Given all the confusing and anxiety-provoking mixed messages about motherhood and work that the culture was bombarding me with, I was glad when I was assigned the review of Knocked Up. It would be a light, life-affirming comedy about love and babies and how everything would be OK and nobody would end up living in the car. I was even more than receptive to this goofy tale of role reversal and nontraditional family values because I was the one with the secure, much higher-paying, stressful, high-profile job in my relationship, too. I was ready to relate, to have my perspective validated and my anxieties soothed. Besides, I’d loved The 40-Year-Old Virgin, especially for the relationship between Catherine Keener and Steve Carrell, which was sweeter and more offbeat and more real than anything I’d seen for a long time. I knew it would be a hit, of course, and that people would like it no matter what, but I fully expected to like it, too. I took a friend. We got popcorn. We settled into our seats excitedly. The dread that came over me when I realized just how much I hated it came as a complete surprise.
Knocked Up is about two strangers who go home together after a drunken night at a club, have sex, accidentally get pregnant, and decide to try to make a go of staying together for the baby. The joke of the premise is that Ben and Alison are a role-reversed odd couple: Alison is a beautiful and successful on-camera entertainment reporter, and Ben is an overweight, unemployed, eternal adolescent with limited social skills who is working on a stupid idea for a website with his many roommates. It’s not the premise that’s the problem, however. The problem is that the movie would sooner chew off its own arm than explore its premise in any honest way. It is so intent on avoiding reality that it becomes, with every further complication, a Jenga tower of lies. Alison is given all the attributes that signal power, agency, autonomy, status, popularity, and happiness, yet she is portrayed as a miserable, lonely, and friendless wretch. Ben has none of Alison’s advantages, but he’s happy. He doesn’t need to be attractive, hardworking, smart, prepared, or dedicated. It doesn’t matter how much time he’s wasted or how many brain cells he’s killed. When the baby comes, all he has to do is decide to get his act together, and the doors fling open. The system is ready and waiting. All he has to do is walk through the door.
What bothered me was not that the movie didn’t hew to some strict standard of realism. What bothered me was that its many moments of through-the-looking-glass misrecognition worked in unison to form an alternate reality. There was a montage of bizarre visits to the ob-gyn as imagined by someone freaked out by the idea of an ob-gyn; a shopping scene in which Alison, Debbie, and Ben choose a crib that costs nearly $1,000, and nobody bats an eye; a scene moments later when they run into Alison’s catty frenemies, the only friends she’s shown to have; a couple of scenes at work where her female boss tries to sabotage her because she’s jealous, but Alison gets promoted anyway because audiences love that she’s pregnant. In the upside-down Wonderland of Knocked Up, the woman has no friends, but getting pregnant boosts her career. It seemed like more evidence that, as the George W. Bush administration had made clear, the “reality-based community” had lost. We were strictly faith-based now. By the mid-2000s, you had to look to the fantasy genre if you wanted to see your social or political reality reflected in any recognizable way. You had to read The Hunger Games. Realism had jumped the shark into ideology. The more fantastical the story, the more “naturalistic” the look.
The problem with Knocked Up wasn’t that it was full of moments that made it more than a little bit sexist, even though it was. The problem was that it presented an adolescent boy’s perspective of what it means to be an adult woman in a world that has not yet come to terms with the idea of women as autonomous subjects. The problem was that it reveled in its hero’s unearned advantage in this world while at the same time refusing to acknowledge what it’s like on the other side. The movie refused to so much as utter the word abortion. (It makes somebody say “smashmorshun” instead.) Knocked Up wasn’t interested in Alison’s life or in her experience or in her options; it saw the life stages of a woman as they are seen in fairy tales: child, maiden (hot chick), mother, and crone. Alison was an incubator, not only for her baby but also for Ben’s maturity, just as Debbie was, long past the point when her own chicks had hatched. Alison and Debbie grew old and angry waiting for their men to grow up, even though they knew—said the movie—they would never grow old. The women braced for their terrifying decline, whereas the men retained their childlike wonder forever. Their growing old was without cultural meaning; it didn’t count. The problem with Knocked Up was that it was self-satisfied, triumphalist swagger barely concealed under layers of sentimentality. It was its bad-faith premise. The trouble wasn’t only Knocked Up, of course. This take on gender relations circa 2007 was the only perspective anyone got. It was the most suffocating dude-bro imperialism; patriarchy rebranded as “fratriarchy.” Watching it, I felt the way I imagine Khrushchev must have felt as Nixon tried to undermine his self-esteem with a tour of a modern American kitchen. Khrushchev was, like, we have kitchens in Russia, too, you know . . . But nobody listened.
The low point of the movie for me came when Debbie, who is forty, and Alison, who is pregnant, go to a club one night when Pete and Ben are in Las Vegas. The bouncer at the club, played by Craig Robinson, allows a parade of younger girls in and sends Debbie and Alison to the back of the line. Debbie explodes with rage at the bouncer.
“I’m not going to go to the end of the fucking line!” she yells at him. “Who the fuck are you? I have just as much of a right to be here as any of these little skanky girls! What, am I not skanky enough for you? You want me to hike up my fucking skirt? What the fuck is your problem? I’m not going anywhere! You’re just some ’roided-out freak with a fucking clipboard. And your stupid little fucking rope! You may have power now, but you’re not God. You’re a doorman! OK? You’re a doorman! So . . . fuck you, you fucking fag with your fucking little faggy gloves!”
The bouncer just listens to her homophobic tirade, and then he does something unexpected. He empathizes. He recognizes her vicious, homophobic tirade for the impotent howl of pain that it is. He grabs Debbie, pulls her aside, and whispers to her. “I know. You’re right. I’m so sorry,” he says. “I fucking hate this job. I don’t want to be the one to pass judgment and decide who gets in. This shit makes me sick to my stomach. I get the runs from the stress. It’s not because you’re not hot. I would love to tap that ass. I would tear that ass up. I can’t let you in because you’re old as fuck . . . for this club, not, you know, for the earth.”
What Knocked Up said to me was that when it came down to it, it really didn’t make a difference if, on earth, the hero was a slob with dreams of getting rich by creating an Internet database of female nudity in mainstream movies and the woman who agrees to marry him is beautiful and successful. It didn’t matter that, as he told Alison over an expensive sushi dinner at Geisha House, he had been living off an insurance settlement for years and had only eleven dollars left in the bank. In fact, it didn’t matter so much that the scene ended before the check came. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t smart, or good-looking, or sexy, or funny, or capable of empathy. It didn’t matter in the same way that Alison’s career, salary, accomplishments, looks, or other advantages didn’t matter. Without a husband and a baby, she was just Emily Dickinson in a backyard, without the poetry. He still got to be the hero. He still got to decide. What Knocked Up said to me as I tried to get pregnant at the last possible moment of thirty-nine while fretting about how I’d manage to do my job after the baby came (if a baby ever came) was “Fuck you.”
*
In the fall of 2007, a few months after seeing Knocked Up, I went to a screening of a movie called Lars and the Real Girl, which turned out to be the weirdest Pygmalion story ever told. The movie poster featured Ryan Gosling in a bad sweater and worse mustache, clutching a bunch of flowers and smiling shyly next to a silicone sex doll. At the beginning of the movie, Lars is living alone in the converted garage
behind his brother’s house. Because he’s lonely but terrified of human contact, he orders a life-size sex doll online for companionship and invents a chaste and utterly dependent personality for her—an unbeatable Madonna/whore combination. When the doll arrives, Lars introduces the doll to his brother, Gus, and sister-in-law, Karin, as “Bianca,” an orphaned, disabled, celibate, child-loving Brazilian missionary. Bianca might look like a rubber replica of a sex worker, but her mystique is all “true woman.” Sure, believing it requires contorting your subjectivity into a pretzel, but if Lars—that beloved, temporarily insane, universal everyman—insists she is a virginal and demure girlfriend, selflessly devoted to him and to “children,” then so it is. Gus and Karin are horrified, as is everyone else in town. But at the request of Lars’s therapist, they all agree to play along with the delusion that Bianca is real until Lars is good and ready to snap out of it. For this particular course of treatment (and for the movie) to succeed, however, certain things must be accepted as true: that underneath the temporary psychosis, Lars is a nice, decent guy going through a rough psychological patch who deserves the town’s support and the audience’s emotional investment until he’s ready to come around and find a real girl to love—Margo, the cute coworker whose crush on Lars never flags, not when he turns heel and bolts each time she tries to talk to him. Not when he ignores her when she asks him a question. Not when he fails to stand up for her when his cubicle-mate is rude to her. Not when he brings his sex doll to church with him and it becomes patently obvious that he’s not in his right mind. Not when he brings it to another coworker’s Christmas party, talks to it, dances with it, and tells everybody that she doesn’t like it when he drinks. Every time she appears on-screen, it’s to gaze longingly at Lars. Nothing Lars does can dampen Margo’s affection and commitment to Lars, because she is a “real girl,” too. Margo is almost as passive and inert as Bianca. She is entirely devoid of needs, for example, the need for a boyfriend who is not crazy. No social or conversational skills? No grip on reality? No problem! No matter how many times he rebuffs her in favor of his sex doll, she’s there for him. She’s even there for the sex doll. She considers her a friend.
Somewhere between the arrival of the doll and the shrink’s insistence that everyone in town collude with Lars’s delusion, the townspeople get over their discomfort at being asked to pretend a sex doll is a person, and they begin to treat her like a person even when Lars isn’t around. They take her shopping and to the hair salon. They elect her to the school board. They embrace her as a valued member of the community.
As I watched the movie, a feeling kept nagging me. Lars and Bianca reminded me of someone. They looked so familiar. He was dowdy, she was hot. He was active, she was passive. He was maladjusted, she was placid. He was unreliable and immature, she was patient and forgiving. He was funny and charming, she was conventional and dull. He was the subject, she was the object. He was human, she was a piece of plastic with a fantasy projected onto it. They were Man-Boy and Dream Girl, and the audience was the community who had stopped noticing that something wasn’t right with the girl.
This would have come as a shock regardless, but it was especially strange given that I’d been fully expecting a metaphor about a psychotic man-child with a Manchurian Barbie doll, whose psychiatrist insists that the everyone else disregard their own senses and go with the story, for his sake. It takes the story of a guy who has purchased a fuck doll, gives her Mother Teresa’s biography, insists that the world accept her as real, and then tries to bury this story under a feel-good, completely bonkers message of inclusion and acceptance: sex dolls are women, too. It says, sure, he ordered the thing and forced his family and his community to deny their own reality and take his messed-up fantasy at face value, but, hey, he loves and respects his fake woman. He makes it sleep in his brother’s guest room!
In order for Lars and the Real Girl to function as the kind of edgy yet wholesome entertainment it is trying to be, it has to sell you on its absolute sincerity. It has to remain resolutely oblivious to its own symbolism and categorically refuse to engage with its own premise in any meaningful way. It has to ignore the glaring fact that Bianca is the literal objectification of “the unbeatable Madonna-whore combination” of Robin Morgan’s worst nightmares. The movie is so hell-bent on forcing our identification with Lars that it tries to pass off its own perfect metaphor for the symbolic annihilation of women in pop culture (where they are systematically replaced with fantasies, robots, or sex dolls) as a supercute tale of redemption. This is why we never see Lars ordering Bianca from the website, cobbling together his womanly ideal from a diverse selection of faces, bodies, heights, cup sizes, hair color, pubic styles, and number of working orifices. To face the reality of what Lars is doing—to even so much as acknowledge it—would make it impossible to identify with or root for him. Instead, the movie decides to mirror its delusional main character and insist that the audience go along with its delusions as well. As the movie critic Dana Stevens wrote in Slate, “Lars and the Real Girl suffers from an even stranger delusion than Lars does. The movie is convinced that its man-loves-mannequin premise is uplifting, when actually it’s just kinda gross.” Confronted with its own ontological horror, the movie squeamishly averts its eyes.
I wasn’t assigned to review the movie. Instead, I wrote a long essay about how the sex doll represented what had happened to female characters in the movies over the past decade. I wrote, “The idea that a girl might play anything other than ‘the girl’ in a studio comedy is so far out of the mainstream that it’s considered an experimental idea, not to mention a major financial risk. It seems that not a week goes by without a dust-up about the alleged misogyny of studio executives or a lament about the state of women’s careers in Hollywood, or an explosion of frustration on feminist blogs.” I got more than a hundred e-mails from all kinds of people: from teenagers saying they’d never understood why so much of what they saw made them feel bad; from men who were irritated by the presumption that this was what they wanted; from frustrated writers, directors, and producers, most of them women. I felt like Miss Lonelyhearts. Nine days after the piece ran, Kira was conceived. It’s true. I looked it up.
Sometimes, it really helps to talk about your feelings.
“The best directors of romantic comedy in the nineteen thirties and forties,” wrote David Denby in The New Yorker that summer, “knew that the story would be not only funnier but much more romantic if the fight was waged between equals. The man and woman may not enjoy parity of social standing or money, but they are equals in spirit, will, and body.”2 It was commonplace for the heroine to play the clown to the hero’s straight man, because he, after all, was the hero. He had a patriarchy to uphold. So, it fell to the frivolous, irrational ladies to play the fools. In coming together the couples locked in a struggle to preserve their identity and individuality. You rooted for them to get together, because it was clear from their dynamic that once they got past whatever hump they were trying to get past—no money, an interloper in the form of Ralph Bellamy, whatever—their lives would from then on be a glorious expanse of witty banter, fun times, and incredible sex. You understood that one would not extinguish the other but would reflect the other, and we would recognize this as love.
The women in Knocked Up were based not on people but on an idea of woman that hadn’t changed very much since the Victorian era. Following a decade of rom-coms about girls with low self-esteem, the script had flipped. In the new comedy of the sexes, as Denby observed, the main purpose of the female lead was to make the hero grow up. Once again it was incumbent on women to uphold the patriarchy while men enjoyed the fun perks of disenfranchisement—things like flouting convention, mocking authority, and shirking responsibility, Lucy Ricardo–style. Still, this didn’t entirely explain what appeared to be a strict prohibition against female characters’ being funny, even when played by funny women. It was as if a law had been passed barring female characters from making jokes, or having fun, or letti
ng anyone else have any fun. They were backlash personified. In the “new comedy of the sexes,”3 there were sad girls in the public sphere, like Alison, or demons in the house, like Debbie. The women were trapped in their tiny psychic spheres. They were petty, jealous, shallow, and selfloathing. They spent their split-second youth lamenting the passing of that youth. The boys’ world, meanwhile, was as expansive as ever; mediocre looks and penury notwithstanding, their lives felt full of possibility. The message was clear: women might be smarter, more responsible, and more together than men now, but men were still happier—because this was still a man’s world. You don’t get to make jokes if the joke is on you. This was the new sexism; “enlightened sexism,” as Susan J. Douglas called it. It was the sexism of people raised on Free to Be . . . You and Me, of people brought up to believe that sexism was a thing of the past, so they didn’t have to worry about perpetuating it anymore.
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