We have met the enemy and he is us
by zunguzungu
In responding to Christian Lorentzen’s N+1 piece on Judd Apatow, Adam Serwer makes a point just right enough to be quite wrong:
I don’t think his criticism of the Apatow canon grapples with the most consistent theme in all of his films, which is that in American culture, heterosexual men have almost no means to express mutual feelings of platonic intimacy without seeming all super-gay. At least for me, this is what often leads to his funniest moments — like when Jonah Hill and Michael Cera wake up next to each other at the end of Superbad. The whole scene takes on the awkwardness of a conversation that takes place the night after two exes somehow end up sleeping with each other again after a bitter breakup. Apatow movies always cleverly acknowledge the extent to which American masculinity is a performance, and how our internalized obligation to perform it makes us do really stupid things.
This is, I think, a nice way of describing the narrative impulse that motivates these movies. But in doing so, it describes their imaginative limitations, not their strengths. After all, why exactly is it that “heterosexual men have almost no means to express mutual feelings of platonic intimacy without seeming all super-gay”? Who is it that’s enforcing all this homophobia on them? Is it “American culture”? Yes, insofar as “American culture” is the same thing as “homophobic heterosexual men,” which, sadly, is pretty far. But that’s the thing that all of these weak verbs let him skate right over: heterosexual men are not oppressed by “American culture”; such a “culture” exists to the extent that it is homophobic dudes repressing themselves.
The point, in other words, is that Serwer frames Apatow as responding to an external force, the artist critiquing the culture which makes it so damn hard to be a straight white man in America. But that’s utterly silly, and not only because only morons claim that straight men are oppressed in American culture. There is no more important cultural master-text teaching heterosexual men how to fear and repress platonic intimacy because it’s super-gay than dumb Hollywood comedies like the Apatovian. If you’re already smarter than the movie, you can recognize how all the jokes hinge on male anxieties, yes. But if you simply already feel those anxieties, you will simply laugh, having confirmed them (and relieved some of the tension).
More importantly, while movies like Superbad are quite canny in exploiting the difficult time homophobic dudes have being friends with other dudes — a real phenomenon — they never solve the problems they raise, and more often tend to present them as virtuously unsolvable, handing straight men a way to feel sorry for themselves before going on to enforce normalcy. The best of them are movies like 40 Year Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or Role Models, because those movies dramatize a process of introspection and growth by which adult men figure out how to resolve the issues they have with being adult men and find ways to get healthy. But the rest of them follow the Knocked Up script, putting forward a grimly joyless moral about the nobility of sacrificing happy-fun-times with the bros in favor of doing the right thing by raising children with a humorless she-harpy (which is why Ross Douthat digs it). Homoerotic banter with the bros is the heart of those movies, but the moralistic core of their plots ride that sad escalator of adulthood away to soul-deadening marriage.
After all, in the ending that Serwer pointed to, Jonah Hill and Michael Cera’s characters don’t put anything they’ve learned from the experience into practice; instead, having discovered that they love each other (platonically), they go back into the closet. This makes that last escalator scene quite touching, and nowhere near the naked dishonesty of the ending to Knocked Up. But it’s still the same picture of frightened conformity to self-imposed homophobia, and one in which women come to seem to be the agents of that sadness, obliviously tearing the two friends away from each other. In this sense, while the two friends seem to grow from the experience of that night — through all the “coming of age” cinematic sign-posts the movie throws out — what they actually learn (and teach) is that adulthood is a time when you can express your platonic love in code, while drunk, and in silence. But you can never act on it; adulthood requires tortured self-repression, self-pity, and submission to the nuclear family unit.
We’re bigger than that; we Americans contain multitudes. The heterosexual males in Judd Apataw’s films are utterly unable to express platonic male-male love in any other way than homophobic banter. But while many American men fit this pattern, not all are so blinkered and all struggle with it in their own ways. Yet defining “American culture“ in terms of the former (and excluding the latter) not only reinforces the normalcy of homophobic self-repression, it renders it the end-point of the adulthood’s socialization. Which is, then, the biggest problem with giving the name “American culture” to the array of cultural texts and practices that teach us to be heteronormative: we (silently) reduce the vast and heterogeneous multiplicity of American society to a singular and monolithic entity, and one we define in terms of its homophobic fear. Because in order to construct a narrative where “American culture” is an oppressive force that closes off options for American men, you have to define “American culture” in terms of the people that do that to themselves. Which is exactly the problem, a closing off of alternative stories and ways of expressing love that both the movie and this kind of critical framing not only reinforce, but invest with spurious nobility.
zunguzungu 
Well said. This is the problem I always had with “Friends”, the persistence with which it would unnecessarily reinforce the most retrograde aspects of heterosexual male interaction. Bah.
Yeah, which sort of dove-tailed with the show’s intense lack of curiosity. The comparison with Seinfeld was always sort of illuminating: Seinfeld would make enxieties funny by showing them to be ridiculous, while Friends enjoyed the spectacle of discomfort but always re-established normalcy afterwords.
Wow, I’m going to be repeating that observation a lot. Hope you don’t mind!
I love you, man.
Right back atcha.
Heh… that’s the one film that kind of worked for me. Oddly, even though it was the formula of the formula at that point. But starting from the absence of male friendship as the thing lacking in Rudd’s life made the whole quasi-romantic quest almost believable.
Of course if one then makes the mistake of rewatching, say, The Apartment, and consider how much more interesting the gender ambiguity of Lemmon’s characters in the Wilder films was, well… One really shouldn’t do that.
It’s good that there’s someone like you with the erudition to express why those movies, despite the “coming of age” cinematic sign-posts”, actually seem to promote a lonely, repressed version of what ones social relationships ought to be like. Essentially: many close, male friends but just one female love interest (the usually absent love interests of the other “bros” seems kind of sad, on reflection). I’m trying to think of one of those movies that had a different structure, but they all seem to be variations on a theme. I wonder, when, exactly, did this became the cultural norm? I can recall reading letters and such from the nineteenth century that seemed both free of repression and (I regret to admit) super gay.
Ther is a certain amount of variation in those movies — I really like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, for example — but yeah, some things are pretty constant. As for when it became a cultural norm, I don’t know, but I bet Caleb Crain does. (his blog here, by the way)
It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure that in my book I do the usual thing and blame it all on industrial capitalism, i.e., the repression starts in the early nineteenth century, but it’s a very slow fade, at first even a flowering into sentimentalization, as Romanticism belatedly arrives on America’s shores. I’m strangely untroubled by the question of who’s repressing whom in watching Apatow-circle movies; maybe my expectations are too low. In “40-Year-Old Virgin,” for example, I was much more upset about the ideological dishonesty in the representation of bicycling. I guess I’d disagree with the Serwer quote 100 percent: my feeling about the Apatow movies is they’re evidence of *increasing* comfort among straight men with having “gay” feelings for each other, even if homophobic jokes are the means of expressing those feelings. Maybe I should have been upset by the “Do you know how I know you’re gay?” sequence in “40-Year-Old Virgin,” but I wasn’t. Add in movies like “Hump Day” and “Old Joy,” and I think it’s possible to argue that the culture has been loosening what’s permissible in straight men’s emotionality. So then the question would be, who is unrepressing whom?
Yes, which is why the internal differentiation within the Apatow canon is so interesting; that 40-year old virgin “I know you’re gay because” moment is quite intimate (and the videogame violence is such a naked expression of a certain kind of affection), representing that loosening that you’re talking about. But — if I may — there’s a kind of reactionary backlash to that within the genre: the master narrative of the ones I like the least (like Knocked Up) are all about enjoying the pleasures of carefree homosociality until the point where SOCIETY (in the person of one or more humorless woman-baby-machines) forces joyless conformity, and you leave the boys behind to be a productive member of society because that’s VIRTUE. But because the currency of the Apatow universe is bro-humor, there’s something incredibly dishonest about the way those endings pretend to be happy. They’re tragic; after having spent the whole movie establishing that Rogin and Heigl have nothing in common, we’re supposed to believe that the power of Christ will compel them to work as a couple? After the entirety of Superbad is devoted to these two kids coming to realize how broken up they are at leaving each other for college, the mega-happy-getting-the-girl ending is supposed to make that better?
I have to confess I didn’t see “Knocked Up,” maybe because I was afraid of an ending like you describe. I’d also have to see “Superbad” again to answer properly, because I seem to have edited the ending in my memory, where it does end as a tragedy.
A blog conversation I had about this films once — iirc — hinged on the fact that I had sort of creatively mis-remembered the end of Knocked Up; the scene where he joins the work force and cleans up his act had, in my mind, become the horrific self-betrayal that it should have been, a kind of monumental sacrifice of all the jouissance that had animated the movie up until that point. That’s the ending it should have had, but I think on reviewing it (or was it Mike R that pointed it out to me?) I discovered that the ending was portrayed as wonderful. “Gosh! It turns out that becoming a worker drone is what I always wanted!” Or something. It makes no sense in terms of the character, but then neither does any ending which involves Rogin and Heigl being happily married, which is exactly the problem.
I should think so, given how much he references Freud in his blog. I was reading about when this shift occurred, and It seems that Freud was the person who initiated this homophobic cultural paradigm by declaring that “all love is erotic”. So that’s where you get this weird combination of attraction restrained by cultural repression, which I’m sure Freud would recognize as neurotic. Some things that meant to describe really invoke, it seems.
I’m feeling curiously vindicated by this post.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, no idea at all.
Nobody else has any idea either.
(Natalia is, of course, referring to this little dustup in blog-land)
May I say that it is kind of disconcerting, or that it throws one for a loop, when someone refers in one way to someone who refers to himself some other way? A response to Aaron Bady? Who’s that? (Enlightenment comes with mouseovering, and at this point I can sort of remember that AB = ZZ, admittedly, but it’s still cognitively burdensome, man.) Of course in this case the dissociation is also self-inflicted.
“ZZ: Burdening you with cognitive burdens since 2007!” Maintaining a pseudonym was hard work, so I gave it up, but it does leave the a mess sometimes, I guess.