Judd Apatow's Comedies of the Mature

We are currently in the era of the boy-man (or mook).

Male character types in popular culture run in cycles: The 1950s square jawed hero, the ‘60s rebel, the ’70s swinger and the ’80s action hero. The early 21st-century male type is shaping up to be the hapless 20-something who is developmentally arrested. Manhood is forestalled by indecision, partying and smoking marijuana from bongs, spending long hours mastering video games, and living in plain fear of growing up. A culture of boy-men characterizes numerous movie types—Adam Sandler, Jack Black, characters in Kevin Smith films, etc.

But two recent exceptions take an ethnographic look at the slacker lifestyle and discover characters searching for their escape out of a boy’s life and into manhood. Judd Apatow’s raucous and insightful film comedies understand that world and these guys, but challenge his characters to act their age.

R-RATED MORALITY TALES
The first thing to know: these films aren’t made for your church youth group (although I’ll bet a few have watched them.). They’re R-rated and for a reason. Characters talk the way people in this subculture speak—except probably wittier. But like all good dramas and character-based comedies, the screenplay forces them to painfully confront their problems. They have behavior that they must grow out of, but first the audience has to see and hear it to understand the lives the characters live and the challenges they face.

In the last two years, Apatow has directed and co-written two films, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up where the need to put away childish things and belatedly face responsibilities sets these films apart from other R-rated comedies. Here are brief plot synopses (with spoilers) of these very raunchy films, so you won’t need to watch them to understand just how their themes run counter to the cultural flow.

BOYS TO MEN
In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Andy Stillzer works at an electronics superstore where his male co-workers engage in the usual masculine sexual braggadocio. One night during a card game, as the guys are swapping their bawdy tales of female conquest, real or imagined, it becomes quite obvious that the nice but dorky Andy doesn’t know what he’s talking about and soon has to admit that he is a virgin. When as a youth he’d tried to fornicate—though the flesh was willing—his heart just wasn’t in it, and awkwardness led to embarrassing disaster and decades of romantic and sexual solitude. The other guys now make it their mission to initiate Andy into sexual activity.

What follows is a hilarious commentary on the misplaced priorities of young males who are mostly still little boys on the inside. In fact, the men in Apatow’s stories are terrified of women and can only relate to them as sexual playthings, but though Andy is the most scared of all, he doesn’t see women as sex objects, but as individuals. He respects the idea of sexual love with one woman so much that he has never had sex. When he tries to play the swinger, he fails horribly and hilariously.

He feels much safer immersed in his house full of hobbies and hundreds of valuable mint-condition (never opened) action figures. Obviously, Andy’s had to learn a lot about sublimation. In a scene charged with insightful dual meanings, taking his action figures out of its original packaging becomes a metaphor for the sexual activity everyone is urging on Andy. Unconsciously referring to more than the action figure, Andy says, “It loses its value if you take it out of its packaging.”

Eventually he meets an attractive woman older than him, Trish, who is already a youthful grandmother. There’s good chemistry but, though they date, Andy’s virginity is a secret whose revelation he thinks would scare off any woman who learned the truth. Andy finally “confesses” his sexual purity motivated by his desire to commit himself to one woman for life. “For so long I thought that there was something wrong with me . . . because it had never happened, but . . . I realize now that it was just because I was waiting for you.”

In the biggest surprise of the movie, rather than finally having sex, the two middle-aged sweethearts are married and after the minister tells him he may kiss the bride, he adds to Andy, “And for God's sake, consummate the thing.” In a profane and obscene sex comedy, the title character endures decades of abstinence before matrimony allows him to lose his virgin status. A better advertisement for the “True Love Waits” campaign in the real world is hard to imagine.

A SECOND TAKE
Last summer saw Apatow’s second directorial effort, Knocked Up win similar critical and box office success. Ben Stone, another layabout living off a now-dwindling insurance settlement, spends his days with his stoner buddies planning to create a website that chronicles the nude scenes of Hollywood stars. When he meets a beautiful blonde, Alison, at a club, the two awkwardly drink their way into her apartment and have intoxicated sex that Ben scarcely remembers in the morning.

The mismatched couple goes their separate ways until eight weeks later, Alison begins to suspect she is pregnant. Contacting Ben to bring him into the loop, they go to the doctor’s office where they view an early sonogram with awe and dismay—indeed, there is an obviously visible tiny life growing inside her. This new and unplanned development has interrupted their lives and they are completely unprepared. Alison’s mother gives her this chilling advice:

“I cannot be supportive of this. This is a mistake. This is a big, big mistake. Now think about your stepsister. Now, you remember what happened with her? She had the same situation as you and she had it taken care of. And you know what? Now she has a real baby. Honey, this is not the time.”

Alison refuses to “have it taken care of.” Ben’s father tells Ben the child is a blessing and he should welcome it. When Alison tells Ben she’s keeping the baby, Ben gamely agrees that he should be a part of the child’s life and the two begin to work on their relationship. They go shopping for baby clothes and Ben tells her he’ll read a stack of child-rearing books to prepare. But it won’t be that easy for Ben to change. His friends are his support group and they are arrested adolescents. Ben doesn’t really know how to be an adult, and as the months pass, Alison begins to question whether he will be a fit partner in rearing their child. When she discovers that Ben has never even taken those child-rearing books out of the bag, she breaks up with him.

Hitting rock bottom, Ben turns to his father, Harris, a thrice-married man, for advice. The only thing Harris can tell his son is, “You can go around blaming everyone else, but in the end, until you take responsibility for yourself, none of this is going to work out.”

Ben leaves his druggie pals, moves into his own apartment, and finds a real job. He stays home in the evenings and reads the baby books. He grows up. When Alison goes into labor alone, she calls him and a new side of Ben emerges. He manages to get Alison to the hospital and stand with her through a difficult (but hilariously graphic) birth process. The gestation period has resulted in two births—one of a baby, and the other of an adult male. Ben’s whole demeanor has changed from that of a man-child to someone who acts like a husband. The hard-won maturity raises the hope that the couple, once so wildly different, has been transformed by the process into good parents for their baby daughter.

Critics were struck at finding such traditional values in an R-rated sex comedy. In the New York Times, A. O. Scott remarked, “While this movie’s barrage of gynecology-inspired jokes would have driven the prudes at the old Hays Office mad, its story, about a young man trying to do what used to be the very definition of the Right Thing, might equally have brought a smile of approval to the lips of the starchiest old-Hollywood censor.” Time’s film critic Richard Schickel wrote that Apatow “clearly believes in marriage, family, bourgeois dutifulness.”

A New York Times Magazine profile of Apatow describes his films as having “conservative morals the Family Research Council might embrace—if the humor weren’t so filthy.” The reporter accompanied the director/writer/producer, his wife, and the Knocked Up stars to a chic club on the rooftop of a Las Vegas hotel and noted how uncomfortable Apatow was amidst the glitz and girls. In the same article, a friend reports that Apatow doesn’t even like it when he points out attractive women to him. The director confirms this unease: “He’s right . . . I’m the guy who gets uncomfortable. That’s why I was able to write ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin’ and ‘Knocked Up.’ I believe in those guys. There’s something honorable about holding out for love and not breaking up for the sake of the baby. I see people get divorced, and there is a part of me that thinks, I wonder how hard they tried?”

What’s striking is finding such morals in what are truly R-worthy comedies. The F-word and other such language flow freely because that is the social world of these nerds and geeks, although, as the New York Times review notes, “for all its rowdy obscenity it rarely feels coarse or crude.” Although Apatow has a clear affection for his male losers and bong-smoking boys, they serve as a sharp contrast when his protagonists start to break away from their boys club, leaving them looking somewhat pathetic in their immaturity. They will probably never know the joy and satisfaction of Andy and Ben, who traded their action figures and porn sites for commitment and fidelity.

This is not to advocate that readers should rush out and rent an Apatow film, but I find their critical and commercial success interesting cultural indicators that even in the midst of an age long past the restraint and taste of yesteryear, there is an underlying attraction to the stability and joy that can come from taking responsibility to act one’s age.

Can a couple of subversively moral sex comedies reverse the results of the sexual revolution? Media effects theorists argue it takes many exposures to a given message over an extended period of time before attitudes change and behavior is altered. Cultural transformation is a mysterious and complex phenomenon so only the presumptuous would read these films as harbingers of moral regeneration. But we can still marvel when someone like Judd Apatow can make people laugh at themselves while pondering his challenge to be a mensch.

Alex Wainer teaches communication and mass media at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is also a regular contributor to The Culture Beat. He can be reached at commdocalex@netscape.net.

Gina Dalfonzo, “’Knocked Up’ Not a Knockout,” The Point, 1 June 2007.

Travis McSherley, “Continuing the ’Knocked Up’ Knockdown,” The Point, 6 June 2007.

Lori Smith, “Have Sex, but Please, Try Not to Fall in Love,” The Point, 26 June 2007.

“Judd Apatow’s Family Values,” New York Times Magazine, 27 May 2007.

“Seeing Film through a Worldview Lens,” BreakPoint Commentary, 26 October 2007.