Viewing Knocked Up as a fairy tale about a male damsel saved by a brave princess answers (even if it doesn’t excuse it from) its most frequent critique: that the female characters are humourless scolds, and not very well realized ones at that. Dana Stevens put that complaint forward at Slate way back when the movie was fresh, and Bridget brings it up in the comments on my earlier post:

The only problem I did have with Knocked Up was the utterly one-dimensional portrayal of the female characters. Sure, I know women like that, but then there are women like me, who are, you know … normal and stuff, and probably have more in common with the guys in that movie (I’m thinking of the poor beleaguered husband who plays fantasy baseball to escape the dull reality of his suburban life) than the women.

The thing is that it isn’t really a movie about gender relations, or about pregnancy. It’s a movie about one guy’s struggle to become (more of) a man. [SPOILER ALERT: Knocked Up and Juno are discussed in plot-revealing detail below -- but you saw them months ago, right?] So none of the characters aside from him are all that vividly drawn — Ben Stone’s stoner, adult-website-building buddies are caricatures and so is his love interest and her (wicked) step-sister. Of course the dudes get to be friggin’ hilarious and there’s a certain cartoonish verisimilitude in them that is absent from the women. But all of them are primarily symbolic of Stone’s personal journey: the guys are the warm, comfortable goofball life he’s leaving behind, which explains why they have to have some charms. The step-sister and her emasculated-but-cool husband is the life he’s afraid of stepping into, the sketch of his worst fears for his future (which is why Pete, the henpecked husband, needs to have some of Ben’s charms — he represents what Ben fears is the ghost of himself future). Allison is the beautiful, patient, encouraging but-still-slightly-scary vehicle for his coming of age. The plot needs her to be a bit stern, because the dragon she’s slaying to save Ben is a flaw in his own character. It would have been nice if the attractive elements of her went beyond her obvious physical beauty, sure, though that’s the measure start-of-film Ben and his friends value most in a woman. Overall, the questions rightfully most expressed about her are: Why the hell would she sleep with him in the first place? Why would she call him back even if she was pregnant? Why wouldn’t she have an abortion? Why would she decide automatically to date him even if they were going to take some stab at co-parenting? The answer in all cases is the same: it’s a movie about him, and it would be a very short movie with little room for him to develop as a character if Allison made realistic choices at any of the above points (a point I have heard made before on the internet).

But the wooden female characters fit the fairy tale form, too. I don’t remember much about the prince from Cinderella except that he was handsome and, you know, a prince. (Come to think of it, what kind of oddball way for a prince to choose a wife is that? Throwing a ball for all the maidens?) He’s mostly unimportant to the plot, because he is just a vehicle for Cinderella’s ambition to escape her sorry lot in life as a domestic indentured servant.

The problem with this as an excuse is that Judd Apatow does try to present the female characters as more than cardboard stand-ins, and the movie may actually have been better off in some ways without the relatively flat scenes of the women doing their baby-shopping, bouncer-confronting women stuff. Without those scenes, the argument that all the characters in the film are somewhat distorted because they’re seen through the lens of Ben’s psyche (as adults in John Hughes ’80s teen movies were always shown through teenaged eyes, for example). But even with the women-bonding scenes there, I think it’s ultimately just a movie about Ben.

And even as a fairy tale, Knocked Up does do a good job of giving comic life to so many typical male fears: the scene in which Ben and Pete talk about the urge to run away from family and responsility in front of their partners and the women display utter shock was a bit of a mirror for me to conversations I’ve had with a bunch of family-guy friends and the reception we get in even hinting at the subject to the women in our lives. Of course it’s not a topic of casual conversation for our partners, since the ones we’re tempted to run from are them (even less so because statistics show just how many men do run), which makes the urge no less real. The counterbalancing fact is, of course, that we don’t run, because we realize that our own fears are stupid and whether we stay around or not, adulthood is not a pursuer we can outrun. And the reason we can joke about it quietly and privately is because we know we’re way better off and happier for the decisions we have made.

Juno, the “female Knocked Up,” released around the same time (a damn good movie, by the way), is not really the female Knocked Up. For one thing, the title character and up-knockee is a high school student who is already much more mature than Ben Stone — like the characters in Judd Apatow’s follow-up Superbad, she’s at a much more traditionally appropriate age to be the subject of a coming-of-age story. For another, it’s funny more in the mould of Gilmore Girls than Anchor Man. It’s certainly not a fairy tale. And it’s much more devastating in it’s portrayal of guyliness.

The male lead — or the “good guy” guy, anyway, played by superkid actor Michael Cera — is a confused, nearly helpless teenager whose only ambition in life is to give everything to his running club and to Juno, who he wishes was his girfriend. She seduces him, then shuns him, then comes to realize he’s already the love of her life and, all along ,he just tries to be supportive (and leaves the running club for her in the end). He’s a good guy, but he’s an almost entirely passive character. That’s not the devastating part.

The devastating part is the switcheroo in audience perspective that happens with Jason Bateman’s character mid-film, one of the most effective cinematic moments I’ve seen in a long time, especially since there’s no Crying Game or Usual Suspects-type revelation to help open our eyes.

When we meet Mark Loring (Bateman’s character), we like him, as does Juno. He seems to be similar to Knocked Up’s Pete in that he’s essentially a cool guy married to a bit of a caricature of a shrew. He plays a cool guitar, listens to cool music, watches cool horror movies in his spare time and is able to smirk at his wife’s dramatic maternalism and his own surprising yuppie-dom alongside sixteen-year-old eccentric Juno.

Then, suddenly, in one scene, the sort of Lost in Translation-ish supressed sexual tension between Juno and Mark is no longer supressed. They’re dancing a little too close, and he tells her he’s leaving his wife (somehow not realizing that what he’s telling Juno is that the perfect home that was to welcome the child she’s carrying is about to be upended by divorce). And suddenly he doesn’t look cool at all. And not just because his friendliness suddenly seems lecherous (though there’s that too — and she’s only sixteen). But also because he’s exposed to be an entirely self-centred kid resenting his wife not because she’s a fragile but controlling mommy figure, but because she’s his wife and her becoming a mommy figure means he should become a daddy figure. And the reason Juno relates to him is not because he’s a righteous dude who shows her that adults can still be cool, it’s because he’s a sixteen-year-old only pretending to be an adult. “But you’re old!” she says, in a moment that should wake him up. Instead, it just confuses him. And equally suddenly, his wife becomes a rounded, sympathetic character who both we and Juno identify with and admire.

There’s no Knocked Up-style salvation for Mark, either. He just up and leaves his wife to move into a loft downtown to watch his gory movies and read his comic books and try to live out his rock-star dreams. Don’t know if any guys out there sympathized with him, but I wasn’t tempted to. You could be with him right up until the point he goes over the line, but unlike the characters in Knocked Up, he crosses it. Many, many men fear fatherhood, find themselves inappropriately flirting with much-younger women and enjoying it a bit too much, look at their lives and wonder what became of their teenage ambitions. But for the real men, that’s the opportunity to realize that, whatever they’re feeling, they aren’t kids anymore. That becoming a teenager again isn’t a possibility. That while we may consider our youth to be an unfinished story, it isn’t one we can rewrite. That our future is ahead of us, not in our pasts. So we beat on, boats against the current…

This is the second of three posts following up on the Princess Charming thing. The first, laying out my prejudice, is here. Soon: Is the man-child a welcome corrective to the manly sophisticate?

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Posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 1:30 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.