in the sense that a) they live in a major city where they have easy access to a clinic or doctor that will actually perform the procedure safely and without incident, and b) that they could face the decision to terminate a pregnancy without experiencing any kind of personal moral qualm or emotional trauma. That all seems to me to be more unrealistic than anything Apatow put on screen.
Stepping away from Denby and Emdashes for a moment, this brings us back to the elephant that’s always in the room when talking Knocked Up: the idea that Katherine Heigl’s character is poorly written, because someone like that would never get involved with someone like the character played by Seth Rogen. I know it’s a stretch to ask anyone whose natural analysis of character stops at “Pretty” or “Fat” to think this way, but do you think it’s maybe possible that the Katherine Heigl character was written that way for a reason? Is it so hard to imagine that a woman whose chief asset is her body, whose greatest aspiration is to follow in the footsteps of Giuliana DePandi (no offense to Giuliani), who is clearly lonely as hell (her only friend is apparently her shrewish older sister, who’s clearly occupied with her own pre-midlife crisis) would be lacking in self-confidence and self-worth, and for all of the reasons above, would be attracted to the unconditional love that a baby would represent?
It’s like there some kind of post-feminist block that won’t allow some female critics/viewers to admit that some real-world women are less than total braniacs, and/or that *most* women make decisions from time to time that don’t make total sense, and/or that in real life, attractive-but-dim women often date down the social ladder, picking men who they feel they can control without worrying that they’ll get dumped. At least Seth Rogen’s character showed promising glimpses, signs that he was capable of being genuinely caring, witty and kind. This puts him miles ahead of the average 23-year-old boy.
Here, I’m in agreement with Emdashes–”Spend a few hours reading Craigslist Casual Encounters, Nerve Personals, the multiple choices on social networking sites (what’s the difference between “random play” and “whatever I can get,” by the way?), Maxim, Gawker, ad nauseam, and suddenly Knocked Up is going to look real, real romantic to you”–and so, so glad that I’m not going to have to return to the world of dating anytime soon.
