"... It had been the rule that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard read law and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction. The only essential was that he should live 'like a gentleman'- that is with a tranquil disdain for mere moneygetting a passive openness to the finer sensations one or two fixed principles as to the quality of wine and an archaic probity that had not yet learned to distinguish between private and 'business' honour."-Edith Wharton
Scene one: L and I lie on the sofa watching "." At first I think that the unpleasant sensation in my nose is some kind of physical manifestation for how much I hate the film. And apparently L and I are the only two people on the planet who feel this way."I love how they make Jewish men out to be fat unattractive decadent and oversexed," one of us says."Yeah. And I love how they imply that marriage and family is secretly what all women want because they are humorless harpies and it is a devastating trap for men who only want to be free. ""Apparently no one likes being married but us."We sigh sad. I grow palpably angry as the film wears on. "Do you smell that?" I hiss to L. He doesn't. Finally. I sprint into the kitchen as I recall that L put water on for me for tea - over an hour ago. The kettle is scorched. The whole kitchen reeks of molten aluminum. And so to me. "Knocked Up" will always smell like fire and anger. Scene Two: L and I drive home from a delicious Ethiopian dinner with the Novelist and the Do-Gooder Lawyer. The wipers on the Mini go at a steady clip as we zip along the freeway."I never want to have a portable DVD player for the kid okay?" I say. We do not have a kid but you never can tell with these things. "Why can't we just talk to it? Or sing?""Let's sing," urges L. "I'm feeling tired."And so we do a few rounds of Row. Row Your Boat. "Now like monsters!" cries L and we do a round in loud monster voices."Now like hummingbirds!" I say and we do a round in high squeaky bird voices."Now like queens!" chimes L and we do a round in posh British monarch accents. Then we do Jack Nicholson. Bob Dylan an opera singer cat meows and pig snorts."I feel very human right now," says L and I laugh and we even get the parking space right in front of the house. Because sometimes things work out perfectly.
Interestingly. I really liked Knocked Up (my main objection was the assumption that people should stay together for the sake of the kids). And yet I also think that of all my friends your ideas about marriage are closest to mine.... But then. I didn't see the movie as thinking that all women want marriage more that most of us human beings have no idea what the *?!?*! we're doing when we get into it....
My main issue with it was that it seems modeled on an outdated almost 1970s model of gender relations. Men and women are in two different camps with no friendships across the boundaries and with entirely different ways of looking at the world. And I just don't buy that anymore. Further let's say they do stay together. Implausible but fine. Why does the film treat the baby as the transformative event that catapults the loser into maturity and responsibility? It's like the baby is a bigger deal for him than it is for her! Jesus. And no suggestion as I suspect would be the case that the person with no job prospects take point on child care while the high-profile career person goes back to work. No. The solution *must* be that he gets a career too. That and the rampant anti-semitism. God. I hated that film. Except for the dance club bouncer monologue. That was genius.
I didn't love Knocked Up but I didn't hate it either. It actually reminded me of a lot of guys that I knew both in high school and college - there was pretty much nothing else going on but getting high and some half-baked (pardon the pun) ideas around career possibilities often involving film-making or entrepreneurship. I love your descriptions of married life. You are such a good writer - I'm jealous. Le mari and I were just commenting two days ago about how hateful the car DVD players are. I like singing. My favorite hobby at home is to change song lyrics to ones that will fit my pets.
Anti-semitism? I didn't see that at all. Rogen played the same character as he did in "The 40 Year-Old Virgin," which featured a diverse cast of semi-unappealing oversexed male characters. Anyway. I'm not sure the 'men feel trapped by commitment' meme is anachronistic. In your two PhD household gender relations have presumably progressed beyond the 'Everybody Loves Raymond' model. But the 'men want sex/women want commitment' idea,' while grossly oversimplified has a foundation in evolutionary biology - as do all manner of other behaviors that we would do well to rid ourselves of. But the evolutionary drag is very real; men have been built by nature to reproduce with every member of the opposite sex who appeals to them. The civilizing influence of the beloved should purge a good husband/boyfriend of any wish to act on these desires. And the responsibilities of family should also have a similarly civilizing effect. To the degree that we have any kind of functioning society at all it is because violent and lustful men are capable of being civilized. The end.
There's a certain optimism to thinking that an event such as a baby could transform a guy who seriously thinks he can live off of a porn-film site in spite of having done no research to see if he has competitors. That's such an appalling oversight that I'm skeptical. As a result you could argue that the movie is if anything anti-male: there isn't a single guy in the film that I'd be happy to see a female friend end up with. On the anti-Semitism question this is where I look a bit shamefaced and say. "um.. somebody in the movie was Jewish?" I never noticed any sort of religion in there at all....
The Seth Rogen character was - thus jokes about his stand-up hair. The only reason it made me bristle is because he is meant to be an oversexed repulsive decadent lout who is at the same time something less than masculine; this is a very old stereotype about Jewish men in our culture. See "Sex and the City" for further elaboration on this theme. Monsieur P. I am afraid that the "evolutionary biology" argument also holds little sway with me as it is rooted in nineteenth century models of gender and morality which hold that women are (or ought to be) a civilizing influence on men who are otherwise at the mercy of their physical drives. By way of comparison the stereotype of the eighteenth century and earlier interestingly was that women's sexuality is wanton and rampant by definition and it takes a strong man and a heavy bible to keep her under control. The structures that we take to be "natural" are nothing of the kind. We are creatures of culture to such an extent that we often do not even know it. Lastly. I'd like to point out that the only person who made a rational recommendation - the mother who told her to "take care of the problem" and then promptly vanished from the film - was presented as something of a villain viz the line "you can then have a real baby later." Now. I know that that would defeat the premise of the movie. But just imagine- if she had only taken her mother's wise advice then she would never have had to deal with her lout the movie would have ended after only ten minutes and I wouldn't have burned by teakettle. Everybody wins!
Huh. I'm out of synch with my stereotypes; my instant and heartfelt recognition of "pudgy slacker with poorly-researched internet business idea" trumped all else. Maybe it's a geography-specific awareness; there's less visible Jewish culture and (as a result? a side effect?) fewer visible Jewish stereotypes in CA than I remember from NY which is sort of interesting in and of itself. Makes me wonder if you got a bunch of West-coasters & East-coasters together and asked them to rank the prevalence of various stereotypes movies how different the results would be based not on the movies but on the stereotypes we're all most accustomed to seeing.
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