Sorry I forgot that you had already posted on The Apartment–it was a really good post and I should have looked back at it.

Hmmm. Does it really scan that way? In my post on The Apartment, I read it in pretty strict ethnic/humanist terms, but you raise an interesting point. Maybe I can steal your own rhetorical tactic and read the distinction by reference to the underlying similarity that makes it possible: because both are commentaries on what it means to be completely human, the interesting thing is the different valences they take in getting there (the Apartment is interested in ethics and affective bonds, Irma is interested (I think) in trust and honesty, and the Apatovian focuses on age as vector for development?)

On to Sturges and Rock Hunter.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342974

On your second point, see my most recent post.

on the other thing, i guess i should emphasize that, given the kinds of movies and tv you analyze, and given the broadly ethical goals you seem to have, i’m just assuming that you want to write the kind of criticism that tells a culture about itself – that the stakes on the writing are, ideally, much higher than could be left to overlapping eccentricities. but that’s the ideal. and i take your point.

However, I wouldn’t write off the arrested development trope in the Lemmon movies. “Be a mensch!” is, after all, the message and soul of The Apartment. In Irma La Douce, a lot of the fun of the first half of the film is playing off Lemmon’s sexual naivete–which is different, I understand, from the kind of arrested development we think of today, but couldn’t it have been considered its own form of arrested development at the time? Similarly, cross-dressing and gender reversals were in a sense considered a very serious form of arrested development.

I guess I included Observe and Report because Rogen’s work has been so fully supported and nurtured by Apatow that it seems to me one can say it is, to some extent, circumscribed by the Apatovian; while it is certainly an attempt to break out of the genre, I still think it can be thought of as emerging from whatever film historical background and tradition might be in play with Apatow’s work.

I have to be honest and say that I might never really flesh out the Apatow/Scorsese comparison–mostly because I don’t enjoy the Scorsese/De Niro collabs at all and doubt I’ll be re-watching them soon. (They’re all worth watching (once), though–especially King of Comedy.) I’ll try to justify my thought better, however.

Just to add another name to the list, if you’re enjoying the Lemmon/Wilder comedies, check out Frank Tashlin’s “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?”–it’s great.

As for the second part of your comment, I’m not sure. And it really is a thorny issue; my answer is usually that we model and make accessible ideas and readings by inhabiting them, that we “teach” our readers precisely by allowing them to mimic our affective reactions to the text. I’m not fully satisfied by that answer, but it’s the one I’ve got.

To be self-reflexive, though, the “we” in that sentence was meant to be anyone who writes interpretation for a reader, but as I look back at it, I wonder if I’m modelling my own theoretical performance too strictly by reference to my pedogogy. After all, the experience of teaching literature is so often one of finding yourself describing a text in ways that the students only barely recognize and working to overcome that hurdle. And there always seems to be something magical about the ways one’s own subjective perspective — “this poem is about sex!” — that is not shared by one’s students comes suddenly to be shared by them (“maybe it is!”). But I feel something similar about my blog writing; the stuff I write for my dissertation has to be solid in a way I don’t hold myself to on the blog, which is more a performance of subjectivity and an invitation (without an expectation) to share. My first reading of Star Trek, for example (Kirk as Bush, Spock as Obama) is somewhat eccentrically subjective; if people read that and think it sounds silly, I wouldn’t try to hard to argue them out of it. But then, some people *have* read it and found it provocative, so there must be something there, which is often the case; our subjectivities might be eccentric, but in practice, they do overlap with the eccentricities of others, and it is in that interstice that we find communication.

Andrew,
That’s a useful provocation; I really like the idea that it’s the similarities that make them *seem* different. And I’ll have to think about whether I can back up my broader claim; my friend scrimshander has been telling me to see some Lubitsch movies (I haven’t) so for the moment I’m limited to a handful of Wilder movies. But it strikes me that however similar they may be, the Lemmon vehicles I’ve seen completely lack the masculinity-as-arrested-development trope that practically defines the Apatovian; crises of masculinity abound, but the torturous fear of inevitable inadequacy is completely absent. They’re very post-industrial in that sense, I think, very much of an era when it’s no longer natural to conceptualize masculinity through labor in the ways that the Lemmon films do, for example, since “flexibility” in employment has become the standard in place of lifetime employment. This is why “Arrested Development” is such a powerful trope for late capitalist comdey, I think (like “Arrested Development” itself, which funs all over deconstructing the andy Griffith model of development and the new deal era “new South” trope it, in turn, was dependant on): we have inherited, for worse more than for better, a broad variety of normative expectations about masculinity that are based in the conceptualizing the family through futurity, through development, and through the kind of labor that has historically made that possible, all of which is called into question by post-70’s developments in the world economy, but the American in particular. Apatow movies generally find ways to reconcile themselves to an unsatisfactory labor market, of course, but they are at least interestingly premised on that dissatisfaction: the fact that Steve C opens up an electronics store with the same money he uses to get money is symptomatic of the kind of desire that those movies symptomatically start off with being thwarted: locked in a dead-end job and with no romantic prospects as a result.

After all, the ease by which the Lemmon/Wilder films could play with gender always seems enabled, to me, by a basic lack of real threat to the system they take for granted: you can play around with gender roles (and suggest shifts in the workforce) because there was actually so little social basis on which women could actually supplant men and because demand for male labor was still incredibly high. In Irma La Douce, for example, the idea of a man depending on a woman’s labor (and losing his monopoly on her sexuality) could become comedy not as an expression of fear but as a kind of perverse joke that the movie didn’t really have to take all that seriously: we know, for example, that in the end he will become the provider and she will bear his child, etc, whereas the narrative conclusion of Knocked Up (gets a job, becomes a provider) not only is dishonest (as Mike pointed out), but it just rings hollow; the movie seems to *know* that it is unpersuasive, I think.

Will have to think about DeNiro. I’d like to see you flesh out that comparison, partly because Observe and Report isn’t actually an Apatow production, and partly because I just don’t know those Scorcese/DeNiro movies that well. But in a general sense, yes, Sturges! I discovered him a couple months ago and haven’t worked my way completely through the canon, but expect more from me on that count.

Natalia,
cogitating! I like the “all-cereal diet” as a trope, fyi, and am trying to remember all the moments when people eat breakfast in Apatow movies. It seems like a really nice metaphor for self-fashiooning actually, and I think it might actually be an important idiom in those movies in a broader sense (Jason Segal’s hard liquor for breakfast in FSM, for example, signifies his self-destructive desire, and eating a healthier breakfast indicates his desire to properly self-cultivate and become healthy).

Winslow,
Goes without saying. This is just how we roll.

Sepoy,
Consider them called.

NC