Bromances, Buddy Films, and Chick Flicks more

Bromances, Buddy Films, and Chick Flicks: The Fitful Evolution of the Post-Patriarchal Romantic Comedy Dr. John Alberti Department of English Northern Kentucky University Highland Heights KY 41099 alberti@nku.edu “That tap-tap-tapping sound you hear is another nail being driven into the coffin of the romantic comedy.” Thus began Manohla Dargis’s review of The Ugly Truth in the New York Times. She goes on to lament, “the romantic comedy is nearly as dead as Meg Ryan’s career.” Career women atavistically obsessed with bridal gowns and lavish weddings; supposedly adult man/boys trapped in states of perpetual adolescence; a fixation on homophobic humor, misogyny, and homosocial male bonding—there is ample evidence to support Dargis’s sense of despair. Predicting the end of the romantic comedy as a viable cinematic genre is nothing new. In 1979, Brian Henderson published an essay in Film Quarterly entitled “Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?” Discussing romantic comedies in the context of the dramatic changes in the construction and understanding of gender and gender roles in the 1960s and 70s, Henderson argued that where traditional “romantic comedy posited men and women willing to meet on a common ground and to engage all their faculties and capacities in sexual Alberti 2 dialectic. . . .what we begin to see now [i.e., 1979] in films is a withdrawal of men and women from this ground (or of it from them)” (321). Of course, romantic comedy has not only survived the period of crisis Henderson described but also experienced several cycles of boom and bust since then. However, Henderson’s central concern—the impact of an evolving “sexual dialectic” and the continuing influence of feminism on romantic comedy—remains relevant. And while there has been a strain of cultural criticism that stresses the transhistorical nature of romantic comedy, most recent studies of contemporary cinematic romantic comedy agree with Celestino Deleyto’s sensible observation (pace Dargis—and remember she had just seen The Ugly Truth) that “romantic comedy has always been in a process of constant transformation” (168). In fact, we could even consider the romantic comedy to be in a periodic upswing, both in terms of movies released and the bottom line of box office revenues. How do we reconcile, then, Dargis’s pessimism over what she sees as the retrograde nature of so many romantic comedies with their fixture in the contemporary movie production cycle? An alternative understanding of what might seem to be problematic characteristics of so many contemporary romantic comedies reads then not as symptoms of a genre in its death throes but as a genre in transition, a transition manifesting itself in terms of a series of crises relating to the reconstruction of gender and sexual identities within the narrative framework of the Hollywood romantic comedy. This transition/crisis defines what the title of this essay means by the evolution of the post-patriarchal romantic comedy. This evolution is fueled by a combination of an increasingly niche-fragmented and unstable cinema audience for romantic comedies as well as ongoing demographic and cultural Alberti 3 changes related to the reconstruction of gender and sexuality within the broader society. The excesses and contradictions that Dargis refers to represent the cultural work of revising narratives of love, sex, and gender in the context of a larger social struggle over the meaning and possibility of a post-patriarchal world. These crises manifest themselves most significantly and, judging by their commercial success, in ways that closely resonate with contemporary movie goers, in the romantic comedies centered around the work of Judd Apatow, especially his influential diptych The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, as well as the “bromance” movie cycle represented by key movies such as I Love You, Man and Superbad. I will explore some key sources of debate and even frustration with these movies in relation to the following critical narrative issues and contradictions arising from the evolution of the post-patriarchal comedy: • The crisis in the social, narrative, and symbolic function of the masculine-coded character: the question of “what use are men”? • The crisis in terms of narrative desire inherent to the functioning of the romantic comedy: not only what do men and women want but also what does it mean to want to be a man? • The crisis in tension between potentially contradictory utopian visions: the desire for egalitarian gender roles and relationships versus the desire for familiar, unproblematic, and clearly differentiated gender identities. • The crisis in narrative meaning resulting from an adherence to/deconstruction of binary constructions of gender and sexuality. Alberti 4 Since Henderson posited a crisis in romantic comedy thirty years ago, a number of articles, studies, and essay collections have explored different reasons for and manifestations of this crisis, including the increasing inability to represent women’s desire solely in terms of the conventional heterosexual marriage. The hetero-normative, marriage-centered plot structure of the pre-1970s romantic comedy may have represented “men and women willing to meet on a common ground and to engage all their faculties and capacities in sexual dialectic,” according to Henderson, but they also functioned as a containment strategy, a strategy that facilitated a wide range of gender non-conformist behavior among women characters from the screwball comedy to the American bedroom farces of the early 1960s without seriously challenging the larger stability of gender roles themselves. No matter how subversive or androgynous a woman’s behavior in these movies (to cite just two examples, Katherine Hepburn’s sexually aggressive Susan Vance in Bringing Up Baby or Veronica Lake dressed as a boyish hobo accompanying Joel McCrea from Hooverville to Hooverville in Sullivan’s Travels), the inevitable containment of these transgressive energies within the confines of patriarchal marriage acted as both a cultural and narrative safeguard against the larger subversive implications of these energies. The “sexual dialectic” Henderson referred to resolved itself into the mythic unity of the stable marriage, and even if both filmmakers and audience members implicitly understood this unity as ultimately preposterous, the dominant social and narrative codes governing the representation of romance in the movies made sure this understanding remained implicit. It is exactly this implicit suspicion of the ability of patriarchal hetero-normative marriage to successfully contain the energies generated by the sexual dialectic that has become Alberti 5 increasingly explicit since the late 1960s. Marriage, or course, still operates as a crucial structuring device in contemporary romantic comedies, but a deep ambivalence marks its role as object of women’s desire, an ambivalence that troubles the identification of romantic comedies as “chick flicks” within the highly stratified niche marketing strategies of modern Hollywood. If the question of “what do women want” haunts contemporary romantic comedy, the movies I am looking at in this essay, movies often described as reactions against chick flicks, ask the even more potentially disturbing question, “what do men want”? Again, this question implies two further questions: “what does it mean to want to be a man?” and, most directly connected to the crisis of masculinity depicted in these movies, “what use are men?” both socially and in terms of narrative function. The destabilizing of desire in the romantic comedy has complicated and confused the binary ideal of the sexual dialectic. Within the movie atelier of Judd Apatow, the question of “what use are men” is often quite explicitly raised by the male characters themselves in the movies, as in the Las Vegas hotel room scene from Knocked Up when the character of Pete, played by Paul Rudd, expresses his amazement to the putative hero of the movie, Seth Rogen’s Ben Stone, that his wife could possibly love him and want him around. The pairing of the characters of Pete and Seth places Knocked Up within a subgenre of buddy romantic comedies that, as contemporary critics such as Richard Corliss have pointed out, can be seen as part of a trend to isolate and even banish women from romantic comedies through films combining homosocial longing with homophobic panic: “In this all-guy world, girls are the mysterious Other. . . . But they are only the goal: get the girl because of the challenge. They are not only unknowable, they’re hardly worth knowing.” I think this is a valid line of analysis, but I Alberti 6 want to suggest another way of looking at these movies: as part of a project of reconstructing the heterosexual romantic comedy male hero, a post-patriarchal hero who preserves the logic of the sexual dialectic Henderson referred to but that also questions the very subject position of masculinity itself within the romantic comedy. In Apatow’s movies—both those he has written and directed and those he has produced and/or inspired, as in the case of Superbad and I Love You, Man—the alpha male has been rigorously excised from the plot, a recognition of how traditional representations of a dominant male character, dominant in terms of conventional male attractiveness, physical power, and social status, have become a radically destabilizing force in contemporary romantic comedies (the movie Dargis despaired over—The Ugly Truth—is a virtual case study of this observation). The character of Mr. Big in Sex in the City foregrounds the degree to which the conventional alpha male character disrupts the emerging algebra of the post-patriarchal romantic comedy, as a core topic of conversation among the four lead women in the show focuses on whether a longterm relationship with such a throwback construction of masculinity (echoed in the form of Don Draper from Mad Men as well as in the main romantic conflicts between mature women and aging alpha males in Nancy Meyer’s two most recent romantic comedies, Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated) could ever be viable, however nostalgically attractive such a relationship might seem. The Apatow cycle of movies approaches the question of the post-patriarchal romantic comedy from the unlikely direction of the male buddy movie and derives conflicts over heterosexual bonding from what are seen as the more fundamental conflicts surrounding homosocial bonding. With the exception of Superbad, a high-school coming of age variation on Alberti 7 American Graffiti that ends with a shopping date at a mall, all of the movies under discussion here lead to marriage. As Corliss points out, from a conventional patriarchal perspective, women are indeed regarded by the male characters in these movies as the mysterious Other, and the men endlessly, graphically, and, most important, anxiously discuss women’s sexuality and anatomy. Their efforts at sexual boasting and claims of sexual mastery are subjected to endless ridicule, both from their other male friends and situationally from the plot situations they find themselves in. In a key sense, male sexuality is the real mysterious Other for these characters, a source of inexplicable desire and humiliation and an aspect of identity that renders them almost useless as functioning members of society. In these movies, the male characters are represented as not only romantically unattached and even alienated (as in the evocative title, The 40 Year Old Virgin) but socially unattached and isolated as well. Under or unemployed, these men exist in a state of perpetual adolescence not so much out of selfishness as aimlessness; specifically, the lack of clearly defined social roles that are necessarily encoded for masculinity. The title sequence from Knocked Up exemplifies this situation. As the music of the Wu-Tang Clan plays under the production company logos, signifying the exaggerated and parodic forms of hyper-masculinity associated with rap, the movie opens on a group of unkempt and unfit young men, apparently in their twenties, engaged in adolescent horse play around a half-filled, stagnating suburban swimming pool. The music provides the only sound track to a montage of what we take to be their typical daily activities-roughhousing, smoking dope, visiting theme parks—all played in slow motion as if they were exciting action sequences. The movie positions these young men as classic examples of perpetual adolescence, and unless the viewer recognizes the actor Seth Rogen as the star of the film from the credits, there is nothing in this opening sequence to label any of these characters as the Alberti 8 potential hero of the story. These characters are not just positioned as ugly ducklings or diamonds in the rough; they are aggressively unattractive, personally dedicated to rejecting qualities that would render them as good candidates for any kind of stable long-term relationship, whether economic or romantic. The rhetorical move being made here, however, is a claim for radical honesty. Within a genre almost by definition based on fantasy and wish fulfillment, and in the case of Knocked Up within a movie whose plot resolution exemplifies an almost ludicrously unlikely male fantasy, these movies appeal to both men and women in the audience with the claim that male desire and insecurity will be exposed with ruthless candor. I emphasize the appeal to both men and women, because the key to the marketing success of these movies stems from their ability to combine the box office appeal of both chick flicks and buddy movies, to create a date movie with crossgender appeal. This candor extends as well to the representation of the pathology implicit within the comic situation of these isolated male characters. Early in The 40 Year Old Virgin, for example, Seth Rogen’s character of Cal remarks to his other dysfunctional male co-workers that he seriously wonders whether the title character of Andy, played by Steven Carell, might be a serial killer. The hyperbole behind this joke turns more serious at the crisis point of Andy’s relationship with Trish, played by Catherine Keener, when Trish learns that Andy’s odd behavior and reluctance to consummate their relationship stem not from psychosis but from his embarrassment over his sexual inexperience. While Trish is relieved to learn that Andy does not plan to kill her, we are meant to understand her initial fear as real. This is an astonishing scene to find within a mass-market romantic comedy, Alberti 9 acknowledging and even foregrounding the threat of sexual violence that usually remains scrupulously suppressed within the conventional patriarchal heterosexual romance. This relentless focus on male pathology recurs in all the movies I am discussing, as in the morning after breakfast scene in Knocked Up where Ben reveals to Alison his aspiration to become a successful Internet pornographer, or in the repeated concerns about sexual “normalcy” throughout Superbad. In all these cases, the underlying social and sexual inadequacies and anxieties of these characters become a virtue in that they prevent the male characters from displaying the alpha aggression or ambition to ever realize these obsessions, a point underlined by Andy’s almost ashamed admission that “no, I didn’t want to kill you.” So what construction of masculinity can take the place of the alpha male in the postpatriarchal romance? There have been several possibilities offered by scholars of the genre, including Deleyto’s suggestion that the lover may be replaced by the friend in certain romantic comedies, an idea she derives from a close reading of the popular 1990s movie My Best Friend’s Wedding and which contains interesting implications for the movies I am discussing, as they all take as a central theme the relationship between love and friendship, exemplified of course by the title I Love You, Man: It is as if the new climate of social and sexual equality between men and women had rendered heterosexual desire less vital, as if the perfectly codified conventions that have been valid for so long had lost much of their meaning and become nothing more than picturesque museum pieces—to be admired but not believed. Disenchanted by this state of affairs the genre has started to explore other types of relationships between people and to consider their incorporation into their Alberti 10 plots. . . . . Friendships between men, between women, or between men and women have started to proliferate in the space of romantic comedy. (181-182) In fact, I would extend Deleyto’s suggestion by contending that we can look at the Apatow cycle as offering not a single replacement for the alpha male but a bifurcated model of male identity. In the movies I am discussing, this bifurcated model appears in two forms. The first and dominant functional version of this model builds on the logic of the buddy movie to offer a literally bifurcated hero, two parts that go into making a single whole. This is essentially the model of I Love You, Man, a movie neither written, directed, nor produced by Apatow but which shares a genealogy with Apatow’s films through the director John Hamburg’s work on Apatow’s cult television series Undeclared and their mutual connection to the work of Ben Stiller, a comic actor who pioneered the version of the obsolete, Beta male we see in the four movies we are looking at here. Many of the reviews of I Love You, Man focused on the substitution of the “bromance” between the two main male characters, Peter and Sydney (played by Paul Rudd and Jason Segel) for the more conventional heterosexual romance between Peter and Zooey (played by Rashida Jones). Potentially overlooked, however, is the central act of agency on Zooey’s part that impels the narrative logic of the movie: her desire to “fix” Peter, a standard plot complication of patriarchal romance in both movies and sitcoms, but with a twist. If the post 1970s romantic comedy often hinged on the need for consciousness-raising on the part of the conventional male hero and his need to develop a greater sensitivity to the needs of the woman he is seducing, I Alberti 11 Love You, Man can be described as a consciousness-lowering movie. Zooey’s frustration lies in Peter’s status as a conflict-free male hero. Sensitive, polite, responsible, and gainfully employed, Peter’s character contains the seeds of a radical deconstruction of the romantic comedy beyond the substitution Deleyto describes in My Best Friend’s Wedding, where Julia Roberts’s character cannot achieve a union of friendship and sexual fulfillment but instead loses her sexual love interest and remains bonded to her gay male best friend. Instead, almost out of loyalty to maintaining the plot structure of the conventional patriarchal romantic comedy, a plot structure based on an inherent conflict between what are seen as the immutable differences between men and women, Zooey encourages Peter to seek out male companionship that will accentuate their gender differences. In his friendship/bromance with the androgynously-named Sydney, Peter forms a kind of yin/yang dyad repeated in the adolescent buddies of Superbad and prefigured in the friendship between Ben and the identically-named Pete (also played by Paul Rudd) in Knocked Up. The persistence of this dyad within the Apatow cycle is reflected in the repetition of the casting, with Seth Rogen and Jason Segel repeatedly portraying slovenly ids to Rudd’s wellgroomed but depressed superego. (Rudd’s career itself mirrors the crisis over the alpha male in contemporary romantic comedy. Possessed of leading man looks, Rudd first appeared in movies as the aspirational heterosexual love interest in Clueless, even “rescuing” the character of Cher from an office bully. Since then, his roles often involve using sarcasm and irony to undermine his attractiveness, while playing both gay and straight characters within romantic comedies). The panic over the crisis in romantic comedy plotting that seems to impel I Love You, Man thus in part explains the obsession with gay sexuality and the mixture of homophobia and Alberti 12 homophilia that runs throughout these movies and that has given rise to the term “bromance” itself. The final sleeping bag scene in Superbad is exemplary in this regard. After a long night where the two heroes, Seth and Evan, played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera and named after the screenwriters of the movie, the ubiquitous Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, search for alcohol to bring to a party where they claim their goal is to use intoxication as a means to initiate sexual relationships with the two young women they desire, the shaggy dog narrative ends with them sleeping over at Evan’s house and confronting the real crisis they are dealing with: their impending separation after the summer when Evan goes away to college. The two characters, whose dialogue throughout the movie combines overdetermined protestations of heterosexual desire with an obsessive fixation on penises (clinically so in Seth’s case), end the movie declaring their love for each other, an admission each makes with a sense of relief and which ironically allows them to successfully negotiate Deleyto-style friendship-based relationships with the young women they had been pursuing. As the title of this essay states, these movies represent a fitful evolution, not a solution, towards the post-patriarchal romantic comedy. Ambivalence over this evolution is evidenced by the instability of the bifurcation of the alpha male hero as well as the absurdity of the central conflict in I Love You, Man; namely, that Peter too well combines sexual desire and emotional intimacy. The last example of bifurcation confirms this ambivalence by presenting two versions of the future of romantic comedies as well as heterosexual romance, one utopian, one dystopian, and that is the doppelganger marriages of Knocked Up. Within the wish fulfillment fantasy of the reclamation of Seth Rogen’s Ben and his building of a relationship with Katherine Heigl’s successful career woman Alison, Apatow Alberti 13 inserts a kind of compressed John Cassavetes film in the form of the strained marriage between Paul Rudd’s Pete and Leslie Mann’s Debbie (that Mann is also Apatow’s spouse lends extra cogency to this relationship, a cogency Apatow explores even further with his subsequent casting of Mann as a frustrated wife in Funny People). A bourgeois yuppie couple raising two young daughters, Pete and Debbie experience the deterioration of their marriage as the romance develops between Ben and Alison. Pete begins to envy what he sees as Ben’s freedom and Debbie what she sees as the youth and sexual attractiveness of her younger sister Alison. More to the point, they both feel trapped not only by marriage but also by their adoption of atavistic gender roles—the smothering stay-at-home mom; the bored, increasingly distant dad--out of the most conventional situation comedies. Whereas most of the arguments between characters in Knocked Up are leavened by jokes and exaggeration, the conflicts between Pete and Debbie bring the movie to a halt, both thematically and also in terms of the plot momentum, as Ben and Alison become stand-ins for the audience, awkward witnesses to moments of potentially irreconcilable anger and resentment. Two scenes between Pete and Debbie are exemplary. In the first, Debbie expresses her concern to Pete over her discovery that a convicted sex offender has moved into the neighborhood. Instead of sharing her concern, Pete mocks what he sees as Debbie’s overprotectiveness, which leads her to complain about Pete’s lack engagement. The scene begins as a comic interplay based on how these two characters have fallen into stereotyped gender roles, but the tone changes from banter to outright hostility at the end, as Debbie angrily hurls obscenities at an increasingly passive-aggressive Pete. Later, their marriage reaches a crisis point when Debbie discovers that Pete, instead of having an affair, has been lying to her in order to participate in a fantasy baseball league. Rather than the merry mix-up of traditional farce, this misunderstanding leads to a poignant expression of despair from Debbie over what seems to be Alberti 14 the impossibility of their relationship. The conclusion is tragic rather than comic. Pete and Debbie’s misery begins to function as the main impediment to Katherine’s final commitment to a relationship with Ben, and although Pete and Debbie achieve a kind of rapprochement after the trip to Las Vegas alluded to above, the conflict is never finally resolved. Ben and Alison finally bond over the birth of their baby, submerging Alison’s never explicitly resolved reservations about the example set by her sister and brother-in-law, but as an audience we are left with an uneasy sense of the long-term implications of their relationship. As the popularity of this latest cycle shows, reports of the death of the romantic comedy have been greatly exaggerated. Rather than seeing the genre as either an enduringly transcendent narrative archetype or as constantly under threat of extinction, we can better understand the romantic comedy not as static but as a genre constantly in transition. The reconstruction of gender identities and roles that Henderson pointed to as a threat to the genre remains both a source of crisis but also a source of vitality. The particular version of the crisis that I am describing affects the narrative logics of a number of contemporary genres—the potential narrative obsolescence of traditional versions of masculine identity. The idea of obsolescence may initially seem counter-intuitive in reference to contemporary mainstream American cinema, where critics have rightly noted the virtual disappearance of women from central roles within key genres, including of course the bromantic comedy, but this obsession with male narrative function is itself a sign of anxiety over male identity. The title I Love You, Man suggests both this obsession and anxiety. Alberti 15 Works Cited Abbott, Stacy and Debbie Jermyn. Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema. New York: I.B. Taurus, 2009. Print. Corliss, Richard. "Superbad: A Fine Romance." Time. 17 August 2007. Web. 15 October 2009. Dargis, Manohla. "Girl Meets Ape, and Complications Ensue." The New York Times. 24 July 2009. Web. 16 October 2009. Deleyto, Celestino. "Between Friends: Love and Friendship in Contemporary Hollywood Romantic Comedies." Screen 44.2 (2003): 167-182. Print. Evans, Peter William and Celestino Deleyto. Terms of Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and 1990s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Print. Henderson, Brian. "Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?" Rickman, Gregg. The Film Comedy Reader. New York: Limelight, 2001. 310-326. Print.