June 3, 2007
Knocked Up Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:55 PM EST I saw Knocked Up last night, a summer comedy movie yesterday released to enthusiastic reviews, and one prompting a short thought about cultural history. Knocked Up has a simple premise: Katherine Heigl, an actress who looks like the sort of girl who runs out on Menelaos, plays a newly-hired TV interviewer of celebrities, one who is impregnated in the course of a drunken one-night-stand with Seth Rogen (she is celebrating her hiring). Mr. Rogen looks like an ordinary mortal, and his character’s idea of entrepreneurship is to develop a commercial website identifying all the nude scenes ever played by all actresses, with special attention to which bits of each actress were undraped at which precise moment in each film (he is regrettably unaware that such a service already exists). His friends, also his roommates and business partners, are other youngish men of comparable ambition and discipline and possess a similar fondness for marijuana. Mr. Rogen’s character seems fantastically unsuitable for the role of fatherhood, but this initial appearance is misleading. Knocked Up is a very bawdy, very funny, and in the last analysis very sweet love story. There is a tendency to describe history, cultural and otherwise, as cyclical, an alternation between opposed tendencies. More precisely, the depiction of sexuality in comedy is sometimes imagined to be the alternation of a dishonest and priggish vision, one punishing non-reproductive sex as mere lubricity and celebrating self-restraint, with a libertine vision, one less moralistic and more honest about the body’s pleasures, but perhaps indifferent to the moral claims of the familial, sometimes tending toward the heartless and dishonest in its own way. By this theory the vision of Cheaper by the Dozen, as Ellen Feldman criticized it, yields to the most Saturnalian elements of Animal House, and then things swing back again, forever and ever. Knocked Up suggests that this is silly. Knowledgeable vulgarity about the adult body and its claims does not mean a movie cannot serially attend to a loftier sense of human sexuality; comedy can be the enemy of asceticism and idealism without becoming the friend of the darkest cynicism. People who greatly dislike America tend to say we are peculiarly likely to be monsters of amoral carnality, or else mad prigs. On the evidence of one summer comedy at least, we are a little more interesting than that.
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