Over the weekend I saw Funny People, the latest movie to fall out of the Judd Apatow money-printing machine. There’s not much to say about the movie itself – it’s a moderately funny film, not as good as previous Apatow creations such as Knocked Up, and it has a weird “melancholy clown” mood that doesn’t mesh well with the movie’s comedic intentions. While it doesn’t concentrate on sex as much as its predecessors, Funny People hits upon some serious notes for students of the coming collapse of Western civilization. This post contains spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie but want to, read no further.
The film concerns alpha male actor and comedian George Simmons (Adam Sandler) who hires aspiring stand-up Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) to write jokes for him. The first half of the film concerns Simmons’ struggle with a variant of leukemia and his impending death. At the midpoint of the film, Simmons’ doctors inform him that the experimental drugs he is taking are curing him, which encourages him to restart a relationship with his onetime girlfriend Laura (Leslie Mann). The problem is that in the time since they broke up, Laura has married a beta businessman, Clarke (Eric Bana), and the two have had children. Several points came to me while I was watching the film:
- Women are amoral, and in the absence of checks on their behavior, they will pursue their own interests to the detriment of everyone around them. When Simmons rekindles his interest in Laura, she eagerly tosses aside her family to be with him. When Clarke discovers her infidelity, she shows zero remorse for her actions and prepares to divorce him. Because she will likely get the children (acknowledged in the film’s dialogue), she has nothing to lose and everything to gain from taking her beta hubby to the cleaners. In a similar move earlier in the film, Simmons bangs a groupie who had refused Ira on the basis that she had a boyfriend. When Ira asks Simmons about this later, he says, “She told me she had a boyfriend too…while she was sucking my cock.”
- There is little incentive to be moral in a world ruled by what women want. Ira stops making advances on the groupie in the first part of the movie when she tells him she has a boyfriend, allowing the morally suspect Simmons to take her instead. Ira also takes issue with Simmons’ affair with Laura, stating that his boss’ actions will destroy Laura’s family, but his concerns are slapped down. Ira then attempts to intervene to keep Laura and Clarke from divorcing, and is fired by Simmons, forcing him to restart his career from the bottom. Simmons, on the other hand, pursues his desire to be with Laura not caring what his actions will do to her family, and after Laura chooses to return to Clarke, he escapes largely unscathed.
- Men and women pursue adulterous relationships for different reasons. It is implied that Clarke had once cheated on Laura while on a business trip. However, Clarke’s alleged infidelities were supplemental in nature, not intended to replace his relationship with Laura. In contrast, she had replaced him in her heart in her affair with Simmons.
- There is a difference between what men perceive as alpha and what women perceive as alpha. Clarke is a wealthy businessman (rich enough to afford a suburban house in the expensive Marin County, California) as well as a devoted father and husband, but he lacks the social dominance necessary to keep his wife in love with him. Simmons is a man of poor character who abuses his underlings (including Ira) and refuses contact with his family, but his fame and social dominance makes Laura’s “gina tingle.”
- A beta can beat down and kill an alpha male easily. When Laura confirms to Clarke that she was having an affair with Simmons, Clarke proceeds to find Simmons and physically assault him. Simmons is a man of average strength and is easily smacked down by the muscled Clarke – Laura and Ira’s intervention is the only thing that keeps Simmons from dying at Clarke’s hands.
- Alpha males make poor relationship prospects. Laura finally becomes cognizant of Simmons’ true nature when he laughs at her daughter’s performance of the song “Memory” from Cats, which was intended to be heartfelt and moving. Her realization of Simmons’ narcissism and callousness drives her to rekindle her marriage with Clarke. (As an aside, this twist came off to me as somewhat forced, a necessary nod to public morality, akin to how Alfred Hitchcock reassured the audience that the criminal had been brought to justice at the end of each episode of his TV show.)
Despite the mainstream media’s efforts to paint over reality with a coat of lies, the truth keeps seeping out, like water out of a leaky pipe.
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This synopsis is probably why the movie did poorly. I know several reviewers took issue with Ira having a problem with the girl screwing another guy before him, and to me they seem either gay or manginas.
It’s anti-romance. All the people dislikeable. The wife, a faithless, and stupid judge of character who’s family life is wrecked (guaranteed the husband will bail on her, one way or another). The wife puts her tingle down there ahead of her kids. The star, Sandler, is a class-A jerk who does no one any good.
And the immorality and faithlessness of female-orientation is made clear. There’s nothing to live for or die for. Most guys don’t want the naked suggestion that their wives are just one old boyfriend who’s famous away from being summarily cheated on and divorced. That’s reality to them, not entertainment. Most women don’t like that nakedly suggested as well.
Apatow’s film is probably honest, but therefore not funny, in the way that, say, Wedding Crashers (a film he wasn’t involved with) was. In that movie, most of the comedy comes from making fun of the thinly disguised Kennedy clan, a bunch of aristos crazy as a nuthouse. Audiences who resembled the more everyman protagonists liked them winning over the Kennedy’s aristo idiocy and the preppy tormentor.
I think even Apatow sees the reality of social relations between men and women. He just can’t make it funny. Had he made Ira the center of the movie, and had everyone be screwed up and losers except the “winner” Ira, he might have had something. But he could not make a real target of the character played by his wife.
–Women are amoral, and in the absence of checks on their behavior, they will pursue their own interests to the detriment of everyone around them–
A woman would never comprehend the higher ideals such as justice, sacrifice and morality. No wonder women’s groups are the most vehement opponents of religion, patriotism and armed forces.
I would not call women amoral, merely having a different morality. There are practical reasons why women detest patriotism, religion, and the armed forces. All tend to diminish their sexual options OR political power in culture and politics. I.E. if there is a war, with broad public support, who needs a feminist or “women’s issues?” That certainly was not the case in WWII. Or even Korea.
Women don’t support the nuclear family, by and large, or restrictions on male/female sexuality (mostly Alpha men and ordinary women) to make that work. What they do support is “moral” and shaming language aimed at optimizing women’s opportunities and ability to move about in social space without being constrained.
Yet women comprise most of the congregations of churches around the United States and mandirs in Bhanu’s India.
Religion is the domain of women, despite religious customs often holding them back.
From the tenor of this piece you clearly have an animus for Sandler’s “morally suspect” alpha character yet you will take mincing betas to task when they end up acting like Rogen’s conciliating Ira. What eludes me is that while you champion game as a salve for society’s ills (and berate conservatives for failing to do so), the adoption thereof would entail the alpha behavior exhibited by Simmons–which you did not heartily endorse–with all the concomitant callousness. If you indeed find such behavior reprehensible, how is this to be reconciled with your touting of an ideology which glorifies it? This is a matter of genuine curiosity–the resolution of which might not be so elusive after all if my conjectures are correct–but what say you?
Great question. I’ll address it on the blog Thursday.
All this game stuff is excellent and good and I agree with it very much, but the one thing I can’t stand is all this talk of women being especially immoral…this is so pathetic and unworthy of anyone with any pretensions to seeing the world as it really is.
First of all, whining about women being immoral is pathetic because men are just as immoral, cheat just as much and juggle multiple partners just as much, etc, etc, and secondly, it’s retarded to blame women for having a particular sexual nature, just as it’s retarded to blame men for having a particular sexual nature. Neither are “moral”, or “immoral” – they just ARE, facts of nature with no moral content.
The game people LOOOOVE to go on and on about the fact that it is simply a fact that men like multiple partners and stray all the time – apparently this is just “male nature” and not at all immoral and women who are upset at this are just anti-male and cannot accept male sexuality, but if women obey the dictates of THEIR sexual nature and ditch one guy for another that is better for them, they are somehow culpable and wicked immoral beings.
What a crock!
Worse, men who whine about how women are supposedly more immoral than men just seem bitter and resentful, because it is in such obvious and glaring contradiction to how they excuse mens sexual nature.
Game is good stuff, but we undermine it when we blame women and heap moral opprobrium on them – just as we men have every right to pursue our male sexual nature and are not “pigs” , as the feminists would have it, for liking hot bodies and having a propensity to stray, women have every right to pursue THEIR sexual nature – which they have no more responsibility for than we men have for ours – and prefer assholes and ditch beta guys for more dominant ones when they come along.
Neither men nor women are responsible for how we have evolved – we are both blameless. Moral condemnation makes no sense and is stupid. Women are BLAMELESS!
good post didn’t see the movie but like the overall take, yes I flipped backward through posts to find it since your reference in one of the newer pots.
the implicit assumption about alpha dominance in hand to hand combat is somewhat absurd, after the age of gunpowder…
reminds me a bit about the painting “rape of the sabine women” we have no idea what the actual reasons were but one of the assumption is young hungry betas went outside of Rome and robbed rich older Alphas, and the Alphaness didn’t prevent it from occurring.
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