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.