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Drucker wrote:Brian, I'd like to ask you this honest question before (and if) I chime in with my two cents: how is your critique of Superbad different than a critique of heterosexual teenage men in general? I'm truly not trying to condescend, and would love your answer on this.

I don't take any condescension from this question, but I'm not really sure what you mean. How would I go about critiquing heterosexual teenage men "in general"? That's like asking me how I would critique childless middle-aged women in general. How does one even start to approach a question?

Looking back, I think I attributed more of this conversation to just you than you were actually responsible for. But:

domino harvey wrote: I get that they're young and projecting their inexperience and blah blah blah but there's a lot of different ways to get to the ultimately positive message that don't involve the persistent objectification of women the film espouses. If I didn't reply then it was because the incredulous responses to my comment were less-than-inviting. You and anyone else are free to disagree with my assessment, obviously, but to deny that these elements are in play and that it would be ludicrous for some one to respond negatively in this fashion seems rather disingenuous and churlish and not the start of a conversation I am interested in furthering.

Brian C wrote: But it's really more of a spectrum, isn't it? Most men are somewhere between the extremes, neither the kind of guy who walks around thinking of women solely as shrinkwrapped pleasurebots nor an infallible feminist. I think that Dom's initial diagnosis (years ago) of "overwhelming misogyny" was hyperbolic, but I also think he's dead-on right about the male-centric perspective towards and sexual objectification of the women in the film. Granted, it's been awhile since I saw the film, but as I recall it is not a film whose makers seem all that interested in its female characters, beyond the practical point that they need to be there in order to serve as vehicles of personal fulfillment for the males. Essentially, they're Manic Pixie Dream Girls, without the manic pixie part, and I don't think it's all that out of line to suggest that it leans to the wrong side of the misogyny scale.

Satori wrote: It seems to me fairly inarguable that much of the dialogue in the film does indeed exhibit hostility toward women. Whether the film as a whole is hostile is perhaps more complicated, although I think I largely agree with Domino here. To me, the film is normalizing a cultural assumption that young adolescent boys must form their homosocial bonds through an objectification of women. It is not simply a matter of trying to have consensual sex; the two "protagonists" seem to only understand sex as something they must get from the women rather than enjoy with them. Their conception of sex seems to completely foreclose any understanding of female desire and the possibility that women might, ya know, enjoy sex too. Thus the major narrative strand of the film becomes a quest narrative in which they attempt to acquire alcohol to get the girls drunk enough to sleep with them.

I'm not going to say too much, and I'm very wary of accidentally saying something stupid that comes off the wrong way in this discussion.

And not to try to address all of these absolutely valid points one by one, but to me, a central part of the film is that the two protagonists (maybe three) are each other's only friends, and I think it's worth pointing out. The two main protagonists, for example, only accept McLovin when he's able to help them fulfill the need of getting alcohol. These two not only seem incapable of talking to actual women as peers, but don't feel capable of talking to anybody as a peer.

I think a lot of the reading about female hostility (wrong word?) is valid in this movie. But these two are the only friends that they have. Chalk me up as another somewhat late-bloomer crowd on this forum. I couldn't talk to people when I was a freshman or sophomore, and if it weren't for

Spoiler

weed

I don't know how I would've broken into any social circle as a freshman in high school. My personality and tastes just separated me from everyone it felt like.

Does that mean I'm trying to excuse the behavior of protagonists in this film? Not actively. But this story is about two outsiders who don't have a clue how to exist in the social world because they are so insulated from it (Cera says as much after the fight that precedes the party, where he explains why he needs to not go to the state university with his best friend). Would the movie have been more "fair" if it included scenes of women talking about how they just really wanted to get laid? Maybe, but I never got the feeling that it was trying to tell an honest tale of high school sexuality and social perception in general: the film is really more focused on the two protagonists, warts and all to me.

The film is of course representing a Maxim magazine-styled stage some young men go through (and many never leave). I knew kids like this in high school and college and I can say with honesty that I've never had patience for guys then or now who vocally objectified women. I don't think anyone is saying dudes like the leads don't exist, but I don't see the need to indulge these aspects in a film without the picture offering sufficient reason to suffer them. Let's not kid ourselves: the leads spew vulgar comments for the entertainment of the audience, some of which is the result of self-identification. What's left for those who knew the touch and/or grace of a woman in high school? Not much on my end, at least. If you find it funny besides, I can't argue the point since humor is subjective, but I don't think so. What's worse, the film is so convinced of its vulgar brilliance that there's little else offered for those unconvinced.

No film can ever recapture the totality of the high school experience, of course, but the two representations nearest to my own observations and experiences are the Myth of the American Sleepover, which is the closest thing to an accurate portrayal of being sixteenish in suburbia I've ever seen and a film where I recognized not one or two familiar figures but nearly everyone on screen in a glorious spectrum, and the UK series Skins, which is far from realistic but nonetheless expertly captures and relates what being a teenager felt like.

domino harvey wrote:No film can ever recapture the totality of the high school experience, of course.

Thankfully.

Satori's quote above regarding the terrifying sight of a "vagina by itself" is an excellent example of using vulgar comedy to highlight the complicated, misogynistic attitudes that many kids have toward heterosexual adolescence. It think it's a rather brilliant moment in the movie for all the reasons Satori neatly identifies above. Satori, however, produces it as an effect that the filmmakers never intended, and it's this question regarding whether a film espouses or rejects the attitude displayed that seems most at issue here. Satori seems to assume that the scene was a virtual high five, perpetuating the attitudes that I think were lampooned in that moment. Can we honestly believe that the filmmakers are unaware of the rich irony in Seth lamenting the lack of dick in a porn movie, and the fact that this is a huge and patent contradiction for a wildly homophobic teen, or that the "vagina by itself" is not a riff on the nasty male delusion of a young woman's dependency on the penis for sexual fulfillment? You can accuse the film of being vulgar (which is an accusation totally distinct from its potential misogyny), but it seems a stretch to say that Superbad is another piece in the cultural enforcement of misogynistic attitudes that predominate among American teens. Speaking as someone who views youth culture in America as increasingly misogynistic (usually couched in more hypocritically antiseptic media), I see this moment rather as a kind of oasis, a refreshing moment of exposure that deflates this attitude. And for me, at least, a lot of this depends on its crude presentation. I actually wish I had seen something like this when I was a teenager instead of all the phony, benighted '80s drivel that poisoned teen sexuality and gender self-esteem even as it never dared confront the spectacle of a child viewing pornography. A shit bath after that is, by comparison, like a dive into a cool pond in a rainforest at the base of a waterfall... to be perfectly vulgar.

Well, I don't think that the "vagina by itself" joke is an unintended effect. I'd even agree that the joke is a knowing "riff" on misogynist youth attitudes- its presence in the opening sequence is clearly intended to establish that the film's leads adhere to the cultural archetype of the immature teen boy that holds these attitudes. But I don't think that the film ever extends this riffing into a direct critique of these attitudes. Indeed, as I said above, I don't think these attitudes are ever directly interrogated, much less revealed as complicit in the perpetuation of great harm in the real world.

What the film does, I think, is to poke fun at the lead characters' immaturity, which (for the film) manifests itself in a variety of ways, including their particular brand of misogyny. But by treating their misogyny as nothing more than a part of their teenage immaturity, the film both trivializes it and naturalizes it as they way teen boys "are." It is precisely the "boys will be boys" argument described above, which functions as an ideological excuse for misogyny.

A film about two misogynists does not automatically translate into a misogynist film, of course, but I honestly don't see the film as contributing anything to a critique of the pervasive cultural sexism is exhibits. Thus, in its own way, I think it does naturalize certain sexist attitudes among young men.

I get that dynamic you describe; I agree that it crops up constantly in films aimed at teens. I just disagree that we are presented in this instance with immature teens who are anything but grotesques; they are flagrant caricatures in an all-out farce. (Compare them to, for example, the buttoned-up lead in American Pie.) Through them, the film takes sadly normalized behavior in American teenaged years (and beyond) and distorts it into what I believe is essentially a critique. It does just the opposite of normalizing or naturalizing the behavior. I could be missing something as it's been a few years since I've seen it, but this was my take-away impression.

EDIT: Let me add, too, that it takes some case-by-case, scene-by-scene analysis to make these arguments, as opposed to just naming a genre (i.e., farce) and leaving it at that. Certainly, films like Road Trip (which I fled in horror after fifteen minutes) are equally farces, however disingenuous, so the devils of intention and critique are inevitably in the details. (I'm tempted to condemn any film where Seann William Scott appears.) I just think Superbad is making this teen tendency to objectify women sufficiently ugly (and at the same time, coming up with some genuinely funny, original gags--the penis drawings during the end credits, for example, were sublime).

Am I the only one who remembers the ending of this movie? It's not very sophisticated, but the two main characters do, sort of, learn and grow..

This

Brian C wrote:but I also think he's dead-on right about the male-centric perspective towards and sexual objectification of the women in the film…. it is not a film whose makers seem all that interested in its female characters, beyond the practical point that they need to be there in order to serve as vehicles of personal fulfillment for the males..

The misogynistic jokes and pervasive homophobia are bad enough, but what really gets my goat is the enormous discrepancy in the filmmakers choice of actors when casting boy and girl parts. The only film I can think of from the top of my head where a female leading role that one is supposed to sympathise with is as butt ugly as Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, Will Ferrell or Zach Galifianakis is Welcome to the Dollhouse.

Can anyone here find one, let alone five films where a female that looks as esthetical displeasing as Jonah Quasimodo Hill gets an attractive guy? Reality certainly is not like that in my experience. My shy, fat curly haired, ugly straight male friends in high school certainly did end up scoring with girls but no way where they as consistently hot as Superbad or The Hangover.

Michael wrote: Misogyny? WTF. It's a fucking teenage boy buddy movie and of course, the girls are gonna look like hot idiots in their world. There are so many silly movies for teenage girls, let the boys have it too.

Yeah right, can you name some? I don’t really think there are that many girl equivalents of these kinds of bromance films. Even Bridesmades only had the one fat girl in a sea of women that all could be, if not H&M models, than at least Sears Catalog. From Clueless to Legally Blonde, most films directed at a female audience feature beautiful model pretty girls that hook up with fairly attractive guys. Even Ugly Betty is not as eye scrapingly ugly as Jona Hill, and for most scenes in the show she was wearing a fat suit.

mfunk9786 wrote:they tend to be more mature, more sensitive, more emotionally developed.

Really? Have you spent any amount of time with teenage girls lately? This type of romanticizing young women pisses me off. Girls are just as stupid, insecure and plain looking as boys. You just rarely see these girls represented on film. Instead you get two-dimensional objects of male attraction, like for example the girls in Suberbad.

malcolm1980 wrote:Michael Cera is crazy talented. He has superb comic timing, intelligence and a sweet personality to boot. He's gonna be big this year.

No. Michael Cera gets away scot-free without anyone mentioning how totally unfuckable he is. He is not cute, and no woman on the planet has ever thought so, let alone a gay guy. He exists as a substitute for male audience members in the wish fulfilment plot these films always contain.

Come on, don’t you guys notice these enormous differences in how males and females are portrayed in the bromance comedies? Don’t you care? You sure as hell seemed to care about how Lena Dunham looked in Girls. Reading this forum I really feel like I am in some kind of episode of The Twilight Zone where everyone is drinking the cool aide and are oblivious to the fucktupedness that surrounds them. I mean, come on, Will Ferell can flop out his fat fucking disgusting belly in literally every appearance he does on Conan O’ Brian or Lettermann and everyone loves it, but every hypocrite from New York to Middle America gets pissed of when Lena Dunham shows her fat ass.

I get the critique that men in movies are allowed a variety of looks, while women generally all have to be model-gorgeous- but a.) that's not a new critique at all, so you needn't get all Invasion of the Body Snatchers about how nobody sees it; it's a truism that people have been commenting on for decades, though that sadly hasn't reversed the trend, and b.) you are focusing on how unattractive you find the men in a way that's super fuckin creepy, dude, particularly in your apparent assumption that everyone in the world shares your tastes. There are definitely any number of warrens of misogyny where Dunham's body is the primary target of criticism, but as far as I can tell, she got for more hatred here for a derogatory remark about Nick Ray than she ever did for being other than conventionally attractive.

(Incidentally, the top grossing comedy this year thus far is Identity Thief, which stars not only Melissa McCarthy but also Amanda Peet, so it's not 100% Jonah Hill getting together with models out there.)

What did Amanda Peet ever do to you? (this is mostly in good humour)

In what world is Amanda Peet not conventionally good looking?

gcgiles1dollarbin wrote:I get that dynamic you describe; I agree that it crops up constantly in films aimed at teens. I just disagree that we are presented in this instance with immature teens who are anything but grotesques; they are flagrant caricatures in an all-out farce. (Compare them to, for example, the buttoned-up lead in American Pie.) Through them, the film takes sadly normalized behavior in American teenaged years (and beyond) and distorts it into what I believe is essentially a critique.

I am intrigued by this reading, but I wonder how you would be able to demonstrate it. Your argument seems to be that the film is critiquing the sexist behavior of the two leads by making it so extreme and vulgar that we cannot help but read them as caricatures designed to call attention to the pervasive sexism among teens. Yet it seems to me that the genre of the "gross-out" teen comedy is such that each new entry necessarily needs to be more vulgar and extreme (which in this case is connected to the presence of sexist remarks) in order to "top" previous entries. How then do we determine if the teens in this film are more sexist and vulgar because the film is trying to call attention to and criticize this behavior or if the film is simply trying to outpace the sexism and vulgarity of (say) Road Trip in order to appeal to its target audience? It seems to me that there needs to be something within the film that would suggest or reveal that we are meant to read the two leads as ciphers for a satiric act of criticism of teenage sexism. I just don't see that at all. There are no Brechtian alienation devices that would distance us from the teens (such as in Funny Games, a film that is clearly meant to both exceed and critique what Haneke sees as the sadism of the horror genre); indeed, there are not even any strong, well-developed female characters that might serve as vehicles for this critique within the film or to simply call attention to it through their presence.

It also seems to me that your argument that we are meant to be completely critical of the leads is a very far removed from what most of the other posters defending the film have been saying. I was certainly critical of the main characters when I was watching the film, but I believe I was very much reading the film against the grain (I am also quite sure that I am not the target audience of the film-I only saw it when out with some [all male, incidentally] friends of mine). I very much want to follow your argument, though. Do you see anything else in the film that suggests we are meant to read it as a critique of the leads?

knives wrote:What did Amanda Peet ever do to you? (this is mostly in good humour)

Haha, I was confusing Amanda Peet with Amanda Plummer.

Which is still curious since neither one is quite Jonah Hill material (I say knowing at least one person who think he's cute thus proving '90s Ewan McGreggor thriller correct).

Satori wrote:Your argument seems to be that the film is critiquing the sexist behavior of the two leads by making it so extreme and vulgar that we cannot help but read them as caricatures designed to call attention to the pervasive sexism among teens.

While the behavior is sexist, the leads themselves are grotesques, I believe, who are not beyond sympathy, in the same way that Laurel and Hardy are sympathetic characters guilty of human failngs that we nonetheless always read as vehicles of critique because of their grotesque or cartoonish demeanor. When Fogell struts like a sexist ass, it is absurd, and it is impossible not to enfold the behavior in one's ridicule of the character. And because of the disjunction between act and actor, it is more likely you will feel sympathy for the character. Critique of said behavior accomplished, at least in my mind! (This relates also to your final point.) What I'm describing is rather basic to comedy, but as I wrote above, the devil is in the details, and whether a film successfully negotiates the invocation of sexist behavior without subtly endorsing it is, of course, a subjective call by the viewer mostly dependent on his or her tolerance toward the mere spectacle of such behavior.

Satori wrote:Yet it seems to me that the genre of the "gross-out" teen comedy is such that each new entry necessarily needs to be more vulgar and extreme (which in this case is connected to the presence of sexist remarks) in order to "top" previous entries.

The parenthetic embedded in this sentence lumps the vulgar with the sexist in a way that mistakenly conflates the two and misrepresents my argument. I think that the oneupmanship of so-called "gross-out" comedies is something entirely distinct from the misogyny that may or may not exist in those films. As I wrote above, too often vulgarity is used as a front for sexism, homophobia, etc.! But in this case, I don't think that is the intent, except insofar that they even cite that behavior in order to mock it. (As a caveat, I should say that I am pretty immune to the mere appearance of blood, bile, profanity, shit, vomit, etc.)

Satori wrote:There are no Brechtian alienation devices that would distance us from the teens (such as in Funny Games, a film that is clearly meant to both exceed and critique what Haneke sees as the sadism of the horror genre); indeed, there are not even any strong, well-developed female characters that might serve as vehicles for this critique within the film or to simply call attention to it through their presence.

You're right! There are no Brechtian distancing devices in Superbad that are as hammer-to-the-skull obvious as the rewinding tape scene in Funny Games, but given their respective genres, it seems like an odd comparison, and at any rate, some would argue that Haneke's devices condescend to the audience and do not credit their intelligence enough to believe that they can experience this alienation without shattering the fourth wall so pretentiously. (For what it's worth, I think Funny Games is a good film, but there is this very sensible argument against its tactics.)

What I'm describing is rather basic to comedy, but as I wrote above, the devil is in the details, and whether a film successfully negotiates the invocation of sexist behavior without subtly endorsing it is, of course, a subjective call by the viewer mostly dependent on his or her tolerance toward the mere spectacle of such behavior.

I suspect that this is the fundamental point of disagreement. For me, the film feels like it is, if not endorsing sexist behavior per se, at least treating it as a relatively benign part of the social world of immature teenage boys. For me, the film feels irresponsible for making the casual sexism of the leads such a big part of their characters while avoiding any direct confrontation of their behavior or gesturing at the consequences of it.

The parenthetic embedded in this sentence lumps the vulgar with the sexist in a way that mistakenly conflates the two and misrepresents my argument. I think that the oneupmanship of so-called "gross-out" comedies is something entirely distinct from the misogyny that may or may not exist in those films.

You are absolutely correct that vulgarity does not equal sexism, but I only meant that in this particular film, the vulgarity is intertwined with the lead characters' casual sexism in a way that is impossible to separate. The vulgarity may not be a front for sexism, but I do think the film uses some of its sexist remarks in order to be vulgar/offensive/"funny," ect (like in the porn joke that opens the film). So in this sense, I do think that in this particular film, sexism cannot be separated from the film's attempts to one-up previous teen comedies. (But you are absolutely right that vulgarity is not itself oppressive; indeed, I think that a filmmaker like John Waters uses vulgarity as a weapon against power)

You're right! There are no Brechtian distancing devices in Superbad that are as hammer-to-the-skull obvious as the rewinding tape scene in Funny Games, but given their respective genres, it seems like an odd comparison

It is a bit of an odd comparison (maybe Blazing Saddles would have been a better one?), but I think its apropos if your argument is that it is the increase in the level of the character's sexism that serves as the foundation for its critique. If Funny Games didn't utilize its (admittedly obvious) alienation devices, but simply increased its sadism and general unpleasantness to what was at the time (of the original) unprecedented levels, then it would be ambiguous as to whether it was a critique of horror film sadism or if it is simply perpetuating it. Haneke, who seems to feel like horror film sadism/violence is inherently a negative thing, and I should say that as much as I love Haneke, I don't agree with him here, draws attention to the fact that he is critiquing the sadism in a way that Superbad simply doesn't. I do, on the other hand, think that blatant and repeated sexism is inherently a negative thing unless it is clear that the film is somehow interrogating or exploring this issue rather than using it to get laughs.

At any rate, I'm not saying that every movie that traffics in sexist characters needs to be as obvious as Haneke. I'd settle for some indication of the harm that sexism causes or simply a strong female character to call their sexism into question by comparison. To me, the film seems to suggest that sexism is funny and might make you look like an ass, but is ultimately a benign part of being a teenager. The idea that sexism "isn't that big of a deal," is, I think, the major way in which sexism currently operates.

Regarding your top point, I think you're right! We are essentially at odds about the film's success in comically undermining the misogynistic material that appears in it. Back to square one!

Thanks for the back-and-forth and for putting up with my initial reference to your earlier comment.