God FUCKING dammit, I had this long and hopefully interesting post on the “Observe and Report” controversy. But of course, Expression Engine logs you out if it takes even more than half an hour to write a post, and so when I hit “submit”, I was logged out, and when I went to hit the “back” button and copy/paste it, I accidentally closed the window.
I wanted to revisit the issue after Friday, because I found it interesting that Wired blogged the controversy (in a style that could have been generated by a “get your readers riled up about how much they hate women while maintaining a veneer of journalistic objectivity” program), and they buried in the second to last paragraph what I think was the most relevant piece of information---actress Anna Faris disagrees with director Jody Hill and actor Seth Rogan about whether or not the rape was really a rape.
“I’m so grateful I was cast,” she said, “but when I read the script, I thought, ‘Well, this is Warner Bros. This is a studio movie, so this is all gonna be softened up. It’s a comedy, right?’ So when we were shooting it, even the date-rape scene — or as I refer to it, ‘The Tender Love-Making Scene’ — I just thought, ‘We’ll shoot it, but it’s not gonna be in the movie. I don’t have to worry about that one.’ And yet there it is.”
Lindsay took a bullet and saw it. I have to say that I agree pretty much exactly with Lindsay’s take. I have no problem with putting rape in a movie, or even using it for dark comedy, which could, in theory, be done well. I’ve often strained against feminists who claim there’s entire categories of things that can’t be joked about. But if you’re going to put rape in your movie, put rape in your movie. Don’t put a rape in your movie, and then create a faux “out” so that the sexist idiots who see your movie can tell themselves it wasn’t really rape. And don’t pretend it’s edgy to slap every stereotype imaginable about women who deserve to be raped, either.
He also makes Brandi’s character so shallow, manipulative, drug addled, and “slutty” that target demographic feels she deserves what she gets.
According to Lindsay, the filmmakers aren’t done with punishing Brandi for being sexy but not giving it up willingly to every guy that asks, either. She gets dressed down later for having the temerity to have sex with another man because she wants to, despite the fact that Rogan’s character apparently claimed her by raping her (where’s that rule written down?) and the audience ate it up. The problems she finds in “Observe and Report” are what bugged me about the second half of “Foot Fist Way”, too. The first half is a hilarious satire of this middle American overblown cult of masculinity, but then halfway through, Hill loses his appetite for having an anti-hero protagonist and starts setting up villains for the protagonist to struggle with and become a hero by default. If it had ended halfway through the movie, then it would have been really great, but he ends up using the exact same trope---the protagonist’s wife has sex with the more powerful man and the newly minted hero gets his revenge on both of them---as he does in “Observe and Report”. The satire is over, and the whole thing is a nerd’s revenge against evil women and more successful men. And even though the movie starts off satirizing the cult of masculinity, but the end of the movie, the basic rightness of the cult is upheld as the hero wins by pissing on his wedding ring in a manly man fashion, and winning a battle of physical prowess.
I’m curious why someone like Roman Polanski, who admitted to raping a minor, gets a pass from certain feminist bloggers because they like his movies and art isn’t affected by it’s maker or something, while depictions of sexual violence by non-criminal movie makers is awful and instructive and bad.
Aren’t they one and the same? Or shouldn’t they be similarly condemned?
As I said in the comments, if they were one and the same, I’d suggest that Jody Hill and Seth Rogan should go to jail, which is what I think should happen to Polanski. (And considering his advanced age, I think that Polanski should die in jail, because he should do the time for his crime, even though he probably never will. I fail to see how this is letting him off the hook, because last I checked, dying in jail is a far worse fate than having people pretend your movies aren’t as good as they are.) But obviously, I don’t want them to go to jail, because they didn’t commit a crime. Rape apologism is bullshit, but bullshit has as much a right to be expressed in an artistic format as anything else. This is a simple, 101 criticism basic. What’s onscreen is dealt with as what’s onscreen, and what’s off is dealt with as if it’s real life. One is subject to being read as a piece, and one is subject to being dealt with as a real life event. I wouldn’t have Polanski in my house, but I like his movies.
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Ho. Lee. Shit. Who the hell would ever want to see that? (And why do I have a funny feeling Anna Faris is going to start being a little pickier about her scripts?)
She’s a smart and funny lady, and I hope she gets a break out of this, but I suspect she, like a lot of actors and especially actresses, is stuck in the typecasting loop.
Oh man, I have been fighting this battle on slashfilm.com all weekend. Someone from slashfilm posted a review that didn’t even mention this scene, and it came up in the comments anyway, so I have been using every new way I can think of to say, “Actually, that IS rape, according to the law and to morality” and being shot down. The guys over there don’t like it (I mean the commenters, not the writers for slashfilm, who are not sexist assholes; I know a couple of them, they’re good guys). It’s really, really depressing. I have to keep stopping myself from saying, “Are you so invested in calling this not-rape because YOU have done EXACTLY THIS?” But I won’t, because that would really unleash the shitstorm. I hope some of them at least are willing to think about it, although I’m not hopeful. Argh.
The fact that so many men are invested in saying that it’s not rape is more than a little scary, but not unexpected. I wouldn’t want to be alone with a guy who defended this scene as not-rape.
I wish there were more effective ways of addressing the bro’s NEED to dismiss this sort of thing as “not rape” than by asking them if they’d be happy if it happened to their sister or their mother or their girlfriend before they knew her. Because more often than not their rejoinder would be something like “oh, that would never happen to her because she’s not a drunken slutmobile.”
People need to open their eyes to the fact that rape involves people that aren’t the stereotype.
Nice girls get raped. Just because you care about a woman doesn’t mean that she won’t have someone slip something into her drink, or make a bad decision about who to trust and pay for it. It’s not a woman’s fault when she’s raped.
Nice guys rape. Just because you think someone’s nice, or funny, or have known them since you were both 3, doesn’t mean he won’t rape. It sucks, and it hurts to think that you could be wrong about something so fundamental as “is this person a rapist,” but rather than figuring out how he’s NOT a rapist and how the woman deserved it, maybe you should take a minute to deflate your ego and accept that sometimes we’re wrong about people, even people we care about.
I’m still trying to figure out how making jokes that could have run word-for-word in Playboy circa 1962 is “hip” or “edgy.” Is it like that retro swing dance thing, where you try to convince everyone that the stuff your grandparents did is still cool?
I haven’t seen the movie. Is the Rogen character a big loveable schlub except for the rape? Or is he a total asshole villain including the rape? Or somehow both?
Both, I think. It sounds a lot like “Foot Fist Way”. Hill’s problem seems to be that he buys into the masculine tropes he’s satirizing, and so the humor is not in mocking the tropes, but men who fail to live up to the standard. Which means that a sufficient explosion of bullying might allow someone to redeem himself.
By the way, regardless of Rogan’s characterization, this is denialism. It’s inherent to the injection of a line that implies that she’s cool with being raped, likes it even. If they want to make him a dark character who is not above raping, they should do that. But what they do is try to have it both ways---shock the audience with the rape, and then play like it’s not really rape.
The satire is over, and the whole thing is a nerd’s revenge against evil women and more successful men. And even though the movie starts off satirizing the cult of masculinity, but the end of the movie, the basic rightness of the cult is upheld as the hero wins by pissing on his wedding ring in a manly man fashion, and winning a battle of physical prowess.
He can’t decide whether Ronnie is going to be the lovable loser who strikes a blow against elitist cops and uppity broads, or whether he’s just flat-out crazy and sick. By the end, he’s pretty much settled on the latter.
Hector, no, Ronnie’s not lovable at all. He’s sort of an anti-hero, but the writing is inconsistent. He comes off sweeter in the rape sequence than anywhere else in the movie. The conceit is that he’s so smitten with Brandi that he rapes her seemingly without realizing that he’s doing anything wrong.
This is why I have pretty much given up on movies altogether. 99% of them aren’t worth my $8.50, and the few that I actually want to see will make it to TV eventually.
The fact that so many men are invested in saying that it’s not rape is more than a little scary, but not unexpected.
In my over-long string of posts on the last Observe and Report thread—which seem to have disappeared into the aether, oh well—I invest a lot of critical hope in the idea that the point of the scene requires it to be transparently obvious that what the Rogen character is doing is rape, and that the Farris character’s consent is transparently not freely given, because that’s part of Hill’s method of making us squirm and calling it “dark” “comedy.” That’s how I read the Rogen anecdote about “making it OK”: the point IMHO has to be that it’s _never_ OK, and the film wants to mess with its audience by making us take a beat to realize that impaired consent is not consent, which is pretty much a cardinal rule of basic human ethics.
But if lots of people are actually out there defending the act as not rape but consensual, that kind of blows my theory to hell, and leads me to question my faith in the conscience of, you know, people.
Well, rape is exceedingly common, and so is supporting the rapist. So yeah, when feminists say “rape culture”, that’s what we mean. From Lindsay’s review, it appears that Hill relies on rape culture for the joke to work---if the audience wasn’t invested in rape culture, they wouldn’t be hooting along with that joke.
There’s this tactic among all sorts of denialists, which seems to come up here:
1.) Agree with opponents that the crime in question is really, really bad.
2.) Cite extreme example of the crime being committed, arguing that of course, how could anyone be in favor of that?
3.) Point out that the issue in question isn’t nearly as bad as the previous example
4.) Therefore, claim that the current issue isn’t really the same thing at all, and can’t be described in the same terms.
5.) Conclude by saying that really, talking about (current issue) as (general crime) is an insult to the victims of the REAL crime.
In rape, you’ll see it like this. 1.) Agree rape is bad. 2.) Talk about mass rape as a war crime in Rwanda or Bosnia. 3.) Point out that Anna Faris’s character doesn’t have to go through ANYTHING like that 4.) Therefore deny that Faris’s character gets raped, and real rape victims suffer the most from people talking about this as rape.
It’s easy to see in discussions about race, too - racism sucks, like when there was Jim Crow, so people drawing Obama as a monkey can’t be racist since it’s not as bad as Jim Crow, and in fact, it’s an insult to black people to even call this racism when they suffered etc. etc.
It’s an inane argument, but you see it every time.
(Also, I never intended to use the “comedy” to defend or justify the scene, because even were my most wishful reading Hill’s intent, it still ends up being offensive to use rape to induce squirming and then call that squirmy sensation “comedy.” It’s a particularly cheap way to establish “edgy” cred.)
In _Animal House_, Tom Hulce’s character started making out with a tipsy girl, only to take the gentleman’s way when she passed out. The movie got laughs in the literal devil-and-angel debate in his head, and his later attempts to get her home. Gee, how far we’ve come ...
I’m clearly out of the “bro-man” demographic—that alpha-male locker-room teenage crap that persists well into middle-age—so I can’t seen how anyone would green-light that scene. Then again, the “bro-man” crowd clearly outnumbers beta-males like us who grew up with a sense of decency.
P.S. Pro-tip for blogging: type your blog into a separate text window—e.g. Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac—and then copy-paste it into the browser window. Also, save the text file often.
I thought I caught a whiff of douchebaggery in the previews for this movie.
I have noticed that Seth Rogen doesn’t seem to be able to play a character that I can like all the way through a movie. Which is sad, because he looks like the kind of guy who’s usually really cool and down-to-earth in film, so I want to like him. Oh well.
Writing your copy directly in the shitbox blogger form window is an open, scented invitation for it to annihilate your work whenever the mood strikes it. Write your post in notepad/emacs/vi/whatever, then copy and paste.
This hits so close to home for me. During my freshman year of college - the first year I was EVER exposed to alcohol, and lots of it - I went to a party, drank way too much, blacked out, and found out FROM A FRIEND that I’d “had sex” - the guy who’d done it was someone I knew only as an acquaintance, and who seemed harmless. People already think this is funny, they already DON’T classify it as rape, and the last thing we need is for that to be confirmed by yet another stupid, not-at-all-funny “comedy.”
what if the scene hadn’t ended after the “why are you stopping, motherfucker?” line, but had gone on and shown Faris verbally/sexually humiliating Rogen, e.g., demanding that he not come too soon, etc.?
You can ‘what if’ all you like. It doesn’t change what made it onto the screen. People who are so drunk they pass out are not capable of giving consent. Waking up in the middle doesn’t change the lack of consent at the beginning. Regardless of what was said, the other person passing out should always bring an end to things, I don’t care what gender the unconscious person is, what the previous relationship was, whether or not consent was given on the way to the bedroom, etc. If one of you is not aware, just stop. Not really all that hard to figure out. Not at all funny when someone DECIDES that having sex with an unconscious person is okay.
What if I stole your car, but later you decided I could keep it? Subsequent permission does not mean it was OK for me to take it in the first place—I still stole it.
i was offering a thought experiment regarding the filmmaker’s judgment.
the “motherfucker” line gets a laugh because - “oh, she’s awake afer all!” and the subsequent “oh, it’s ok to joke about rape after all!” that occurs in the minds of the bro-demo.
by continuing the scene, it would perhaps have further subverted the audience’s expectations - this time about gender itself by portraying Rogen as a victim. at that point it could be realistically assumed that Faris’ character consented to what had happened to that point.
as it stands, that is not the case.
btw, Hector B., i don’t quite get your analogy. are you against the portrayal of rape in film?
Making her sober and Rogen drunk might be a way to subvert the audience’s expectations, but I don’t see any way to turn her into the assailant as intoxicated and drugged as she is.
Trigger warning.
Because I know men who have been raped by women, and sexually humiliated, while intoxicated, I think it would be a really positive thing if we could start talking about how that *is* rape, regardless of the sex of the victim and assailant. But I think if I ever tried to portray that in something I wrote, I would put a lot of thought into how that might harm the victims, and talk to them about it to try to come up with something that wouldn’t further damage them.
I think it would be a really positive thing if we could start talking about how that *is* rape, regardless of the sex of the victim and assailant.
i agree. in fact, another alternative the Hill/Rogen team had was to make it so that the scene depicted (however fuzzily) the possibility that BOTH were assaulted in the scene, after becoming equally inebriated.
the more challenging of the two assaults for the demographic, however, would have been the female-on-male.
I do not think it is possible to have mutual assault--whoever instigated the sex act would be the perpetrator (the active partner).
hmm… so does that mean anything Faris did after the violation cannot be considered assault?
for instance (and pardon my morbid imagination - i blame Jody Hill), what if it seems like she’s unconscious and then suddenly Rogen tenses up, looks shocked and screams, “get your finger out of my ass!”
I really don’t see your point and I’m not going to go there beyond this--yes, after one person commits an assault, the victim could potentially assault them back in a manner that is not self-defense.
But as far as I know, two people cannot both be the victim and perpetrator of one assault of any type.
The REAL point is that this movie shows what is legally a rape, and tries to make it okay. Your thought experiments aren’t adding much to the analysis.
I just had someone who claims to be a prosecutor tell me that this isn’t rape, because if consent is given before, during, or after, it doesn’t count as rape, and that a lot of the rape cases he’s seen have just been the woman getting pissed and changing her mind later.
I think I need a brown paper bag. Douche overload is combining with fear and making it difficult to breathe.
Your thought experiments aren’t adding much to the analysis.
i kindly disagree.
if this thread is at all about the art of filmmaking and the possible motivations of the folks who made this particular film, then i think they add something.
i assume most reading this thread don’t think it’s never appropriate to depict rape on film. which means we’re discussing certain WAYS of depicting it, and what they mean.
exploring the options the filmmakers had allows us to explore these subtleties.
if they wanted to get a laugh off the sudden switch from Faris being unconscious to her being conscious, that’s one thing. if they wanted to encourage a culture of rape, that’s another. so the question becomes, could they have achieved the former without doing the latter? and if so, do they care?
finally, if it’s possible to portray mutual assault in the form of non-consensual sadism, that itself becomes interesting in the context of filmmaking and, in my opinion, that of an enlightened sexual philosophy.
Yes, rape is common. I’ve been raped, another person here has said the same thing, and others probably have and haven’t said anything, which is their right. Why is it any of your business whether Amanda or Pam have been raped? It isn’t, is the answer. It’s not yours or mine or anyone else’s, and you’re only asking to be an antagonistic jerk about what is clearly a sensitive subject.
There used to be a movie convention that men had to overcome the resistance of foolish prissy women to have sex. But, that was ok, because once the man inserted his magic electric penis, the woman would suddenly experience bliss such as she had never imagined before, and the initial lack of consent could forgiven.
But nowadays we realize that yes means yes, and no means no.
God damn, is registration nice. You can not only ban the troll, but everything he posted is gone. That’s got to be frustrating for them. Not really worth the effort of posting, actually.
godless’s point appears to be, ‘WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ?!” I’m personally not interested, because I find the reality of rape to be more relevant than the what-ifs that haunt the minds of those trying to imply that gender has no influence on people who commit gender hate crimes.
godless’s point appears to be, ‘WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ?!” I’m personally not interested, because I find the reality of rape to be more relevant than the what-ifs that haunt the minds of those trying to imply that gender has no influence on people who commit gender hate crimes.
whoa. that might be my point, but i honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.
btw, my “and… scene” comment was in response to the troll. (i thought it would be the effective end of this thread.)
Hill’s problem seems to be that he buys into the masculine tropes he’s satirizing, and so the humor is not in mocking the tropes, but men who fail to live up to the standard. Which means that a sufficient explosion of bullying might allow someone to redeem himself.
I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m not interested in East Bound and Down, despite liking Danny McBride in everything I’ve seen him in (though I haven’t seen Foot Fist Way). This sums it up pretty nicely. Thanks, Amanda.
Two tangential points:
- For a great Anti-Magic Pixie Dream Girl experience, see Anna Faris in Smiley Face.
- Very tangential, but I just saw one of the greatest anti-hero turns in a movie: Joe Frazier in the documentary “Thriller In Manilla” on HBO. Noone comes away clean in the movie, but I empathised with what Frazier put up with from Ali ("Uncle Tom” and “Gorilla"). Then the last five minutes of the movie made my blood freeze. A clear an indictment of acting out revenge as anything I’ve ever seen.
Given the fact that Jody Hill has apparently tried to tell people that this movie is a latter day Taxi Driver, (and I suspect that his efforts in this regard are much funnier than anything in the actual movie), why not make the scene about the battle allegedly going on inside the Rogen character? What if she doesn’t respond to him when he says her name, he stops, and it becomes clear that he realizes (perhaps only vaguely) that he’s crossed some line? It doesn’t make him likable, clearly, and it’s not funny, but I keep reading about how Ronnie is such a complex and disturbed character blah blah blah. Why not just let it be what it is, if you’re committed to making the movie you claim you want to make? Is it perhaps because you’re just talking out your ass so no one notices that your movie is about validating your own standard white guy insecurities?
this is an honest-to-god-would-someone-PLEASE-explain-stupidity-for-me question.
who the hell would *WANT* to have sex with a person so drunk/drugged/fuckedup that they can’t do anything more than lying there like a corpse? (aside from the obvious necrophiliac bullshite)
because, while i *flatoutfuckingrefuse* to see this movie, i think it might have been “cool” (in the exploring social ramifications sort of way) to show this moron raping the woman,, realize he’s raping, and *then* realize that not only is he being a total evil-selfish-fuckface who is beyond all hope and redemption, but HE DIDN’T EVEN ENJOY IT.
or is that just me? it seems to me that the *not even enjoying it* would be a nice ironic piece of his punishment (NOT ALL OF IT! just the very first bit of his *self-punishment*, on top of all the years of jail time he should receive)
who the hell would *WANT* to have sex with a person so drunk/drugged/fuckedup that they can’t do anything more than lying there like a corpse? (aside from the obvious necrophiliac bullshite)
For as many reasons as you could probably imagine. The rapist might be so stoned out of his mind/drunk he thinks she is participating (which is probably the most “innocent” you could get). He might be using her as a biological RealDoll instead of relying on his hand in order to masturbate. He might have a fetish about it. He might be getting over on the power angle of the rape, in the sense of her being totally incapable of resistance gives him the ultimate level of control. He might have deluded himself into thinking that she’ll appreciate it later. So on and so forth.
But as far as I know, two people cannot both be the victim and perpetrator of one assault of any type.
Any legal argument that depends on a person being “too drunk to consent” to define the assault has to admit the possibility that multiple people involved might clear that bar.
If both people, whatever their gender, are “too drunk to consent” then things get very gray.
Jody Hill’s main problem is that he’s a hack, and his talent wasn’t up to the demands of the scene.
Young Frankenstein has been in circulation for over 30 years and I’ve heard very few people rip apart the skewed sexual politics of the rape scene in it, mainly because it’s over the top enough to actually be funny.
Because intoxication is not a defense to a crime such as rape, the person who is the active partner is the rapist.
Lest you freak out, realize that if two really soused people both say yes and have sex, charges are not likely to ensue. But because it is entirely possible that the active partner is engaging with someone who does not want to have sex, could not validly consent to sex, and did not really understand what was going on. That realization shuld be troubling enough to prevent anyone with any sense of sexual ethics from going at it with a new partner who is soused, regardless of how drunk s/he is.
In most of the drunk rape cases I’ve heard of, the woman may not have said no, but she didn’t say yes either. So this may not be as similar to drunk sex scenarios as you think.
If both people, whatever their gender, are “too drunk to consent” then things get very gray.
interesting. in considering the ways in which Hill is hack writer/director, it becomes clear that he missed at least one good opportunity.
he could have given his bro-demo audience a laugh when he let his character off the hook for rape, and then challenged them even more by placing a drunken Rogen in a situation where he is emasculated by having a couple of Faris’ digits rammed up his pupenschute.
funny, dark, edgy and against gender type.
question: could he have then avoided an NC-17 rating?
However, I’m extremely disappointed in Seth Rogen for backing him up. I mean, Seth Rogen is the same actor who played the character on “Freaks&Geeks;” who SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER found out his girlfriend was born as a hermaphrodite, and ultimately decided he was totally OK with it. Wasn’t Rogen even like, a writer on that show? I guess he’s “come a long way” ... in the wrong direction.
This pisses me off, because I’ve had the hugest crush on him…
“That would be Deuteronomy 22:28-29, Amanda. Among others.”
Yep:
“22:28 If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;
22:29 Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.” [Source]
What a fucking lovely little book to base your morality on!
“ this is an honest-to-god-would-someone-PLEASE-explain-stupidity-for-me question.
who the hell would *WANT* to have sex with a person so drunk/drugged/fuckedup that they can’t do anything more than lying there like a corpse? (aside from the obvious necrophiliac bullshite)”
Seriously. I can’t think of any explanation other than “a rapist”.
I’m actually not sure about the actual movie any more, since opinions seem to vary quite a lot on how disturbed and unlikable Seth Rogen’s character is supposed to be. I haven’t really followed how Rogen and Hill have handled it, but from the quotes I’ve read not very well. It sounds like the movie could be a great send-up of the lovable Rogen persona, but they’ve not been willing to go all the way on it. I’m not really in a position to see it, since I’ve only seen Zack and Miri before.
Though of course, this is well past a debate on the actual movie itself at this point, and as in most cases the reactions of those insulted by feminist criticism is actually more interesting than the movie itself (especially as many/most of them have not even seen the movie), since it clearly illustrates the problem with these people’s victimization complex and their need to project on bitchy feminists.
</blockquote>who the hell would *WANT* to have sex with a person so drunk/drugged/fuckedup that they can’t do anything more than lying there like a corpse?</blockquote>
Well, when you grow up in a society where your value is based on how many women you can “conquer”, and not enough women are willing to let you “conquer” them when they are fully conscious, it becomes more appealing to some men to prove their manliness by getting it any way they can, as long as they can brag about it.
I hope it didn’t sound like I was excusing rapists. I think that they should be locked away for life because they usually can’t be reformed in this social structure. I wasn’t trying to be simplistic, but rape is a complex problem and I didn’t want to write a whole page. My point is that because men feel like other men judge them on their “conquests”, they also judge themselves that way. While it is common for men to lie about how many women they’ve had sex with, that alone won’t be enough for a very insecure man. There are a lot of factors involved, and one of them is that socially men are supposed to have many sexual partners and women are supposed to have few. We all know how this type feels about homosexuality, so it creates a bind where both men and women are supposed to want opposite things, so someone has to lose out no matter what.
Um, HeLLO, have you ever heard of “You poke it, you own it?”