Movie Review	Movie Reviews Archive

Knocked Up
Directed by Judd Apatow
Starring Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Joanna Kerns, Loudon Wainwright III, Harold Ramis.
How to order

It would be nice to write about a renaissance of queer film, but more gay images than ever on screen doesn't a renaissance make. Serge Diaghilev is alleged to have told his designer and collaborator Jean Cocteau "Étonne-moi!" ("Astonish me!") When was the last time that you were actually startled by a gay image on the screen?

You could say that Brokeback Mountain had the shock of the new, both in its nerve and its overt use of sentimentality in its heartbreaking ending. Sure, the film was riddled with a 1950s sensibility about gay love, but that was okay. Some may have been startled by the avowed tastelessness of Another Gay Movie. But getting grossed out by rectal douching and shit jokes is less being startled than, well, grossed out, even if you're laughing.

<

View our poll archive

P>

Call me jaded, but lately astonishment has gone AWOL from queer films.

Recently, however, I was completely taken aback and reduced to laughing till I cried by a scene that wasn't in a gay film, or any film, really. Judd Apatow's Knocked Up is not really a gay movie. In fact, it's an obnoxiously straight movie with annoying subtexts. But there I was on Youtube recently looking for Brokeback Mountain clips for a class I was teaching and I came across a deleted scene from Knocked Up that made me rethink the movie. (You can see it here: Tinyurl.com/4lxoyu -- as well as in "extras" on the DVD release.) You'll be astonished, too.

Here's the scene: Jonah (Jonah Hill), who plays one of Ben Stone's (Seth Rogin) stoner roommates, is up late watching a DVD of Brokeback Mountain. Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), Ben's lover, comes out and sits with him. Suddenly Jonah, who has seemed clearly straight up until now, lashes out at the film and Ang Lee for not having enough sex in it. "I see two gay guys in a tent in Brokeback Mountain. I want to see a 69. I want to see an asshole eaten out. You're telling me that shit doesn't go down? Gyllenhaal's mouth is practically watering the whole movie. Shove something in there." And it goes on and on for almost three minutes. It's the perfect critique of Brokeback Mountain.

Knocked Up was a weird hybrid -- a chick movie that women could talk their dates into seeing because it was also about a bunch of loser guys who hung out together and smoked dope. I can't imagine what men in the audience would say when it turns out that one of the most lovable straight guys in the film was obsessed with gay sex -- in the most graphic terms.

The scene was the perfect culmination of the stoner comedies that have been hugely popular since the late 1980s. These films were outright rejections of the macho, violence-driven nonsense promoted by the films of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis: Rocky, Terminator, Die Hard and all their endless sequels.

America's romance with the brute had been replaced with a new love affair: the clever, innocent, but haplessly wrecked youth. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was released in 1989 and gave way to Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey in 1991, and then Dazed and Confused in 1993, and the one salient theme here was the refusal to take anything seriously.

But there was also something else curious here. These stoner films were curiously devoid of any real love interests

The next evolution in these films -- and we see it in 1994's Dumb and Dumber (1994), Kevin's Smith characters Jay and Silent Bob in Dogma (1999), and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) -- is that the incipient queer subtexts of these films keep emerging more and more obviously. While the guys in Dumb and Dumber were heterosexual, they were actually too dumb to know how to act that way. And Jay, of Jay and Silent Bob, is a semi-closet case; In Dogma he admits he jerks off thinking about men. This wholesale rejection of masculinity included, to a large degree, also getting rid of the not only the trappings of heterosexuality but heterosexuality itself at some points.

These stoner films are the queerest films around. The deleted scene from Knocked Up is startling because it makes so much sense. It actually explains Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Dumb and Dumber, and Dude, Where's My Car by exposing the real queerness beneath marijuana haze -- and gives a whole new meaning to Tea and Sympathy. It also brings us to a cultural place which, while certainly not the best in the word, is a fuck of a lot better than the dead-ended, death-obsessed world of Terminator and Die Hard in which life is cheap, killing is routine, and no one's high on life... or high at all.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com