CONSERVATIVES TASTES: Right-Wing Fantasy
Bowman, James
Tall, and tan, and young, and lovely The girl from Ipanema goes walking And when she passes, I smile--but she doesn't see... ELL, DUH! But Antonio Carlos Jobim wasn't really as dumb as he...
...If frankness about male lust is stigmatized as an offense not against chivalry or good manners or moral hygiene but against political correctness, then the new libertarian and politically incorrect "right-wing" can be expected to take up frankness about male lust as its own cause, and to use itasaweaponagainstfeministfantasies...
...Even when we know this, even when we understand perfectly well how the sexual economy works and that sex never comes without complications, we menstillcan'tresistthatfantasy,whichalsoliesatthe foundation of all pornography...
...James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The American Spectator's movie and culture critic...
...There's a certain attractiveness to this idea, but it depends on our closing our eyes to the fact that, as Antonio Carlos Jobim showed all those years ago, male lust is every bit as fantastical, in its way, as feministutopianism.Thetwofantasiesmeetatthepoint where Superbad's Evan longs to be treated as a sexobject...
...Goldberg's teenage alter ego, played by Michael Cera,putsitthisway:"Imagineifgirlsweren'tweirded out by our boners but wanted to see them...
...Well, that's one way of putting it, I suppose...
...Scott's mouth, but I think he means that being "square" in this sense, at least as an intellectual stratagem for understanding certainkindsofart,isagoodthing.Itmeansthatyou retain a healthy appreciation of the difference between art and life which gives you a point of perspective not only on movie violence like that in Bonnie and Clyde but on the whole all-is-permitted world of postmodern fantasy designed to make us forget that there is such a difference--or, indeed, that "life" exists at all apart from the art with which we represent it to ourselves and others...
...But, having been a teenage boy myself, I think what they're achingforisthesamethingthatAntonioCarlosJobim C O N S E R V A T I V ET A S T E S Right-Wing Fantasy 5 6 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 Wby James Bowman was aching for, the thing that can never be...
...Ineffect,hewantshernot toknowthatshe'stallandtanandyoungandlovely,or that this gives her the sort of power over men that it always has and always will...
...It's becausehewantsthesexoftheeye,sexwithoutcomplications.Hewantshertofeelthepurelustherbody excites in him, and he's sad because he knows she never will...
...J A M E SB O W M A N O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 5 7 Superbad...
...Rogen stars, is perhaps "right-wing," as thesethingsaremeasurednowadays,inthesensethat averyinconvenientpregnancyisnotallowedtobeterminated,butIthinkhemeansmorethanthis.Forina way shamelessness is right-wing--instead of being, as it used to be, left-wing...
...Cera's Evan as, deliciously lubriciously, she climbsalloverhim...
...It's even a satiricallyfeminist point, since it represents a corollary of the feminist brand of sexual utopianism...
...There is a similar pointtobemadeaboutviolence,andIwasshockedto find A.O...
...Scott--not a critic with whom I very often find myself in agreement--making it in the New York Times.Aproposofthe40thanniversaryofBonnieand Clyde, he wrote that "Even the most bloodthirsty moviegoerwouldbelikelytoleavearealfusilladelike the one at the end of Bonnie and Clyde sickened and traumatized, rather than thrilled...
...IN THIS SENSE SUPERBAD really is epoch-making...
...The shockingtruthnowisthattherealityofsexliesnot just in the delightful collision of bodies but includes the social context that fantasy always wants to leave out...
...Apatow and Rogen are square enough, and right-wing enough, to understand this...
...He was just givingexpressiontoaneternalmasculinelonging: notforthetallandtanandyoungandlovelygirl fromIpanema.That'sagiven.Duh,again.What hereallywantsisforthegirlwholooksstraightahead, notatme(noratanyoftheotherswhoaregoingah...
...But Antonio Carlos Jobim wasn't really as dumb as he sounded...
...I hope that, beneath their extreme coolness, Messrs...
...That these girls would lust for those boys and then act upon their feelings is not completely impossible,Isuppose,butanyonewho'severbeenateenage boy would have to acknowledge the fantastical element in such a scenario...
...They, too, wantthegirlstheylustaftertolustafterthem.And,lo, they do...
...In Greg Mottola's smash hit movie, Superbad, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Mr...
...Now, it tells us, it is "right-wing" (Mr...
...Ooh, but I watch her so sadly, he sings, but it's not because he loves her...
...Not to put words in Mr...
...Ooh, I'm so wet right now," purrs Becca (Miss MacIsaac) to Mr...
...Superbad has to trysohardtobefilthyinordertogiveusback justafaintmemoryofthatfrissonofnaughtiness which, in Cole Porter's olden days, was created by a glimpse of stocking...
...Manohla Dargis of the NewYorkTimesgivesthecredittoJuddApatow,who produced Superbad and directed The 40-Year-Old VirginandKnockedUp,sayingthat"partofwhat'sfascinatingaboutMr.Apatow'sascendancy,andwhythe comedy moment belongs to him more than it does eithertotheFarrellybrothersortoBenStillerandhis mob, is how he has created--and come close to perfecting--a masculine variation on aspirational wishfulfillmentmovieslikeLegallyBlonde.Exceptinstead of perky, pretty women reaching up, up, up, Mr...
...Yeah, they said that would happen in health class," he says...
...That's the world I want to live in some day...
...Iwouldn'tevenbothertomentionit--newsflash, Hollywood produces sex fantasy!--but that, to hear some of its more enthusiastic apologists, you'd think Superbadwasanepoch-makingfilm,theCitizenKane of high school sex comedies...
...Rogen's descriptionofhismovies)tobeshameless.Knocked Up, which opened earlier in the summer and in which Mr...
...Unfortunately, this temporary detachment from the urgencyoftheirowndesiresfadesasMr.Ceraandhis foul-mouthedsidekick,playedbyJonahHill,embark on a madcap project to win the sexual attentions of two pretty classmates (Martha MacIsaac and Emma Stone, respectively)--by providing the booze for a party they're giving--that actually succeeds...
...The particular charge of that scene, and others like it, is that it tries to push the pretense--the art--as close to trauma as possible and to make the appreciation of that art its point.Missingthepointiswhatmarksyouassquare...
...Rogen and Bill Hader, who take under their wing a kid seemingly afflicted with terminal nerdishness (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and obligingly make him over into the coolest guy in the class...
...His recent book is Honor: A History (Encounter Books...
...It's as if the Girl from Ipanema had turned to Antonio Carlos and said, with a wink, "What about it, then...
...It's a wonderful joke, but it only really works in the context of unreality that the filmhassetuparoundit.Itspiquantcombination of sweet innocence and frankly obscene lustfulness is not untrue to the experience of adolescence, but this is because adolescents perforce live in a fantasyworldwhenitcomestotheadultthings,likesex,that theyarenotyetreadyfor.Andiftheyexperiencethose things prematurely, they tend to bring their fantasy worldswiththem.Idon'tthinkitiscoincidentalthat,as I noticed in this space last month, fantasy is now also thenormallanguageofthemovies.Theanarchyofthe adolescent imagination, instead of being something to be disciplined, is now something to be celebrated and enjoyed,byadultsasmuchaschildren...
...We want to be equals...
...instead to look at him the way he looks at her...
...Please treat us as sex objects too...
...It's the fantasy of the attractive woman who doesn't want anything but what we want--and who, therefore, doesn't know aboutorcaretousethepowerherattractivenessgives her over us but only to enjoy the sex for its own sake, the way we do...
...Exceptthatinthatcasetherewouldneverhave been a song about her...
...There's a similarly vanishing quality to Superbad...
...Paradoxically, real sex becomes less real,andlessinteresting,whenthoseboundaries have been abolished...
...What's missing in all this fantasizing, the oldfashionedright-wingwouldhavepointedout,iswhat the literary theorists of the left would call transgressiveness.Societysetsupboundariesforus--atleastit used to--with regard to sex, and it is the transgression of those boundaries, as much as the sex itself, which appeals to our interest and gives us a thrill...
...And the movie goes in for someevenmoreenergetic--andfunnier--fantasizing by showing us a couple of fun-loving cops, played by Mr...
...Yeah, likethat'sgoingtohappen...
...I particularly liked that formulation, because it seemed to have been put in to show that the film's randy and raunchy high school kids actually recognizeforwhatitisthesexualutopianismthattheyotherwise find so irresistible...
...So, of course, do movies...
...Apatowoffersfreaksandgeeksachingtobeworthyof those same women...
Vol. 40 • October 2007 • No. 8
