Weekend Flick
Judd Apatow's 2007 comedy 'Knocked Up' is surprisingly moral.
We live in a trashy time.
Music, entertainment, highway billboards. Public behavior and sigh… politics. Anything contemporary is marked by a race to the crass, ugly bottom. You know that’s the case when a raunchy, fleshy comedy from 2007 looks tame and moral by comparison.
The raunchy comedy I have in mind is one my wife and I had not seen in a long time: Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up starring Seth Rogen (as himself) and a chipper Kathryn Heigl. The premise isn’t complicated. Rogen, an unemployed stoner building a softcore porn site with his loser housemates, manages—against all odds and with the help of alcohol—to score a good time with cover girl Heigl, a T.V. interviewer on the up-and-up who is woefully out of his league.
A few weeks later, Heigl is pregnant. Her decision to both have the baby and pursue a relationship with the unqualified father is a poignant, (if at times, baffling) turn, and by today’s upside down standards, old-fashioned. Granted, and despite Rogan proposing with an IOU instead of a ring, the two don’t get married—but unlike the adoptive couple in pregnancy comedy Juno (also from 2007) the guy doesn’t walk out on parenthood like a spoiled child. A subplot involves Heigl’s sister straining her marriage to a wise-cracking, absent-from-family Paul Rudd, but they also stay together. In a post-Roe age when Tik Tokers boast about how many abortions they’ve had, these plot choices feel almost Puritan.
More admirably, Heigl’s choice pulls Rogan out of loserdom kicking and screaming. Though he’s no role model (on their first date, he admits to having no cell phone due to ‘billing' issues), the scruffy father-to-be rises nonetheless. Rogen ends the film with a full-time job, his own place (unthinkable in L.A. for an entry-level desk worker, but I digress), an earlier bedtime, and the stones to tell Heigl’s pushy sister to give them space in the delivery room.
In other words—and this might be an overlooked source of ‘Knocked Up’s breakout success and high audience score—a male character answers the call that all men, deep down, long to answer. He gets it together to win the girl.
You can look far and wide on Netflix’s new releases without seeing that ingredient, or without seeing it scorned and mocked by women who don’t need men whatsoever.
That the grossly mismatched pair are both funny, and at times, genuinely touching is another source, and may say something about the strength of Beauty and the Beast setups done well. At his best and for the spell he puts on fairy queen Heigl, Rogan is Nick Bottom with an ass’s head—until he gets his act together.
Full Disclaimer
Moral points considered, ‘Knocked Up’ is way too crass, filthy, and sexual for its own good. I feel obligated to point that out, lest this reads like some kind of endorsement.
This being Apatow, anything serious is gross-out fodder (I’ll admit that the scene where Rogen’s housemates have pink eye from farting on each other’s pillows had my wife laughing out loud). So gross. The dialogue swims in obscenity and crass innuendo, which does it no credit—but again, Apatow.
With his crew, (much of the ensemble from the short-lived ‘Freaks and Geeks’) it’s edgy or die. Scatological or bust.
It’s no secret that movies like this helped normalize the crass ugliness that saturates our culture today. It’s also hard to look back on bumbling stoners as loveable dofuses when literally every street corner in California’s major cities smells like weed, or to watch a drunken hook-up scene when political candidates promote casual sex without consequences in a literal campaign ad.
To paraphrase Dalrymple, we’ve seen the ‘bohemian, free-love charm of the privileged classes’ become ‘the chaos of the slums’ in as little fifteen years.
Still, as profane as it is, ‘Knocked Up’ surprises you by taking parenthood, growing up, and staying together seriously. A a decade and a half ago, and even to stoned losers, sacred things were, admittedly, sacred. Moral boundaries were (and are) still moral, even as our culture makers scream that anyone can be anything and there’s no such thing. Losers not lionized, but rightfully losers, stumbling after those facts and rising to the occasion is a great comedic arc, both funny, and in a deep way, reassuring.
If Rogen and Apatow really want a challenge, they should read Shakespeare’s comedies and see it done without the weed, nudity, and body humor.
As with most things, including national elections, it’s never too late to aim higher.
If You’re New Here, Welcome
Thanks for reading; it’s truly great to have you.
I normally go a bit longer, but this here’s a taste of how I ramble.
Stay tuned, and if you’re so inclined, browse the archive for more essays on books, ideas, news / politics, and classical Christian takes on modern letters. Also, here’s a few reads (by both guest authors and yours truly) I’m particularly proud of:
Coming Up
A conversation with Dr. Neil Shenvi, Christian apologist, classical educator, and Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry. Neil and I talk about faith, evidence, naturalism, and the writing of his book ‘Why Believe’
Don’t miss it.
