Superbad: A Fine Bromance

The summer comedy season opened with Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, starring Seth Rogen as a pudgy, mouthy slob who carelessly impregnates pretty Katherine Heigl. The movie is supposed to be the story of how they fall in love, and into shared responsibility. But the scene with the deepest communion of personalities is when the Rogen character gets high in a Vegas motel room with … Heigl’s brother-in-law.

Today we have the summer’s last major comedy: Superbad, produced by Apatow and co-written by Rogen. It’s about a pudgy, mouthy slob named Seth (Jonah Hill) and his quieter, slightly more kempt buddy Evan (Michael Cera) who want, with variously intense degrees of desperation, to get laid before they graduate from high school. At the end of a night of wacky hijinks, the lads do wind up in a sleeping bag, exchanging intimacies with…each other.

Why don’t Apatow and Rogen just do the honorable thing and tell the world they’re gay? It would save them a lot of time wasted pretending their movies are about young men growing up and finding the right young woman. It would also save movie critics from having to find new ways of saying, about their maxi-raunch comedies, “Oh, but at heart they’re really sweet.”

And while Hollywood is being honest about the new strain of guy-meets-guy comedy — bromance, the word writer Dave Carnie coined to describe the strong emotional attachment of one man for another — maybe Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler should come out of the closet too. In Ferrell’s movies, male merging beats female interest to a pulp, and his latest, Blades of Glory, allows him several opportunities to stick his face in Jon Heder’s crotch. Sandler’s summer hit, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, took guy-guy friendship to its logical conclusion: two firefighters get married. At least that seemed as far as boy-meets-boy comedies could go, until Superbad‘s cuddle-up scene.

And yet there may be one more border to cross. When Apatow appeared last week on The Colbert Report, and was asked what was possibly left to show in male comedies, he instantly answered, “A penis.” I don’t doubt that Apatow was speaking ironically, yet there was self-revelation there to, since that’s exactly the sexual organ that the fellows in Knocked Up and Superbad (and his earlier The 40-Year-Old Virgin) are most obsessed by.

I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU JUDD AND SETH

I’m in a pretty small minority of critics who aren’t enchanted by the Apatow movies. The first four reviews I read online this morning of Superbad, all by women, in the New York and L.A. Timeses and the Washington and New York Posts, ranged from favorable to ecstatic. Manohla Dargis’ notice in the New York Times described the film’s phallo-neurosis with a gusto that soared into poetry: “If the penis is puzzled in Portnoy’s Complaint, as Alexander Portnoy’s shrink believes, in Superbad it is thoroughly, stunningly clueless and as violently tremulous as a divining rod at Hoover Dam.” (Congrats to Manohla, by the way, for getting shrink and penis into the same sentence.) The token male critic I consulted, Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal, was just as enthusiastic: this “bawdy, big-hearted” comedy is a “canny evocation of male friendship in all its richness and complexity.” It’s as if all these worthy scribes have the rapture, and I’m left behind.

A few caveats, then, before I go ranting on like the crank at the christening. I’m not a prude. I enjoy a good dirty joke, including more than a few in Knocked Up and Superbad. In my time I’ve praised ribald comedies (Clerks comes immediately to mind) and male-bonding frolics (Sideways). I don’t mind the Apatow movies; I’m not trying to make anyone feel guilty for liking them more than I do. I just wonder why they’ve become the template for popular and critically acclaimed comedy, and why guy-guy is just about the only kind around.

I guess I have to say that, like most other liberal New York heterosexuals I’m a card-carrying homophiliac; so in calling the films closet-gay, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. It just strikes me as a dominant trend in the year’s comedies (and action films, like 300 and Spider-Man 3).

Chuck & Larry, which opened four weeks ago, has already earned more than $100 million at the domestic box office; this is Sandler’s sixth consecutive year with a comedy that reached that healthy number. The movie is about two hetero firefighters — Sandler as Chuck and Kevin James as Larry — who pretend to be homosexual because, the script says, Larry can then get a better insurance policy for his kids. But it’s really because the film wants to indulge in both gay propaganda and gay bashing. Larry, still grieving over a wife three years dead, is the more evolved of the two; he feels no threat from the queer agenda, nor much interest in it. It’s Chuck who has problems even being considered gay. At their wedding, Larry is willing to exchange a perfunctory kiss; Chuck socks him. I now pronounce you Homo and Phobia.

The film then spends most of its time trying to cure Chuck of his animosity toward gays. He attends a gay ball dressed as Count Dracula and befriends a tough cop who’s secretly gay. Finally he convinces his macho pals in the firehouse, who had turned on him and Larry, that gay ain’t so bad. The “gay” firemen’s presumed crimes against nature matter less than their membership in the anti-arson brotherhood; camaraderie is the straight version of gay pride.

GAY-NECOLOGY

In Superbad, inattentively directed by Greg Mottola, the quasi-gay subtext is so obvious, it’s the love that dares to shriek its name. What I identified as guy-necology in my review of Knocked Up blossoms into gay-necology here.

Superbad was written by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, his boyhood pal from Vancouver; he says they started the script when they were 13. The film has obvious autobiographical elements, beyond the writers’ naming the main characters after themselves and setting it in their senior year in high school, when Goldberg got into Dartmouth and Rogen didn’t. That’s what happens to Evan and Seth in the movie.

Nothing Krafft-Ebing about separation anxiety, or, in Seth’s case, Ivy envy. It’s refreshing for a high school movie to acknowledge that kids can agonize as much about grades and college as they do about sex. But Seth is also jealous that Evan might be sleeping with — all right, sharing a dorm room with — their nerdiest classmate, Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who also was accepted at Dartmouth. And Seth needs to have sex with a cool girl named Jules (note: guy’s name) that night, that very night, not to commune with her, or even to get orgasmic pleasure for the first time from another person, but so he can practice sexual techniques with someone he knows and be a stud at the state college he’s destined for. But what the 18-year-old virgin really needs, and ends up getting, is bedtime with Evan.

One more and. Seth confesses that when he was eight he obsessively created drawings of penises. The movie ends with dozens of ornate examples of his draftsmanship.

Somewhere buried in Superbad is the poignant coming-of-age fable — the glimmer of a suggestion that Seth’s dependence on Evan is adolescent, even infantile, and that at some point he has to grow up and accept that friends can be a continent apart and still be close. Or not close: friendships, like erections, can subside. But to find that valuable truth, you have to dig through an avalanche of d— jokes and strenuous slapstick.

Anyway, I’m glad the movie exists, because it has a fabulous performance by Mintz-Plasse, a first-time movie actor with a beguiling, almost cunning dorkishness. The comedy comes from Fogell’s belief that he is somehow cool, though he must have been told the opposite three times a day since he was in pre-school. Apatow has a habit of promoting his featured losers to starring roles. Rogen was one of Steve Carell’s friend-torturers in The 40-Year-Old Virgin before getting Knocked Up, and Hill was a Rogen buddy in that film before Superbad. From this natural selection of the lamest, Mintz-Plasse has proved he merits a full-length Fogell feature.

MEN WITHOUT WOMEN

School comedies from as far back as Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman in 1925 set up the basic conflict of nerd vs. jock. The athlete was seen as stuck-up, taking adulation as his due, knowing “you gotta be a football hero to win the love of a beautiful girl.” So virtually every high school or college comedy dramatized the triumph of the outsider against the sportsman establishment. In 1989, Heathers lifted that vengefulness to a tragicomic delirium.

In Superbad and other contemporary school movies, the misfit heroes are usually mocked or brutalized by the athletes. Well, it’s true that the nerds’ main form of exercise is masturbation, but they are every bit as competitive as the towel-snapping guys on the football team. The difference is that their aggression is verbal, not physical. Instead of wanting to score the winning touchdown, they want to top their friends in the display of ribald wit. They’re joke jocks. And since they don’t think girls are funny (their touchstone movie “classics” are Caddyshack and Porky’s, not Earth Girls Are Easy and Clueless), and since the jokes they make often have a pretty deep misogynist streak, they play to the one audience they think will appreciate them: their male friends, which is to say, themselves. To each his Onan.

In this all-guy world, girls are the mysterious Other — which, from my teen recollections, sounds about right. But they are only the goal: get the girl because of the challenge. They are not only unknowable, they’re hardly worth knowing. They’re a treat to see swinging their hips as they pass the misfits; but they don’t understand the guy game, which is to assert domination by being rudely clever. They can walk the walk but they can’t talk the talk.

Being long past my youth, I can’t say if this is sociologically accurate. But males and females not charming and testing one another by talking — that’s a big change from the best old movies.

It was clear as long ago as the late 80s, and When Harry Met Sally (not Larry) that talk was the new sex. But in that film Meg Ryan got laughs by faking an orgasm. If you go back to some of the great romantic comedies of the 30s and 40s — Bombshell, The Awful Truth, The Women, Midnight, Ball of Fire, The Lady Eve, Adam’s Rib — you’ll see that women got to be at least as witty as the men, and that was very witty indeed. And it wasn’t only male writers inventing funny things for actresses to say; some of these films were written by women (as was When Harry Met Sally).

Hollywood thinks girls aren’t funny any more. Today, smart or sassy talk is something only the guys get to do. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin the main attraction of the female romantic interest played by Catherine Keener is that she laughs at Carell’s jokes. The Apatow dictum (ha-ha, I said dictum) is that women can’t aspire to equality in cracking jokes, but guys will indulge them and let them be the receptive audience.

Which is about all that’s left for female moviegoers to do. Except for the months from December to February, when the tonier Oscar hopefuls allow some good roles for actresses, women have practically disappeared from movies. A decade ago, when the teen audience had established itself as the dominant box office demographic, producers scrambled to “young down” their projects, casting actors in their 20s for roles written for characters in their 30s and 40s. Now, I wonder, are producers “guying up” their movies? Are they having romantic comedy and drama scripts rewritten from guy-girl to guy-guy?

I mean — subtextually, of course — gay-gay.