Is it really so hard for boys and girls to be friends too?
This is a true story. When I was in high school, a close friend and I had two consecutive classes together in the same classroom. I always sat behind him, and in those three minutes between periods, he’d stand up and get the crick out of his back while we chatted. One morning as he took his customary stretch, I noticed something in the front pocket of his baggy pants (I think you know where this is going…). I poked it, asking what it was. And in the matter-of-fact tone of voice one would use to say, “It’s my slide rule” or “It’s my pen,” he replied, “It’s my erection.” I reacted as you might expect (imagine touching a hot pan), which he found utterly hilarious—as did I. Apparently one of our classmates had reached up to grab something and exposed three inches of teen girl belly that had slayed him. When he had it again the next day, and the day after, well, his 10:30 am erection soon became our running joke. When he met someone I knew from work in one of those six degrees situations years afterwards, that was the story he told him about our high school days. And I have to say, the older I get, the more impressed I am by my friend’s complete lack of embarrassment about his daily condition between Pre-Calculus and French. Yep, that’s his hard-on and I, a pretty giiirrrrlll, had poked it. So what. I suppose I should also add for the record that he’s straight.
Now, can you imagine one of the dick-obsessed BFFs Seth and Evan in Superbad reacting with similar nonchalance to the same situation? Or any other boy in any other “young people” comedy—even the exceptionally astute Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Dazed and Confused—not scrambling for a book-shield while dying a thousand red-faced deaths? I can’t. I mean really, a girl noticing your unscheduled tumescence is supposed to be the teen boy nightmare. While that may be the one humiliation Seth and Evan don’t suffer in their long night of the phallus, Seth does discuss his method for hiding an inappropriate boner by tucking it into his waistband. In short, so to speak, it’s a problem. So why not for us? Hm. Hmmmmm. Oh! I know. Perhaps it’s because my friend and I were…friends. He had close guy friends, I had close girl friends, he had a girlfriend, I had a boyfriend, and in the midst of it all we were…friends. How radical.
It would seem radical in the hermetically sealed boy world of Superbad, anyway. Don’t get me wrong. I laughed my ass off at Superbad (hey, after the 10:30 erection, I don’t shock so easily), and it didn’t piss me off like Knocked Up. Jonah Hill’s Seth may be crass, but he’s so damn earnest about it that he’s oddly charming. Michael Cera’s sweet deadpan timing makes Evan’s ability to remain, as one friend put it, eloquent in the face of insanity equally winning. There’s something that’s even rather touching in Superbad’s disquisition on why it sucks sometimes to be a straight guy, what with that annoying sexual imperative getting in the way of tight adolescent buddyhood (and homophobia making it impossible to declare one’s affection—platonic or otherwise—for one’s best pal). By the final scene, Seth is on the verge of getting the girl Jules he’s so loudly wanted throughout the movie, yet his face registers unabashed heartbreak as he separates from Evan. Big kudos to Hill and director Greg Mottola for neither shying away from nor mocking that moment. As always, producer-current comedy maestro Judd Apatow lets the emotion shine in, separating his boys from, well, other boys. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps this life moment wouldn’t be such a bummer if the girls weren’t assumed to be alien creatures from the Planet Vagina (which is orbited, of course, by the satellite Breasts). Is that really so, ahem, hard?
Apparently it is. Seth and Evan’s very first discussion in the movie regarding things female sets the tone for this point of view. Seth informs Evan with the kind of seriousness one usually reserves for such decisions as choosing a college or a coffee beverage that after a lot of thought and research, he’s decided his porn site of choice will be Vagtastic Voyage. Yes, the pun is soda snort-worthy, as is the analytical devotion Seth has given this task. But it’s also telling that it’s a play on a movie in which the human body becomes the science fiction object. The vagina will be that place where no man has gone before, that universe in a galaxy far, far away. When Evan suggests that Seth might want to choose another site that will have a less incriminating name on his parents’ phone bill, Seth nixes it because it “only” shows vaginas. That’s just gross. Seth needs to see the penises that he used to sketch as a child vanquishing enemies, flying planes, and hanging out (as it were) entering vaginas to make it okay. Otherwise he’s seeing nothing but a yucky space oddity. A scary twilight zone of dark matter. He needs a Mars rover to go there. Ground control to Major Johnson.
This trend continues when Seth and Evan have their very own close encounters with Unsettling Female Objects as the night wears on. It would be too easy and reductive to say that Seth’s hilarious boyhood art obsession, as well as his attachment to Evan, must mean that he prefers the company of men that way. Forget the fact that such an assumption minimizes the range of human desire. It also ignores how Seth is reduced to nearly drooling idiocy by the sight of Evan’s mother’s rack, and how much he enjoys it when a woman starts dirty dancing with him at one of his and Evan’s ill-fated stops on the way to the party they’d much rather attend. Indeed, he enjoys it so much that when someone asks Seth what that spot is on his pants after the dance, I figured the punch line would be that he’d enjoyed it too much. Props to scenarists Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg for taking the gag in another direction. Alas, it’s back in that alien life form direction. Turns out it’s the woman who left that spot on Seth’s pants, and he desperately tries to scrub out those menstrual cooties like Lady Macbeth even before he finds out the woman in question is the psycho party host’s girlfriend. Oh no, not the Blob! While Evan isn’t so noticeably disgusted when Becca, the girl he desires (and whose breasts, naturally, he’d been checking out at school), starts climbing over him and describing in graphic porn dialogue detail how she’s turned on, he’s still horrified. His defense? React as if she’s describing a science experiment that confirms what they learned in health class. A boy’s fearful reaction towards what a girl’s body can do has never made me laugh so raucously in a movie.
Obviously, the fact that Jules and Becca have no discernible characters beyond being the pretty and popular girls Seth and Evan want to win over by bringing booze to Jules’s party adds to the alienation factor. More than one critic has observed that there’s no her there, and yes, it is yet another Apatow disappointment in this department. But in this case, it also perpetuates the problem that makes it so difficult for Seth to adjust to impending (sexual) maturity and all it will bring. Of course he’s going to think of girls as a scary unknown life form if the kind of pop culture he’d imbibe (like Superbad, the teen movie the real Seth and Evan started writing because it was the kind of “truthful” teen movie they wanted to see) can’t even give girls anything resembling distinct personalities. It’s especially disappointing because the few memorable moments Jules and Becca do have on screen suggest that they can be just as foul-mouthed, uncertain, and sweet as the boys. Jules may not drink, but when Seth accidentally head butts her as he passes out, she responds with a good, hearty, “What the FUCK?!” worthy of any guy. Becca can clearly talk a big dirty game like Seth, but in the light of day, she too shares Evan’s trepidation. Sure, Becca may have narced on Seth’s penis-drawing habits when they were in grade school. But I kinda get the feeling that in an alternative universe where girls weren’t merely body parts, she and Evan (or Seth) could share a 10:30 am erection-poking moment in high school and the world wouldn’t come to an end. They could all be…friends—as well as girlfriend and boyfriend material. How radical indeed.
Guy Movies is a biweekly analysis of machismo cinema from the perspective of a woman.
