In sex, lies and videotape, Andie MacDowell's character suggests that the difference between men and women is that men fall in love with the women they're attracted to and women become attracted to the men they fall in love with. In my experience, that is absolutely true. My wife wouldn't give me the time of day until I was able to show her that I wasn't an idiot by talking to her about Shakespeare (catnip for high school senior girls, which she was at the time). Conversely, I was immediately taken by her beauty, despite dating someone else at the time, but it wasn't until after that relationship fizzled that I made with the Shakespeare. But against incredible odds, most of my male friends and I are either married or in long-term relationships, despite looking like we'd have trouble getting laid at Comic-Con.
Needless to say, the films of Judd Apatow make total sense to us. We know how these guys feel; we are those guys. So when Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere - upon seeing the latest Apatow-produced offering, Forgetting Sarah Marshall - goes on a rant about the audacity Apatow and company have in suggesting that attractive women would even acknowledge average guys, to say nothing of falling in love with them, I don't know whether to laugh or take a shit into a Fed Ex box with his address on it. Speaking as one of those average guys he's knocking, it's not as if we've been represented all that much over the year: Dustin Hoffman (as Wells himself points out), Woody Allen... yeah, that's about it.
Wells is entitled to his opinion but he should have, at the very least, not made his rant sound like dialogue from an episode of The Hills. It's one thing to say that you can't relate to the characters in Knocked Up or Superbad but it's another thing to end your article (which you got paid to write) thusly:
I don't know where else to take this idea or how to end the article, even, so I'll just kneecap it here and leave well enough alone. I only know that if I were a girl or gay and Jason Segel came up to me at a bar and tried to put the moves on, I would scrunch my face up and say, "Are you fucking kidding me?"
Are you fucking kidding me, Jeffrey? I know he's been taken to task all week about this but goddammit, did he come home one day and find Don Knotts buried to the hilt in his wife's face or something? If this bothers him so much, why doesn't he skip the Apatow movies and pick up something starring George Clooney or Brad Pitt or Cary Grant or Warren Beatty or Ryan Reynolds or Hugh Grant or Robert Redford or Paul Newman or Rock Hudson or Mel Gibson or Will Smith or Richard Gere or Clark Gable or John Cusack or do you see what I'm getting at?
And has he taken a look in the mirror recently? Seriously, he looks like the unlikely progeny of a coke-addled encounter between Robert Evans and Christopher Walken at an orgy. If Wells isn't able to find some sympathy for the Beta Male (as Newsweek called us) in these movies, then he's either in serious denial or blind.
It's that kind of shallow bullshit that has permeated Hollywood for years and now that we're seeing movies with women who can have any guy they want going for guys who aren't classically handsome, people are suddenly freaking out. I know that some people are in love with this idea of the golden age of "Beautiful Hollywood" - when they had "faces," as Norma Desmond put it - and see it as a shame that it no longer exists, but it's an outdated concept. In this reality show-saturated culture, we're much more interested in seeing ourselves up on the screen these days. And there are a lot of paunchy dudes with shit jobs in the United States, let me tell you.
I can understand, but politely refute, the argument that these movies portray women in a negative light, only being redeemed by dating men below their general standards. It's not a far-fetched argument but I'm of the opinion that most people, male and female alike, have impossible standards when it comes to superficial aspects of a partner and tend to let truly important things (like emotional compatibility and trustworthiness) slide. Perhaps the Apatow women are painted a bit shrewish but they're certainly not shallow.
Now, the flip side of this... well, that's a different story. As appalling as some folks apparently find the idea of an ugly guy with an attractive woman, the idea of an ugly girl with an attractive man is potentially even more unthinkable. I'm not saying I think it should be but it's pretty true. If it wasn't, you wouldn't see movie after movie wherein bookish, bespectacled, unkempt and/or overweight women are miraculously transformed into Anne Hathaway or Rachael Leigh Cook or what's-her-name from My Big Fat Greek Wedding before getting their handsome man. Ally Sheedy had to spend 10 minutes in the bathroom with that smug bitch Molly Ringwald and some blush before catching Emilio Estevez's eye! Is that because we as a race have accepted that men are inherently shallow and would never be with a woman they weren't attracted to (as my opening paragraph implies) or is it simply because no one has had the balls to challenge that opinion? Well, almost no one. John Waters (a national treasure, as my wife calls him) did with Hairspray but beyond him, my mind's a blank.
I'm of the opinion that a gender-reversal of the Apatow formula just wouldn't work, if only for the reason that it would be perceived as anti-feminist. Painting a man as a woman's sole motivation for self-improvement would be considered an archaic and counter-productive pattern of thought. On the other hand, we guys are OK with how we're depicted because, gay men excepted, women really are our sole motivation for self-improvement. If not for the ladies, we probably wouldn't wear clothes, eat a lot more, and do almost nothing... there would be a lot of hair too... it would look something like the first 20 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. No one wants that. No one.
But let's play devil's advocate here. Let's imagine that was a sudden rash of hit rom-coms wherein women who don't look like Angelina Jolie landed guys who do look like Brad Pitt. And let's also imagine that some critic cried foul at the idea that frumpy women could get the attention of handsome, successful men. Said critic would be roasted over an open flame for even daring to make such an offensive, misogynist remark, much less putting it in print.
Yeah, you know what? Can someone get me Jeffrey Wells' address, a Fed Ex box and some bran, please?
