Mike,
The Hang-Over seemed to me to be more or less what it promised to be: a clever premise (the expectation that bachelor party in Vegas has no consequences is inverted an turns out to be nothing but consequences) more than adequately implemented. The ending was a cop-out, I thought; as with all of these movies, I want them to be much darker than they are really allowed to be, and this one did the usual thing of making everything happy, even after having gone much deeper into dark places than most examples of the genre tend to.

Your first point, I think, is right, but I don’t think any of them were ever trying to keep team patriarchy at bay; I just think a certain amount of the desire to opt out comes from a sense of distaste with a gender role they don’t care to play. And while in a real economic sense they are certainly exploiting women, they don’t, I think, see it that way (which is not to say that they are right, but simply to characterize their motivations as they would see it), and would almost certainly understand it as a purely consequence free activity. In fact, I would even suggest that they are drawn to this mode of making (a web site cataloging when big name actresses get naked, right?) a living for precisely this reason: the internet creates the appearance of no consequences, allowing them to avoid even having to think about how their masculinity will mesh with feminine type people (iow, because those women are on movies, they aren’t real, and are thus attractive exactly for their unreality). It’s a good point, though, and I may be misreading those scenes in my memory.

Your second point, well, I really was struck by how little enthusiasm the movie seemed to have for Rogen’s job. He just looked so joyless, so unlike himself. And I could be wrong, again — it was just my reaction — but my reading hinges on that reaction: I see the “get a job like your father” to be one that the movie settles on, but without much enthusiasm for it, and it registers this dissatisfaction by making the job a kind of noble sacrifice for Rogen. But you’re right, it’s sort of ridiculous in terms of larger economic trends, even willfully mystifying.

I think it is worth noting that the ambition of stoner Rogin in Knocked Up was to profit off pornography, not just viewing it but cataloging and re-selling it (so the women in question would presumably get paid). It’s hard to read that as him living his life as a desperate way of keeping joining ‘Team Patriarchy’ at bay.

Indeed, were we meant to read Rogin’s final job as a soulcrusher? I think there’s little evidence in the movie for that, and indeed I found it a little twisted the way the movie implied the real challenges facing the average American male at this point in the Post-Fordist USA is just getting off the couch and staying sober long enough to land a sweet magic internet job.

laughter can surely serve as a means of avoidance and deferral, but since it also often has, or is thought to have, a critical function i personally would be hesitant to connect it to the one or the other in general.

i’ve found the fourth essay in northrop frye’s ‘anatomy of criticism’ to be pretty helpful in conceiving of the different modes and genres in terms of their structural interrelations. otherwise i wouldn’t really know where to start. ‘comedy… well, they’re funny?’ etc.

a lot of these movies seem to me to depend on the perspectival effects of combining views of belonging and of good socialization from disparate sociocultural standpoints or different stages in life. in superbad, this might work by playing off the sense probably shared by both the characters and the audience that the characters start out as backward, as isolated, as not incorporated into the wider social grouping – not just as a matter of not being as ‘mature’ but as a matter of not enjoying the capacity to relate to others outside their small bonding group while still feeling like they are ‘being themselves’. then, part of the mixed sense of the ending would derive from the way in which we, distanced from their perspective and more able to positively assess the value of more developed socialization and ‘maturity’, can see their new positions not only as tragic losses (though in some sense they are – the closer bond against the wider social group has been altered) but as comic returns to self after ridiculous efforts to deny it (after they find that in certain ways they can’t break out of their more parochial form of socialization into the broader one merely by affecting what they take to be its codes – they can save some part of the identities they started with and thought they had to hide or cut off).

(part of the reason mclovin is extra-comic and more heroic, then, is that he seems to start out from the same position as the other two, but succeeds, improbably, in passing into a wider social world without the same contortions of pretending to be other than he is. he just keeps being himself and conditions and others conspire to welcome his arrival as himself.)

i don’t recall the movie well enough to know if that fits, but it’s a model.

I mean, the ending to “Superbad,” ostensibly the lightest and stupidest of the genre, is remarkably dark, and very basically about accepting a development — the necessity of putting aside homosocial bonds as a part of growing up — that the entire movie’s narrative arc shows the cost of. This premise is worth taking apart, of course (as with Knocked Up, the way that “growing up” boils down to conforming to a “traditional” model of masculinity is sort of silently insidious) but I find two things interesting about it: first, that it’s a narrative arc that tends towards accepting a fundamental change (the opposite of your ‘everything kind of ends back where it begins’) and secondly, that the story’s emphasis on the value of homosocial relationships then makes it a story of tragic loss, in which we learn the value of a thing as a prelude to giving it up. But I don’t know how else to read that last poignant escalator scene between Jonah Hill and Michael Cera except as tragedy.

OK. back to dissertating.

i would set the criterion not on being funny or on lacking some admixture of serious matter, but on something like ‘everything kind of ends back where it began’, understood loosely enough for variations and mixed modes. (and, probably, loosely enough that certain elements DO end up in different places by the ending, but in the service of something else ending up in the same place.) not that i know what i’m talking about – that just seems like a good starting point.

Maybe not, actually, but then I’m never sure what “comedy” means in this context. As the new Apatow movie — coming soon — about comedians and death illustrates, the jokes always seemed joined at the hip with a lot of darkness, a darkness they tend to attenuate rather than soften.

Natalia,
I’m sorry that was directed at you. It wasn’t originally; it was text that I had written and not included in the original post but which then seemed apropos when I was typing up a response. Laziness on my part, which I’ll cop to, but certainly not meant to be an accusation. The “you” in the first paragraph did reference you; the “you” in the third wasn’t meant to, though it does read that way, I must admit. So, my apologies.

In any case, when I say a “strong version” of ideology critique is “boring,” I’m saying that not because it’s something I find myself to be above, but because it’s a mode of critical reading I find deeply attractive and that I’m trying to think myself through. A lot of this blog’s content used to revolve around pointing out racist content about Africa and expressing outrage, and then I realized that I could do that sort of thing forever without accomplishing anything, and that it was not very interesting. And I wrote this post because *my* first reaction was exactly the straw man argument I slotted you into, and which I was trying to add subtlety to (if authorial intent is worth anything, that second “you” was far more aimed at myself than at you).