Duff stuff ... Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogan in Knocked Up
The debate about Knocked Up, an unromantic comedy by Judd Apatow, rambles maddeningly on. The first disorientating attack of snippiness I heard was on Front Row, on Radio 4, when Mark Lawson and his visiting critic worried that the film might be anti-abortion (guys, if she has an abortion, there's no movie).
This debate continued on the internet, where bloggers complained that the portrayal of a pregnant woman made them want to "puke" (said pregnant woman, played by Katherine Heigl, was deemed too darned hormonal; in fact, she just loses her temper a couple of times). Finally, last week, Joe Queenan, the funny but occasionally snitty American critic, wrote a piece in the Guardian in which he accused Apatow, his collaborators Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill, and the studios currently in his thrall of turning out "juvenile" and "offensive" movies. Offensive, how? Well, they're misogynistic, see. "It's leading to a future so dark," he ranted, "that women will look back on the decade that brought them The Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, My Best Friend's Wedding and My Big Fat Greek Wedding as a golden age."
It's always nice to see a male of the species fighting the good fight on our behalf, and on one level I'm grateful to Queenan for so bravely using the m-word (I avoid it except when absolutely necessary because I fear the p - paranoia - word). The trouble is, in this instance, he's wrong. Knocked Up is lots of things - too long, too light on laughs, self-indulgent and sentimental in places - but it is not misogynistic. If Queenan et al want to know what 21st-century movie misogyny looks like, they should catch Julian Gilbey's Essex gangster flick Rise of the Footsoldier, which is the kind of violent and disgusting film that it's worth getting angry about. This is not, however, to suggest that, beside it, Knocked Up is ignorable misogyny-lite.
For all its tit jokes, Apatow's film can accurately be acclaimed as feminist. When was the last time you saw a major Hollywood movie portray a woman's anxieties about her maternity leave? When did you last catch a big studio picture in which a woman tries to hide her pregnancy from her bosses because she fears she'll be sacked?
Queenan and co are particularly worked up about the inequalities of the Apatow universe, in which all men are fat, impoverished, stoner slobs (in Knocked Up, Seth Rogen's character is a swollen layabout whose big idea is a website that lets its visitors know at what point their favourite actors get their kit off in any given movie, and he is surgically attached to his giant bong) and all women are lovely and successful, and yet still they get off with one another (Rogen's character gets the drunk television presenter played by Heigl pregnant after failing to pull on a condom). Apparently, it's "tragic" that these beautiful young women are doomed to spend their lives with juvenile dorks.
Well, maybe so. But here's a thing. I love this new universe, in which men are a bit dumb and muddled and women are clever and sorted; it might be unfair, it might be improbable, but, my God, for so long - too long - it was the other way round. Last week I saw a preview of Apatow's next effort, Superbad (out on Friday), which is about high school losers and their desperate efforts to buy illegal booze and get laid by the class hotties. It's funnier than Knocked Up - the first half-hour is really hilarious - but the thought that kept running through my mind was how cool it was to see the girls calmly calling the shots, and the guys running (waddling) to catch up. If that makes me a bigot, so be it. You can't get away from the fact that there's an unlikely new freedom in movies right now. It's not just that these films are taboo-breaking when it comes to their particular brand of smut (Superbad is seriously cock-fixated; not since Portnoy's Complaint http://books.theguardian.com/authors/author/0,,-121,00.html has the male member been so satirically celebrated). It's that their men are allowed to be non-macho and affectionate - see Jonah Hill embracing his best friend during a sleepover in Superbad - and their women, well, macho and non-affectionate (or, at least, as into sex for its own sake as any man).
This new freedom reaches a cheerful apotheosis in Julie Delpy's Two Days in Paris, another film about a geeky male and his clever, beautiful girlfriend. Would Queenan call that sexist? I guess not. It was scripted by a woman, and directed by a woman. Hell, she even wrote the music.
