Monday, September 10, 2007

Knocked Up: A Dick Flick


Sometimes you spot some fantastically attractive guy out of the corner of your eye – he’s an incredible athlete, his lithe body rippling muscles, a lock of his hair dancing just so across his forehead. You fawn all over him, and suddenly, amazingly, he’s your boyfriend. He chooses you. Time goes by, and you discover the reason your shower smells is because he pees in it, that Men’s Health successfully summarizes everything he has to say for himself, and his ego’s the size of the truck he drives and is just as appropriate in its global context… Your friends whisper “Cute guy,” and your response is “Please girl -- save me.”

Other times, you get a sort of awkward dude. No neck, laugh like a hyena’s. Over time, though, his sweet, enduring charm begins to chip away at you. The fact that he takes two days off work to help you adjust your kitchen cabinets, the way that he holds you massaging your back as you fall asleep, counteracts the way he spends several hours in virtual lederhosen as a level 60 warlock in World of Warcraft. Your friends say nothing – they’s silently horrified -- but suddenly you know what love means, you’re in love with this incredibly great hobbit from Obispo. That very nape, so stunted in comparison to the rest of his body, has become a treasured, sacred space.

None of that happens to the female lead in the movie “Knocked Up.” In Knocked Up, Seth Rogen plays a chunky-style doof, Ben. When Alison (Katherine Heigl), a woman he barely knows, and whom he has accidentally impregnated, asks him “What would you expect on a second date?” Ben says “A BJ.”

Ben is neither disarmingly charming, nor, by any conventional standard, attractive. He is, literally, remotely attractive. As the movie fluxes between mildly humorous to downright skin-crawlingly crude, Ben morphs from an “in the right lighting, with the right sort of fitted clothes, if you squint your eyes and tilt your head to the left, kind of cute, if you're being kind, and you're an optimist” guy to a “head- in- the- shoulder-of- your-17-year-old-sister-whom-you’d- mistakenly- taken- to- see- this- film- at- the- dollar- theatre- on- the- recommendation- of- thousands- of- critics- who- lauded- this- film- you- can’t- stand- to- look- at- him” repulsive, fat little troll. Ben goes from an ugly guy, who, once you get to know him, becomes an even uglier guy. Fails every screen test.

What makes it worse is this story is about procreation. Before, I might have kept an unplanned pregnancy. Now I’m not longer pro-choice, I’m pro-abortion.

By the time Alison probes Ben with her foot to kick him out after their one-night stand, I couldn’t stand to look at Ben’ s face.

In fact, had Ben been attractive, I think audiences would have clearly recognized that Ben is an Agent-Orange defoiliator-ranking flaming asshole. But because Ben’s appearance is shudderingly uji – he’s “the guy with the man boobs” – people think he’s “refreshing honest” or “charming, in an off-beat kind of way.”

Some of these refreshingly honest episodes include:

Alison and Ben go to a restaurant so Alison can tell him she’s pregnant. Ben’s taken aback, and a blame-game shouting match ensues over who is to responsible for their protection-less sex act.

Ben shouts at Alison: “What did you think I was wearing, a DICK SKIN condom?”

Looking at Ben has become bad enough, but the mental image of his dick SKIN sits like a drying, curling turkey breast against the radiant heat of my frontal lobe.

Or how about the scene where our devastated, devastatingly beautiful heroine first calls Ben? She wants to set up the meeting to tell him she’s pregnant. Rather decent of her, I thought, and rather more than this puckered sphincter deserves. Ben, on the receiving end of this communication, tries to talk nonchalantly while simultaneously enjoying the antics of friends mimicking sex acts, perhaps all too representingly of their actual Saturday nights.

Then there’s the scene where Alison meets Ben at his house. While Ben changes his shirt for one with a less blatantly cretin-inspired logo, Alison endures an interaction with Ben’s friends. One creep comments about “how fast the milk comes in.” Then another clinically obese boy makes eye contact, only to resume the task of drooling and watching porn “research” for Ben’s “Celebuskin” internet business. Finally, the cruelty culminates when Ben’s high/developmentally-challenged/evil groupie friend compares the BenAlison fetus to a parasite and asks what it feels like to be eaten up inside. How much abuse can one woman take?

Which brings me to my next point. Knocked Up is a dick flick.

In the chick flick genre, a young girl faces life’s difficulties. She’s trying to make it in the world, and she’s yearning for love. She’s got a great heart, but maybe the guy that she’s got a crush on doesn’t see it. Eventually, she transforms herself after a series of hard knocks, perhaps even to become physically attractive, and finds true love – either with the crush guy, or maybe with somebody else who’s also a diamond in the rough. She’s loved for the woman that she is, but she’s actually a decent enough human to be worthy of love.

In the Knocked Up dick flick, however, the writers present this male fantasy. Here’s this lout, this loser, this dude who hasn’t done a damn thing to be worthy of the heroine’s – or our – affections. He’s just a below-average looking circle jerk participant, fortunate enough to bed a beautiful woman with low self-esteem, and who faces the crisis of their unplanned pregnancy. He doesn’t comport himself admirably – in fact, he and his band of merry sphincters continue to shock us with their verbal flatulence. And even this complete loser, who coasts financially on exploitation of others, and emotionally upon women’s masochism, can end up winning the heart of an inordinately attractive woman. Nary a kind word, honorable deed or self-sacrificing impulse necessary. We’re meant to suspend our disbelief that this woman will give him chance after chance to be in her and their baby’s life. In fact, we’re supposed to root for that. For the love of Steinem...

Not to mention that there’s no indication why Alison should love Ben. First of all, consistent with the dick flick, Alison is very attractive. And I mean in the kind of way that clearly requires cultivation. Looking at her, I can see her colorist, her hundred dollar hair clip and touchup artist, her breast augmentation surgeon, her tanning bed operator, and her eyebrow aesthetician. For starters. She's very conventional. There’s nothing to indicate Alison’s quirky or unusual taste, to explain her attraction to a guy who time and again startles us with his masturbatory musings. I can only guess her character was beaten as a child. After a childhood of beatings, Ben would seem safe and attractive. Ben lacks the ambition to get out of the cum-crusted lounge chair to calculate his cruelty.

A dick flick explains all the good reviews. Maybe many men can empathize, but my vagina detached itself from me and indignantly stalked out of this movie after about twenty minutes, so I had to run out of the theater to catch it.

Afterword: A male friend of mine had this to say, “You think that was bad? I was just locked up with a couple of dudes for four days. As part of a medical research project, I got paid $4,000 to take glaucoma drops and have my blood taken… Thing was, I had to stay locked up in this room with these guys. You couldn’t have gotten me out of there faster. They just sat there and talked about woman – same kind of shit as that movie. I just sat there and looked at them, thinking ‘None of you guys have done half the stuff you just bullshitted about… Maybe you did, but not you, you and you.’ More than half of them had had “the scare” – and all of those ended in abortions. And they were all relieved about it!”

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