Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Teen
Bromance
(Superbad, 9/3/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
The
major media have lately caught on to an interesting trend in Hollywood:
nobody makes good boy-girl romances anymore. "Who Killed the Love
Story?" Time magazine recently asked; a few days later The
Times of London explained "How Hollywood Fell Out of Love With
Romance." The trickle of viewers who actually saw current romances
like Catch and Release, The Ex, and No Reservations can
attest to the problem. Indeed, the most successful love stories of late,
such as Brokeback Mountain, haven't included women at all. If
When Harry Met Sally had been made in 2007, it would have concentrated
more on the couple of Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby than Crystal and
Meg Ryan.
Superbad, the latest Judd
(Knocked Up) Apatow-produced teen opus, is the latest incarnation
of the so-called "bromance." Newcomers Jonah Hill and Michael
Cera are Seth and Evan, a couple of geeky high school seniors looking
to graduate with (for lack of a fitter word) a bang. These are
the kind of guys who, in real life, would opine incessantly about Lord
of the Rings and manga, but here speak of little else but bagging
"vage-tastic" babes (although, they admit, actual "vages"
aren't as pretty as you'd think...) The script by Seth Rogan and Evan
Goldberg puts such unrelentingly colorful potty-talk in the mouths of
Seth and Evan that they make those two randy Mexican teens in Y Tu
Mama Tambien look like Mitt Romney's sons at a GOP fundraiser. Connoisseurs
of obsession—any kind of obsession—have to grant that Rogan
and Goldberg have truly pegged the permanent emergency of teen horniness.
It's a funny, though not exactly pretty, sight.
The "bromance" part, of
course, is that Seth and Evan are the Butch and Sundance of hormonal
desperation. Even as they chase booze and girls, their most intimate
attachment is really to each other. Coming to terms with this, while
tending the delicate, endangered flower that is modern masculinity,
is their challenge and perhaps the challenge of the times. In anything,
the movie is perhaps a little too optimistic about squaring this circle:
most 17 year-old geeks don't have pretty girls like Becca and Jules
(Martha MacIsaac and Emma Stone) to help them through the changes.
Good as Hill and Cera are in the
leads, Superbad gets hilarious support from Rogan and Steve (SNL)
Hader as perhaps the most juvenile cops ever to disgrace a uniform.
Best of all is a phenomenon named Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the boys'
uber-geek pal Fogell, a kid so clueless he commissions a fake ID with
a single name on it: "McLovin."
So why is quality boy-girl romance
so rare these days at the multiplex? Surely it must have something to
do with the tastes of the primary target audience, adolescent males.
Really, has there ever been a generation of post-pubescent boys who
would plunk down their hard-earned lawn-mowing money to watch folks
lip-wrestle? Time magazine and The Times of London have
it all wrong: it was the era of Gone With the Wind, Casablanca
and, for that matter, When Harry Met Sally that was the aberration.
On TV, where functioning adults still represent a large proportion of
the audience, viewers will still tune in to see if Joey will hook up
with Rachel, or whether Carrie Bradshaw will finally settle down with
Mr. Big. At the movies, if Carrie's breasts don't transform into machine
guns, forget it.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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