Forgetting the Apatovian
by zunguzungu
I think Forgetting Sarah Marshall might be my favorite of the Apatow genre, surprisingly. Surprisingly both because I forgot it even was a Judd Apatow joint and also because the preview made it look sort of stupid: the protagonist, a sad-faced straight man played by Jason Segal, needs to “forget” Sarah Marshall (Kristin Bell) after she dumps him for Aldous Snow, an amazing send-up of the cheesy British rocker stereotype, and so he goes to Hawai’i to try to get over it with the zany help of a zany collection of zany characters. On the surface, thus, a bro-comedy that puts the type in typical, a sequence of jokes and caricatures strung into a plot reducible to the preview’s abstraction: dude gets broken up with by his bitch of a girlfriend and needs to get over it by finding true love with a differently hot babe.
The movie makes a lot of hay by exactly this narrative. It is this story, basically, because those things happen in it. But there’s also a moment in this movie that brought me up short, that made me think more about how self-conscious the Apatovian might actually be, how much work — as opposed to pandering — it actually does, and how well it might actually understand that work. It happened during a confrontation between the protagonist and his evil bitch of an ex — one of the first times they actually talk — when he suggests, in a kind of passive aggressive way, that if only she could have tried a little harder, maybe things could have worked out.
She pulls him up so very, very short. “Try?” she hisses through tears. “Don’t you dare tell me I didn’t try; I did, you were just too stupid to notice.” She’s shaking, but steady as an iceberg. And when she relates the many things she had done to try and save their relationship (a variety of self-help classes and therapists), it isn’t so much the list as the sudden blast that her icy seriousness casts over the entire movie as we’ve so far learned to watch it. I’m serious; this overturns the entire Sarah Marshall narrative as it‘s been presented to us so far: not only does she turn out to be a real human being, but suddenly and dramatically dumping her pain on the screen reveals to him (and to us) what a child he (and by extension we) have been, how willing he‘s been to allow her to simply exist as a cliché, a stereotype, and an abstraction, anything but a human being. He’s unwilling to bend, yet, but also silent, unable to respond. He retreats to lick his wounds. The scene ends.
The movie, I think, is different after that point. Nothing, after all, has encouraged or allowed us to think of her as a real person so far; the comedy has been on his pain, his dramatic, over-the-top (and funny for that reason) masochistic revelry, and she has correspondingly been — exactly as things like the preview have lead us to expect — the caricature of the bitch girlfriend that takes off with the caricature of a crazed hedonistic rock star. That’s how he’s read the situation, and that’s how — through his eyes — the movie has shown us how to read it. But there is nothing to say to this, for him or for us, and since nothing has prepared us for her as a real character, it calls a great deal of what we‘ve seen and felt into question: suddenly, all the laughs and wallowing in self-pity we’ve shared with Segal stand accused of the same lack of seriousness that had made her such an alien creature to him. Like him, we failed to see because we weren’t looking, and now, suddenly, we have to look at our own blindness.
We thought this movie was just a comedy. But this is exactly the point: Jason Segal couldn’t notice that she, with all her faults, was a person, because he could see her only by reference to the Apatow comedy that his life already was. In such a comedy, women have their choice of whore or Madonna (if translated into a new millennial idiom), and so, discovering her to be no Madonna, damned her for the whore she was stuck being. But when she makes him look into her depths, he has nothing to say.
After all, while she does leave him for a hilarious caricature (which proves to be as disastrous a rebound as his were), it is significant that she leaves him for a real musician. As we come to realize, she was right to do so. Jason Segal isn’t a real musician, and he isn’t even as much of an adult as Aldous Snow: because he’s unable to move on from the safety of the crappy job he hates, and is unable to recognize and act on his own neurotic passivity, he poisons their relationship drop by drop by drop. And while he was rottin happy in a rut, she struck out and grabbed at what she though would make her happy, and why shouldn’t she? He couldn’t seem to do that; he just wanted to stay in his man-cave, eating cereal and doing a job he hated, piling everything on her, even while refusing to admit that he was really with her (it’s significant, for example, that her entrance in the first scene has to be preceded by him hurriedly cleaning up their apartment: when she’s not around, that he makes a mess when she’s not there to tell him not to because that’s what he really wants; they share a space not as a couple, but as little boy and mommy telling him to clean his room). But until she says so, and until his silence confirms her, we never understood that the joyous cereal-eating vision of pre-lapsarian boyhood in the first scene was the poisonous stew that rotted their relationship. In other words, the man-cave boy fantasies that come back in I Love You, Man (a massively more insubstantial movie than this one) are shown — as they were in The 40-Year Old Virgin — to be a trap. Wouldn’t it be nice to spend your life playing in your cave and eating cereal? Maybe not, for it is exactly this infantilization that — as the seven-days in the apartment sequence shows — causes him to lose sight of her, if he ever did see her at all.
In this sense, there’s something quite eloquent in his silence to her sudden invocation of personhood, which speaks to both the strengths and limitations of the Apatovian genre. The movie’s excellence, I think, comes from the fact that it points outside of its own Apatoviosity, but it also doesn’t quite actually transcend it. It’s still not a movie that has room, after all, for a female character that has actual depth, and the bulk of the film is still the effort to milk the boy-cave fantasy for all that it’s worth (even Mila Kunis’ character only tells us about her pain while Jason Segal’s we experience). But, that said, it’s also a movie that understands its own limitations enough to make them the focus of the narrative: Jason Segal’s problem is that he’s living in a comedy, but he doesn’t know how to laugh at it.
Which is to say, this isn’t so much a comedy about pain as an exploration of how we hide our pain behind the comedy, how a certain kind of joy becomes a way of protecting ourselves from having to grow, and as such, a performance of its own dilemma. This is why, for example, the movie has to be set in Hawai’i: Polynesia has long served as a metaphor for forgetting the traumas of modernity since at least Melville’s Typee, and ostensibly shallow comedies from Ford’s Donovan’s Reef to Adam Sandler’s 50 First Dates have continued to play with the theme. In the south pacific, we awake from the nightmare of history to the primal reality of human sensuality. Etc. This is movie, however, which not only recognizes the falsity of that vision, but thinks about what kind of dream that is, where it comes from, and what it does: Jason Segal has gone to an island, but as Bell later tells him, this was exactly his problem before: “you wouldn’t get off your little island,” she reminds him, instead doing things like wearing sweat pants for a week and eating cereal all day.*
In any case, while the idea of “forgetting” is the very fantasy he’s trying to sell himself, it’s also the last thing he actually wants to do: he goes to Hawai’i to get away from her, to forget, but he also goes there because he wants to revel in his pain, going not simply to Hawai’i but to her particular resort (leading to the zany set-up of “accidentally” ending up at the same resort as his ex). It’s no accident, in other words; as the changing backgrounds on his step-brother’s computer nicely reflect, the act of getting away to Hawai’i has done nothing but change the background while leaving the basic picture the same (changing the background, in fact, precisely so that the picture can remain the same).
The movie is written full of light touches like that — who knew Jason Segal had it in him? — and another favorite of mine is the scene, an early one, when Jason Segal first really notices Mila Kunis’ character, when the movie starts to become the comedy we knew it was going to be. She’s been very nice to him again and again — though simply sympathizing with another wayfaring pilgrim in the storm — but when she welcomes him into the hotel restaurant, he tells her with a distinct tone of sudden recognition in his voice, how pretty she looks or how nice her dress is or something. What he says, though, is not the point: he’s signaling to her that he might like to be with her, and by this, he means he would like to have sex with her. Not that everything is reducible to sex, of course; in fact, the movie has established that sex is exactly not what this is about, a point it continually hammers home again and again through the character of Aldous Snow (for whom all life is a metaphor for fucking). And the movie has already had some fun with the unspoken open secret of sex banter, in the earlier scene where he tells two women that he’s just met that he would very much like to have sex with one of them and this line — by its unexpected honesty — actually succeeds. And she, at this point, is only interested in him as a sad case in whom she recognizes, I think, a similar kind of pain as her own.
But complementing her on her dress manages to be completely true (she does look great) only by indexing the myth that’s being sold: as the scene progresses, we see that every single hotel employee is wearing the same dress. On Hawai’i, the fantasy of amnesia is already always part of a package being sold to its customers, and Segal is only the latest customer. He — and we — haven’t realized it yet, but we’re beginning to.
Similarly with the idea of music in the movie. One narrative in the film is the self-serving one Segal sells himself: while he has a secret musical opus within him, Bell doesn’t understand him, and therefore she’s a terrible bitch who’s wrong for him. Now, this narrative is partly right: when he plays his Vampire song to her, she tries but does not understand it, and this is central to why they have to break up. It shows that they are wrong for each other. And it’s also true that Kunis is right for him precisely because she listens to his vampire song and responds in the right way. But the problem exactly in Sarah Marshall: she doesn’t understand his music, but she is also quite correct not to understand it, because it isn’t real, because it’s a fucking musical about vampires. It’s absolutely ridiculous, and when he plays the song for her — Dracula wailing in a ridiculous East European accent — she’s exactly as baffled with it as any normal human being would be. It’s preposterous, yet he seems to be serious. Any sane human being would be exactly as bemused or confused as she is.
Kunis, on the other hand, shows herself to be “right” for him because she helps make his music happen, but she does this precisely not by understanding it, but by showing him what’s wrong with it: when she laughs at it, she shows him that his melodrama isn’t tragic, it’s comedic, and for the first time he starts to understand why. Sarah Marshall couldn’t do that for him, and that, it turns out, is what he needed; the neurosis may have been his, but she (an overdramatic actress with the same problem, I think) simply wasn’t the person to help him get over it. Kunis, on the other hand, came to Hawai’i for some random reason, but she understands the myth for what it is now, and is thus able (in a way Bell wasn’t) to show him that being funny is funny, but it isn’t real, and that he needs to be real.
The variety of ridiculous bros that populate the landscape serve this same function, their ridiculousness becoming increasingly apparent to Segal as he comes closer to seeing (through them) his own ridiculousness for what it is. Paul Rudd’s character, for instance, shows us a dark side of the fantasy of amnesia; he’s forgotten everything (he too is running away from a break up), but he’s taken it much too far: since memory is how we function, he can’t function. And when Aldous Snow does gets Segal’s music, we suddenly realize that getting his music wouldn’t be a good thing, that self-important reveling in pain is a pretty stupid thing to do (and the idea of “getting my music” as a metaphor for real connection is repeatedly skewered by the waiter character, who desperately lusts after Aldous and tries to connect with him in exactly this ludicrously flawed way).
Aldous Snow, after all, is hilarious because he’s a walking cartoon and he’s that because he’s utterly humorless about it: as has Segal, he performs comedy without realizing it’s funny, and as such, is trapped within the joke. So when Segal accidentally puts his fantasy of violence into action, surfing over his rival and knocking him out, he both realizes what he’s done (and has become) and takes steps, for the first time, to undo it: fishing his rival out of the water and carrying him to shore is a metaphorical step out of his self-created womb. But he actually comes to escape his own narrative (“ helpless bro being saved by love of a good woman from the tragedy of having been dumped by a bad one”) by laughing at it. On shore, for instance, after having pulled Aldous out, he cries out that the piece of coral in his leg is “rapin’ my leg” and Segal smiles a little. The guy is ludicrous, after all (and the line is just one more of his constant sexualizations of everything), but until now, Segal has been unable to see it, because he sees the world the same way. But this (since Aldous is a dream worked self-image) is the first smile of the movie that’s a real laugh at himself, and it signals a profound sea change in his ability to stand aside and ironize his own failings and fears. As the movie continues, he creates increasing distance between himself and Aldous, separating himself from the boy-child for whom relationships are reducible to sex (which is where he started) to the point where he can have his own kind of personal triumph: he quits his job to put on his Dracula musical, but he does it as a puppet show and a comedy. Once he realized it was funny, in other words, that he could separate himself from his pain by laughing at it, he can move on, and does. And this makes him, for the first time, an object not of pity and sympathy for Kunis, but a human being worth spending time with.
As my telling of it illustrates, this is still a story about men in which women are the stage dressing used to show us something about men. Most of the time, they don’t exist as characters; the ocean-as-womb metaphor that pervades the movie, after all, isn’t even about real wombs (or the human beings that happen to possess them) but, rather, about the experience and the problem of being male which used women as its vocabulary. And while every male character in the film is a different dream reflection of the protagonist’s fantasies and fears and fears about manhood, the women in the film largely signify as black boxes. But what saves it for me — as with a novel like Heart of Darkness — is that it knows this and makes this black boxedness its subject: the main character grows up precisely by coming to realize the seductive danger of the fantasy he inhabits.
Marlow never sees outside the Heart of Darkness, of course. Conrad shows us his blindness as a way of thinking about the limits of human understanding but he does so — as Achebe famously complained — at the cost of re-instating the idea of Africa as unknowable for readers who didn’t care to note his excessive subtlety. In a way the same is true here; it’s quite possible to continue blissfully through this movie without noticing exactly where the narrator’s transformation comes from. It is possible to think, for example, that Jason Segal simply went to Hawai’i, was reborn, met a new girl, and got a new job, thereby locating the original problem securely outside of himself. But it is to the movie’s credit that it’s smarter than that. And at the very least, this is a movie that (unlike Conrad’s ultimately pessimistic vision) can at least imagine its epistemic black boxes as people too.
After all, while Kunis’ role in the movie is, on one level, to be Jason Segal’s savior, to be the new girl that will make him forget his pain, she is also the person who refuses to simply kiss him and make it better. She is the person who tells him that he needs to get himself correct first, that he simply can’t be with anyone until he’s figured out what he needs to figure out. She’s right. And she’s right because she has her own back story, her own story of pain and growth, a story which exists in subtle counterpoint to Segal’s.
I want to close, then, with a pair of twinned scenes late in the movie that help to show how this counterpoint works. The second is the surfing showdown between Segal and Snow (the conversation they have before the accident), and this is, ostensibly, the payoff scene, the protagonist’s turning point. At first, the men are completely unable to confront each other except through the mis-vocabulary of romantic comedy: while Segal sees Aldous Snow as a villainous rival of the sort Hugh Grant played in Bridget Jones, Aldous is completely oblivious to everything (he seems to think he’s Segal‘s buddy). The asymmetrical rivalry then turns into an opportunity for reflection on obliviousness: when Segal realizes how blind Aldous is, he realizes how blind he’s been; by gazing at an external version of himself — and laughing at it — he’s suddenly able to externalize that part of himself that he needs to see outside of.
But the first scene, which ostensibly sets this one up, is interesting in its own right. We see Kunis and Bell confront each other in the hotel lobby, and in sharp contrast to the way the man-children struggled to even find a point of reference to converse, the women’s conversation is deeply structured by a variety of unspoken but completely clear subtexts. They are respectful, sympathetic even, but they are not warm: like opposing gunfighters who have everything in common but where they stand, they size each other up with both sympathy and a consequent recognition of their necessary enmity. This is interesting, in other words, because they are neither sisters of pants (traveling or otherwise), nor “frenemies,” nor are we seeing a girl fight: they are playing a game with each other that both thoroughly understand, meaning they both understand each other and understand their difference from each other. Aldous Snow doesn’t exist for Segal except as a dream/fantasy reflection of his own desires and fears, but these women both are people and see each other as people, having a simultaneous lack of desire to cause unnecessary harm to anyone they can sympathize with and no inclination to sacrifice their own interests in the name of that empathy. They have full willingness to use every ounce of psychological leverage available to them, but it’s leverage they acquire precisely from understanding how they are alike and how they are different.
Their meeting, in other words, is a duel, and a duel between equals; when they comment on how pretty each other is, the antipathy is delicious precisely because the statements are both true and beside the point. You are beautiful, bitch, but I will fucking kill you. In other words, it might as well be John Wayne commenting on the size and caliber of his opponent’s gun in Rio Bravo, or (perhaps more familiarly to you, you philistines) the scene where Omar and Brother Mouzone confront each other in season four of The Wire. Pelecanous consciously reflected the Leone trope of “nice gun you got there” when he made the two in The Wire comment on each other’s pieces, and it does the same work as it did for Leone or Wayne: by comparing their phallus substitutes, they both acknowledge their similarity by analogy (we are both men) and trace out their difference in reality (we are pointing these guns at each other because one of us is going to shoot the other), the difference between similitude in analogy and the basic irreconcilability non-identification of an understood otherness. In other words, it’s a conversation structured by the acknowledgement that other people exist, people who are like you but are not you: both might be men, but (unlike Segal’s conversation with Alsous, in which neither can acknowledge an “other”) Omar and Mouzone are different men. The same is true of Bell and Kunis: both are women, but they are different women, individuals, and their differences signify not types of commodity (as the blonde-brunette distinction, for example, becoems legible in commodity market terms) but the profundity of consciousness, the fact that being me means not being you and vice versa.
All of which is to observe one thing: while this a movie whose narrative is myopically fixated on the transformation and growth of a man, and it makes “woman” the catalyst for that growth (as the genre demands), it also locates in particular women the actual knowledge that Segal so painfully struggles to acquire. In other words, while it is interested in how men make women into black boxes, as Conrad was with respect to Africa (and as such, is located in the consciousness of the blind), it also wants to understand and address what Conrad never did: the knowledge of blindness possessed by those who are not seen.
* In that “seven days of sweat pants” sequence, for instance, the final day is Jason Segal wearing a mockup costume he’s made for himself and replaying, for the camera, Gandalf’s confrontation with the Balrog in the Lord of the Rings: “You Shall Not Pass!” Exactly right: while at this stage of the movie, he’s refusing to move forward, denying himself the ability to grow up by retreating into cinema, the Gandalf character in that scene will, shortly, be killed and resurrected, exactly as Jason Segal later will.
Are you serious?
Do we really need to keep having movies that stage “hey, maybe eating cereal in a man-cave isn’t all it’s cracked up to be” as a revelation?
FSM struck me as the best of this genre of movies also, but I was content to let it ride on the fact that it just hit me as far funnier and sadder–the failed sex scene at the end of the movie just killed me precisely because of the inability to put pieces together even with effort and desire to do so. But I’ll probably have to watch the flick again.
The “Get yourself right, first” moral is, however, one that’s rarely, from what I can tell, as central to a romantic comedy, or it’s played like the makeovers in Grease: “I’m not good for you then, but what about this fake me now?” The point is, though, that the change isn’t done to get the girl. The change is done because it’s the *right thing to do.* A romantic comedy willing to ditch the point of the romance is kind of bold, for sure.
Do you include Freaks and Geeks in the Apatow genre, because if you do, you actually have some fully realized female characters. I’ve always thought it odd what happened to the woman after Freaks and Geeks, like you can almost see him saying, “Well, damn it then, you want stereotypes, I’ll give you stereotypes.” Even when it partially works–Keener in the The 40 Year Old Virgin, but that has more to do with her than him, I think–you can’t help but wonder who, in Apatow’s mind, Lindsay grew up into.
Natalia, of course we do. Which is to say, the “man as man-child” ego ideal is at least as pervasive now as it was a hundred years ago in the days of TR. But the point is that this movie shows it as both attractive *and* dangerous, which is the right way to go about it; the “Seven days in sweatpants” sequence is both attractive as a vision of “play” and frightening in its infantilizing closed-off ness. I’m not saying this is the world’s most revelatory revelation, of course, but it *is* a living cultural question. Also, thanks for telling me to watch Irma La Douce; totally interesting riff on the spectre of women working outside the home (My pearls! Let me clutch them!)
Moacir,
Yes, exactly. This is why I was so pleasantly surprised by Kunis: she plays a sexual character with desires, but most of her interactions with Segal are basically platonic and sympathetic, the actions of a person who knows — as he initially doesn’t — that you have to be healthy first, that romance doesn’t save you. I think she plays that character quite nicely, and has some moments of really powerful restraint.
SEK,
I have to confess having never seen F and G’s, to my eternal shame. But that’s an interesting thought; it would help explain why so many of his movies (like this one) are essentially explorations of how and why it is that women get reduced to cliches in real life by modeling the dilemma in its own formal terms. But it’s still a sort of cake and eat it too strategy; it would be truly interesting to see what an Apatow movie with actual female characters would look like. Juno?
Aaron, I’m still finding myself disagreeing with this reading because, basically, it starts from the premise that we find the man-cave attractive.
For you this is the strength of the movie’s critique.
For me it is an insidious attempt to interpellate people who would never consider the above acceptable conduct for a grown man into the premise that child-man behavior is the logical starting point from which a dude must be eased, cajoled, or startled. The movie critiques only by insisting that child-man behavior is a natural ground-state.
Such a critique can only go so far. It is like trying to teach a course on feminist theory and having a student raise her or his hand every five minutes to say, “Wait, back up. ARE women capable of abstract thought?”
Can men enjoy adulthood? Yes. Let’s move on.
FSM is my favorite of the Apatow films, the others all leave a bad taste in my mouth. None of them compare, however, to Freaks and Geeks. You really need to watch it; you can borrow our copy if you want. Also, I’d like a review of Adventureland if you haven’t done so already.
If we are requesting posts, I would like one comparing Irma la Douce to Never on Sunday, please!
the others are right that you have to see f+g. (and ‘undeclared’, too, if you haven’t: infantilism surely makes several appearances there, but i don’t think it’s the defining characteristic of the central character, steven: he really does have a sort of genial, hapless lack of self-possession and self- and social- identity that he’s trying to figure out, as the show premises. i’m sure you would think that the women have significant male-projection aspects to them, but i was struck by how counter-stereotype, or at least novel-stereotype, they were: they were sort of male, regarding their sexuality, their obsessions, their ways of treating others, in ways that tended to confound the men. seeing this as it aired i didn’t realize how in step or in advance of the times it was, but now it’s a little uncanny.)
(with respect to the failure-of-f+g theory above, i would think that personnel has a lot to do with it, too. linda cardellini was GREAT in it, and the other women were pretty remarkable too [busy philipps!]. but the casts of apatow-related projects since then have seen more recurring actors than actresses, and i think they’ve tended to capitalize on the native qualities or the typecasting of the actors in a pretty apt way, which suggests that who is doing what matters a lot for things like how enlightened the portrayal of gender is. seth rogen characters have done pretty seth rogen-charactery things; jason segel characters have been more jason-segely (which includes let us say a more mature attitude toward adult responsibility, and both starting and ending attitudes toward gender roles that are healthier); and so on. the later women’s roles have sometimes depended more or less obviously on the actresses in similar ways, but also in ways that are not as deep – but maybe this has something to do with the actresses’ relatively lesser familiarity to the writers and producers, who surely get a big advantage from writing for who they know and who they have a history with. and anyway, take this point and add in the variation in writers, directors, creators, producers, etc., and i think a prudent skepticism about overarching explanations of ‘the problem with apatovism’ should result.)
also, i don’t recall it being all that evident at the beginning that in ‘forgetting’ segal’s problem is over-fondness for the man-cave. the scenes are certainly deployed to create that suggestion, but they’re balanced by the suggestion that segal is a pretty open, desirable boyfriend (a traditional failing of cave-dwellers), and the suggestion that he actually is working at something (his music) that just happens to involve lots of cereal-eating and such in its less fruitful stages, and that this is at odds with his girlfriend’s way of life and sense of self.
the idea then would be that it’s not, let’s say, maturity as such, recognition of and disgust with the man-cave, that snaps segal out of it – it wasn’t really the problem at ALL (at best, it was an effect or epiphenomenon of the problem). what happened was that he learned things about himself that let him become who he wanted to be (even though it’s not quite who he expected). the relationship with kunis and the artistic success and ‘adulthood’ are sort of surplus from that, not what constitute the improvement.
Adventureland, Sunday, Freaks and Geeks, got it. Anything else?
Anyway, much to get through here. Natalia, I understand your point better now, though I still don’t fully share it. For one thing, I think the imperative you’re expressing, the thing “we” are to move on to do instead, is too amorphous to be a real imperative; after all, who is “we”? And even if there is something inherently wrong with the man-cave narrative, which I’ll get to in a moment, telling pop-culture what it should or shouldn’t be interested in is always a losing proposition; texts like Apatow movies are interesting because they tell us something about what is popular, what is thinkable, and what is sayable at a more general social level than we otherwise have access to. To demand that cultural texts be different because we want the culture to be different, is, in my mind, a lot like pushing a rope up hill.
Which is not to say your objection doesn’t have force; I wonder, as you raise the question, to what extent the critique of the man-cave allows us to reinstate it as an object of desire? This is more or less what Heart of Darkness does to Africa, I think, critiquing the idea that its just horror, the horror, even while permitting its readers to imagine that this is exactly what it is; the substance of Achebe’s critique, after all, ultimately boils down to the fact that no alternative is allowed in Conrad’s vision. But this is what makes FSM interesting to me: the fact that the knowledge the narrator needs is to be found not in a personal journey for which the romantic partner is a catalyst (as in every freaking romcom ever), but something she actually *knows* and tells him. He doesn’t get healthy by *getting* her, he gets healthy by *emulating* her; in fact, the thing she tells him, most importantly, is that he needs to be with no-one for a while before he can be with someone. And she’s right, and he does. That’s interesting, and, I think, different.
But as Moacir pointed out, the thing of it isn’t the man-cave itself (though other Apatow joints have done a lot more to make the infantilization of grown masculinity attractive; Knocked Up, most blatantly subverts its feel good “time to grow up” message by making it completely and utterly insincere) but what it represents: for Segal at the beginning, the domestic space is a thing to cling to, a means of keeping from having to deal with the real world, and as such an unhealthy fetish object. I find this to be, especially in comparison to Knocked Up, a really interesting critique, because it allows the movie to distinguish the *responsibility* of adulthood from the *security* of domesticity, to emphasize that a relationship is a thing you *do* rather than a thing you *have.* And this still seems to me to be an interesting and quite rare thing for a movie to do, since the overwhelming majority of all Hollywood cinema, I would venture, works to actively conflate the two.
J, I say that Segal’s problem is the man-cave because Kunis tells him it is, and he more or less comes to agree with her, I think. It isn’t apparent at the beginning, you’re right, but that’s because the movie wants us to fail to see it, as he fails to see it, so that we can share his revelation. And I would go farther than to say his “way of working” merely involves cereal eating; he spends most of life working on a job he hates (the tv show she works on) because, as he tells Kunis, he’s afraid to leave. But when Bell dumps him, he is enabled — by Kunis — to make the leap that actually transforms his music into something doable: while he had thought it was a ponderous over-serious vampire musical, she’s the one who shows him that it’s a comedy (he says this near the end), which is what enables it to be a success (and allows him to leave his previous job). YMMV, but I see all these things as being directly brought about by Kunis’ presence in his life, but (and this is the key) not by her role as love interest but simply as someone who has already been through this (she understands that you have to be happy with yourself before you can be happy with someone else and tells him so).
…and what is fundable?
The substance of my comment above is: a large extent.
I haven’t yet made it through an Apatov flick though did manage like about eight minutes into the trailer for the island phantasia, and then like overcome with, er, somethin,’ returned to like my fave Ezra Pound youtubes.
That said, I disagree with your Achebean spin on Conrad (apparently the current par-tay line of Lit., Inc). Novelists are not obligated to present, like, any particular political or psychological point of view. Pointing out specific mechanical errors of a book– the writing’s overly rhetorical, or characters too wooden, pacing off, so forth–that I can understand. Once someone takes the normative turn however, regarding theme or content–“Conrad should have been more sensitive, or he’s really a liberal and/or Tory racist hypocrite, etc”–the game, at least the novel game’s over, and one is doing ideology.
i don’t know what i think about the details but i guess i’m inclined to take segel’s acceptance of what kunis tells him to be one of those moments of self-knowledge that isn’t necessarily objective in character. meaning, the movie might tell us something about self-knowledge, but not about what his life as we saw it was like.
anyway, i just rewatched ‘i love you, man’ at the cheap theater and it might provide an interesting counter-point to this, because it has a similar admission. but there the segel character is set up to seem as if he could possibly be an immature adolescent grownup man, so that the trick with the billboards can work, and when he and paul rudd have their reconciliation, segel thanks him for calling him on ‘a lot of his issues’. but it doesn’t come across as a confirmation that the projected (to the audience, and to paul rudd) image of him was true – because we’ve been given lots of signals that he generally has it together, and just has sort of opted out in certain ways, and anyway he follows that by saying that he’s actually pretty successful with his investments. so it ends up seeming to be a deepening of their friendship because it provides segel with an opportunity for deeper honesty about his vulnerabilities, which was the basis for their friendship.
(a quote to demonstrate the relevance of ‘i love you man’, if you’re not inclined to see it: when paul rudd and rashida jones make up, the reason he has discovered to marry her is that he knows she loves him because she wants him to have a friend for himself, which none of his girlfriends has ever wanted for him before. in a romantic comedy [instead of a bromantic comedy] i guess they couldn’t really play it that way because the setup wouldn’t be that a man is marrying a woman with no friends, it would be that a man is marrying a woman who is jealous of the friends his fiancee has, and ends up accepting them anyway, which is not quite the same thing.)
Adventureland, Sunday, Freaks and Geeks, got it. Anything else?
Actually, Freaks and Geeks first, then everything else. I sorta kinds undersold it in my first comment, because I didn’t want to sound like the disappointed fanboy I am . . . but not only are the female characters in the show fully realized, they might just be the most fully realized female characters on television ever. Seriously, the easiest character to corner is the stereotypical female high schooler, and at first, it seems like that’s what Apatow’s up to; then, of course, he isn’t up to that at all. But I don’t want to bias you one way or the other (anymore than I already have), but really, if you can find a way to incorporate Lindsay and Sam in your theories about Apatow’s canon, I’d love to see it.
J, I have seen I Love You Man, and found it to be an interesting (but less ambitious) movie than FSM, for exactly the reasons you point out: Segal gets to have his cake and eat it too, getting “called on his issues” without fundamentally calling into question the attractiveness of the man-cave. After all, the whole premise of the movie is that Rudd needs a man-cave, that without one he can’t have a “real” (heterosexual) relationship. It’s still better than the “jealous wife” premise of the last century of american cinema, but much less interesting than FSM, which wants to think about the costs of the man-cave in addition to its attractiveness.
Scott, that’s interesting; stay tuned.
[…] Forgetting the Apatovian […]
[…] of the movie is also akin to the crucial moment in Forgetting Sarah Marshall – as I argued here – which is when Jason Segal realizes that he has been his own worst enemy all along, that his […]
Thank you! I was hoping eevnyore would take a moment to read the back cover. Trust me, it doesn’t get better on the inside.By the way, I haven’t dug too deep into your archives yet. Have you ever put any of your writing online?You know, if you’re in a hurry to get published, you could just lower your standards and go the novelization route. Let’s see what Netflix has releasing this week. Oh, here’s one. Dead Clowns. From the description it sounds just like The Fog. Except with, you know, clowns. Just tossing ideas out there, planting little seeds.
Excellent created write-up. It can be prilscees to be able to anyone who takes advantage of them, as well as yours truly . Keep up to date the nice do the job can’r delay to read through extra articles.
[…] of the movie is also akin to the crucial moment in Forgetting Sarah Marshall – as I argued here – which is when Jason Segal realizes that he has been his own worst enemy all along, that his […]
Hi. I would like to be your client! Both my setisr Allison and my friend Diana have referred you. Also I was a client of Jackie from Roots for many years, so we have met before!Let me know when i can get into see you. I have a wedding at the end of this month, so hopefully you can help me before then. Thanks and give me a call. 250-898-9223
That’s a smart way of thkniing about it.
, “I already have to beraly functioning idiots for sons and I don’t need a third of a kind.” So my mother’s classmate got to keep both toddlers. They must be in their 20s now, and I’ve no clue how their lives turned out.Those of you who are parents, what would you do in such a situation? Would you prefer to keep the kid you are raising now that, you just found out, isn’t yours, or would you want your biological child, assuming you can’t have both?
Why does this have to be the ONLY reliable source? Oh well, gj!
[…] Aldous Snow has a good moment or two, which I’m tempted to attribute to the fact that Russell Brand performs that character every day of his life, and is really good at it, independently of this shitty movie. In fact, the only reason I care about the movie at all is because, at his best, there’s a hint of what made these deleted scenes from Forgetting Sarah Marshall so good (which I blogged about here): […]