Last night, I caught some of 'Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story' and was particularly annoyed by a scene late in the movie, where a rapper called Lil' Nutzzak is introduced to an aging Dewey through this a video clip. Nutzzak's rap samples a single-word from Dewey's classic song 'Walk Hard' and the plan becomes pairing Dewey with this up-and-coming rapper (there's some wonderfully shameless Cox and Nutzzak jokes in there too). It's a moderately clever parody of total sell-out, music exec retardation but writers, Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan's disdain for rap comes through way more than a genuine disgust for corporate synergy- and it's weird.While the rest of the movie sends-up musical tall-tales like Brian Wilson in the sandbox and appropriately cuts-down Hollywood's hubris for reducing a country legend's ups and downs to a single event involving his dead brother-- in 'Walk Hard' the brother is sawed totally in-half during a machete fight-- there's no begrudging respect or polite joshing when it comes to hip-hop's excesses and absurdities. When Ghostface- pretty much as ethical and moral of an rapper as there's ever been- comes out at a Dewey Cox Lifetime Achievement Concert, it's got none of the vague absurdity of Jewel or Lyle Lovett being there, it's just, "Ha! A rapper's on the stage saying some dirty-words! Oh how far music's devolved!"
Apatow's producer/director/writer filmography contains a weird trend of using hip-hop as either a quick throwaway joke or as a way to reduce a character or scene to absurdity. Recall the intro to 'Knocked-Up' which uses Ol' Dirty Bastard's classic 'Shimmy Shimmy Ya' (Armond White: "white boys clowning to Old Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”) with emphasis on Dirty's "Ooh baby I like it raw" hook to make it really obvious and funny what this movie's already going to be about. Think of the constant hip-hop slang used by everyone but Steve Carrell's character in 'The 40 Year-Old Virgin' and how it's essentially used to represent just how vulgar and crass everyone's become and how stupid white people are for adopting any part of this culture.
Leslie Mann's bar-slut in 'Virgin' is speeding home, too drunk to drive, blaring and singing along to Missy Elliot's 'Get Ur Freak On', which is sort of real- drunk white sluts love Missy Elliott- but it's sort of the icing on the cake for why this girl's so terrible. It's not presented with any of the sympathy given to a whiny loser who collects action figures, rides a bike, and hasn't ever dropped his dick in a pussy. Contrast this disdain for hip-hop with the 'Superbad' kids. The movie's James Brown-referencing title, constant funk soundtrack, and actor Jonah Hill's Richard Pryor T-shirt (now sold at Urban Outfitters, by the way) are all used to invoke the characters nerdy, outsider-ness. They are characters wonderfully out-of-step with the rest of their peers because of their interest in 70s funk and soul. I won't even begin to understand that one...
In the Apatow and company universe, which is one that despite all the blowjob and weed jokes is incredibly conservative- dumb critics say this is why his movies "have heart"- rap music and culture are one of the biggest signifiers of how low things have sunk and how distant people are from their "real" emotions: Rap as ruiner of everything. In previous Apatow movies, this was just sort of irksome, but because 'Walk Hard' is a movie that sets-out to make fun of just how most music biopics just don't get it, it's even more apparent how little Apatow and Kasdan themselves "get" about pop-music history.
The obvious contrast is between Lil Nutzzak's inarguably offensive interpolation of 'Walk Hard' and Dewey's innocuous but somehow riot-causing, priest-punching ballad 'Take My Hand'. It seems in many ways, the movie is saying, "Here's actual dirty stuff, here's actually reprehensible music" with little understanding or sympathy for the mores of previous generations. It's probably quite hard for a guy like Apatow, so clearly stuck in his own head, to think of the freedom and excitement music could and still does possess- in part, because he's decided to skewer it in this big, dumb movie- but anyone with a working knowledge of pop history should be able to fall-back a few decades and realize just how rowdy Elvis Presley, or Jerry Lee Lewis were and frankly, still are. Lyrically of course, the songs only appeared innocent and were full of double-entendre and even when they weren't, the songs were brimming with anger, angst, and depression.
One of my go-to records is Del Shannon's 'Runaway' LP. There's a song on it just called 'Misery' and it's about some other dude fucking the girl you used to fuck and how fucked-up that is! And even the music is only safe and cute if you're not listening close enough. Plonking horns, a hard-as-fuck drums, and the limits of early 60s recording gives this an incredible raw, anarchic sound. Oh yeah, and the creepy organ solo by an under-discussed electronic music pioneer named Max Crook-Crook rewired a bunch of instruments to create a hybrid synth, shit is real!- pretty much solidifies how this music's supposed to make you feel- less happy and cheery, more creepy, which is the same feeling Buddy Holly's 'Everyday' gives you and something Dewey's 'Take My Hand' is directly aping. If you can't see why an entire generation of kids in the 50s and early 60s weren't totally ready to explode after hearing this shit, you're not really listening.There's a rough, energy to that music that was mostly sucked away in the supposedly "free" 60s-- and continues through pussified 60s pop-influenced indie rock-- but is still alive and well in hip-hop, dance, and club culture, all of which are very scary and silly to guys like Apatow. In David Foster Wallace's 'Signifying Rappers' he discusses the significance of pop lyrics and connects it to rap in a way that Apatow's totally blind to seeing:
"It's well-known in pop history that slang and double entendre and even the tacit neologizing of innocuous words were used to make rock lyrics at once explicit and shocking enough to 'rock' and suitable enough for the radio airplay rock needed- e.g. "Baby here is my love/I'd love just to love you" equals "Baby, here is my dick/I'd just love to fuck you" (75).
What rap, in a lot of ways has done is sort of flipped this and uses very explicit lyrics to sometimes say polite, innocuous things (a lot of the time of course, it's straight-forward but still-). Rap uses the relative freedom to say anything to chip closer at honesty because really, if you love someone you also want to fuck them, so why not say it? Stuff's complicated Judd, think about it. In a way, it makes sense that the two most offensive and pop-culturally off parodies in 'Walk Hard' would be about 50s rock and contemporary rap.
-Costello, Mark & David Foster Wallace. 'Signifying Rappers'. Ecco Press, New Jersey: 1990.
37 comments:
Good post. I haven't seen Walk Hard, because fuck that shit, but I have seen most of the other Apatow-related movies. I hadn't thought about the use of rap, per se, but do remember being intensely irritated at some of the bits in The 40 Year Old Virgin (which, actually, I liked a lot, with caveats), chiefly where the black guy is the repository of all the MOST misogynist comments, and the white guys only follow suit. Like locating that kind of language in the mouth of the black character somehow separates it from the point of view of the movie (which, y'know, is so NOT about black people). But it doesn't.
"In the Apatow and company universe, which is one that despite all the blowjob and weed jokes is incredibly conservative-"
I agree that the Apatow universe is essentially conservative, though I would write this line without the "despite". There's a blandly liberal sense in which sex and drugs--"social" freedom--is STILL seen by people as evidence of being "down" of not being aligned with "the Man". This is the real failure of the 60s counterculture. The Man gets his just find alongside blowjobs and weed.
(Also, I take your point about the energy of early rock n'roll being sucked away in the 60s rock. This being the period when rock n'roll became rock, which is to say white, and when it became less and less danceable. I love a lot of that music (and I am vastly more familiar with it than I am with the 50s stuff of which you speak), but I think your point stands. And the ancillary point about current indie rock, especially as it rides on the more Beach Boys-y and Beatles-y sounds, etc: yes. (And I like the Beatles! But move on!)
Also, part two: I gotta ride in to the defense of Missy Elliott, in case that was a sidelong dig (though maybe it wasn't), since it seems to me that pretty much everyone digs Missy (and I use "everyone" to mean all kinds of people, not all people, obviously)....
Something always bothered me about Seth Rogen wearing a GZA shirt in "40 Year Old Virgin." He was possibly the biggest piece of human excrement in the entire movie and he's celebrating one of the most layered, thoughtful, cinematic pieces of music ever recorded that just happens to be hip hop. Then he does a bong hit and talks about fucking grandmothers. Zing!
Richard-
Thanks! Yeah, I didn't go into too far because I thought the post was already all over the place but yeah, the black character in 'Virgin' (a movie I too, think is really, really funny) is sort of presented as this great corruptor of all things.
"The Man gets his just fine alongside blowjobs and weed"; well-said. And yeah, it's not really despite, it's more along side of or something.
No diss on Missy or Missy-fans, I just think a very particular kind of white girl that Apatow parodies somehow finds a lot in Missy for reasons not entirely known. I say this as someone who's witnessed this at parties; it's real, ha. It's just one of those weird things where an artist, for a lot of reasons, taps-in to a demographic they probably didn't intend to totally tap-into and pretty much becomes THE rap song these people like. Nelly's the same way.
Zilla-
Yeah, Rogen's apparently a big Wu Tang fan or so he claims and he's probably too "blame" for the Wu and maybe funk/soul stuff in Apatow films, but he seems like a gigantic ass who maybe likes the music but doesn't get it beyond it being like "this. sounds. AWESOME"....
I take your point about Missy Elliott (and though I'm old, I've been to enough parties to witness that kind of thing myself, too).
(Also, thanks for pretending my typo in the 'blowjobs and weed' line wasn't there. Ha!)
I think you are looking waaaaaay too much into this. The use of Shimmy Shimmy Ya in Knocked Up is no more offensive than the use of "Panama" in Superbad and both are used in incredibly similiar manners. Both are dumb songs (although both incredibly awesome) used to signify the juvenilia and stupidity of the protagonists (Seth Rogen & The Cops/McLovin' respectively).
I mean let's not pretend that Shimmy Shimmy Ya and Get Ur Freak On aren't an incredibly silly songs here even in a hip hop sense.
I remember seeing that part and thinking the jokes about rap were stale, but thought that Dewey's reaction to the sample was supposed to be ironic in the sense that the song is basically a lyrical display of Dewey's modus operandi, and his disdain for it was hypocritical reflecting white opposition to the verbalizing of the id, but not necessarily the physical acquiescence of the superego to it. Though, I wasn't really sure what the intent was because a lot of the jokes in the movie really had no social import and were instead superficial non-sequiturs that sometimes riffed on the specific biopic bombast of walk the line.
And I suppose the biggie/tupac line in Knocked Up can be another example of what you wrote was the Apatow universe's lack of subtle compassion when it comes to rap in spite of its subtle compassion towards white fuck-ups.
I'm curious how he handles the israeli-palestinian conflict in don't you mess with the zohan. There was one line in the trailer that seemed to suggest there might be a theme of compassion for all middle-easterners in the face of american xenophobia, but it'll be established from the moral highground of a sexual superhuman who did his duty serving the mossad. I always thought the conversation about Munich in knocked up was uncomfortable in the sense that there goes further dissipation of jewish compassion, being replaced by self-satisfaction when cinematic archetypes absorb the power so long held out by oppressors. "We're the strong ones now! Our turf is sealed!" Which reminds of me of Killer of Sheep being a response to blaxploitation films.
Good post.
Interesting thoughts on the black character in Virgin. I've been thinking about that character again recently, mostly because the same actor shows up as the doorman in those ads for Baby Mama teaching the white characters black slang that they use ironically. He's kind of like this anti-Morgan Freeman; this magical negro who spouts corrupting trivialities instead of words of wisdom.
I'm with you on old rock too. I've been getting into the earlier Beatles stuff, and it's pretty much there, as something like eight days a week is about wanting to fuck a girl eight times a week and done in a way more clever and boundary pushing than any of the later psychedelic stuff was.
It is weird though, how old white guys really can't make good jokes about rap. My dad is writing this novel now that's based on his time as music critic at Spin back in th '80s, and all his rap references are about how people knew blank was a good rapper because he got shot, or a character ironically predicting flavor of love. I guess this wouldn't really surprise me so much in most contexts, but my dad at least at one point had a very genuine interest in rap music, and wrote about it pretty often. He got me into Rakim and BDP and the Juice crew. And yet he can't write about rap now in a non-snarky context, and sounds so much more out of touch than when he's talking about Lou Reed, who I can't really imagine he's been thinking too much over the last however many years.
Only thing I take issue with in this is that it's the conservatism that people call heart in Apatow's films. I think despite the politics, Apatow's films are really sympathetic towards the characters. Maybe less in Knocked Up, but definitely in Superbad and Virgin, you get the sense, that despite their flaws, the filmmakers really love these characters.
Actually, the actor who plays the black guy in 40 Year Old Virgin, Romany Malco, is a former rapper. He was in some shitty rap group called the College Boyz in the early '90s and were signed to Virgin Records.
Actually, I take the shitty part back. "Victim Of The Ghetto" is actually pretty dope.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoOTQEsTtgM
Well, I agree that Apatow's movies are incredibly conservative. I guess where I'd disagree is that (a) I think that's a good - no, great thing, (b) I don't think there's a straight line from conservatism to hating on rap, which you seem to be suggesting, though I could be misreading you, and (c) I'm not sure that Apatow actually is down on rap; in particular, if he's using rap to show how "vulgar and crass" everyone's become, and thinks vulgar and crass is bad, then why does he make such vulgar and crass movies? Rather, I think the interesting thing about Apatow is that he represents this odd sort of synthesis of incredibly crass humor and conservative values. And in said synthesis, there's a place for rap, especially for rappers like ODB and Missy, who are really just apolitical party rappers for the most part.
Lots of interesting comments, I'm at work right now, so I should be working, so this'll be kidna short.
Doc-
The thing is, it's very different in 'Superbad' because 'Panama' is the song those cops partied to when they weren't cops. It also may or may not be a reference to this 80s movie 'Over the Edge'. There's no sense of anything like that in 'Knocked Up'.
Good research on the black dude from 'Virgin'.
tray-
I won't get into a discussion on politics, but no I wasn't suggesting Conservatives oppose rap, if anything, it's liberals who have more actual issues with rap.
I also said "conservative" with a lower-case C. What I mean are his values are very sort of middle of the road and conventional. It wasn't even a critique, just a reality.
One of the local music writers I used to work with wrote a great piece on why young White kids tend to approach dance and/or "Black" music with irony. It's fine to dress in 80's gear and dance to Thriller as long as everyone there is in on the joke. Put on some early Parliament or heaven forbid, rap, and watch them scatter. He elaborated on his ideas behind the piece guessing that there's some generational thing that prevents some young White kids from being able to deal with anything real and raw and up front, they need some kind of buffer, a defense mechanism , and irony is certainly a type of defense mechanism.
I think that's what is going on with Apatow, and well many other White folks, Hollywood or not. It isn't that they're being dismissive or taking the piss, they just can't handle the truth. Rap, funk, come from places they don't have a grasp on, or perhaps for complicated reasons, are afraid to try.
In that sense, the type of White girl who digs Missy, the type whom some of y'all seem to be pissing on, is more real, more likable (despite her drunken pawing on me in clubs) than the irony laden, M.I.A. loving hipster chick. Drunken Missy Fan is I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T while hipster chick will still be living off the folks while freelancing for the OC Weekly (no offense).
If Martin Lawrence still had a career he would have been in Malco's part, bet.
Really enjoyed this post, Brandon. I haven't seen Walk Hard, though I have seen Virgin and Knocked Up. I also got some of the sense of disdain that you noticed in those movies, and it kind of felt mean-spirited, as opposed to just the pure raucous/uncouth "boys will be boys" sense of a lot of the sex jokes.
i hear what you are saying, and it was definitely thought provoking as a fan of both hip-hop and apatow movies...but in defense of knocked up's use of wu-tang and especially seth rogan who is a huge wu-tang fan, i think he used it more as a homage to music he loves not making fun of it. here is an interview/cover shoot of seth rogan and RZAtogether if this helps at all.
just a quick note, supposedly the group of actor that all work together apparently refer to themselves as the "jew-tang" clan, which is fucking hilarious in my opinion
also i'm pretty sure the newest movie pineapple express is going to use all kinds of hip-hop especially going international which i see as more of a respect for hip-hop's diversity of styles
http://www.complex.com/CELEBRITIES/Cover-Story/Seth-Rogen-RZA
nice read , but i personally dont see any real disdain against hip hop, atleast not anything intentional or malicious. for ex. totally agree w/ dorknation abt the drunk white chick bumping missy being> hipster chick - i dont see katherine heigl being duplicitous or ironic there - just drunk and loving missy. As it should be.
i agree with tray in that i generally view apatow's movies as crass juveniles coming of age and displaying heroism and/or traditonal moral backbones..basic stuff yknow? call me simple minded
and with regards to your comment regarding seth rogen being a fan of wu tang only on the level of "this. sounds. AWESOME"......umm is there something wrong with that??, and/or do we need to like music on more intricate layers? - jay kay
I think my discussion of Leslie Mann partying to Missy wasn't clear or misread-I AGREE she's great and REAL for being into the music but the implication of the scene is that it's just one more reasons she's awful (and essentially immoral, crashing into cars with little interest...).
What I mean about Rogen and "this.sounds.AWESOME" is the music's more than just bad-ass and I don't think Rogen sees it beyond that, which is fine- he can do whatever he wants, but I can call him out for not getting it and being a douche too.
not really trying to get that deep into this whole thing, but do you really have any evidence that rogen only likes wu-tang because it's badass. i mean for all i know you could be right, but i don't think you're basing it off anything other than that it helps your argument and you don't like him. also, i don't think there's really a link between rogen being a terrible person in 40yov and him wearing a liquid swords shirt. probably he just wanted to use his exposure to boost some records he likes and/or make people think he's cool because he likes those records. i mean he also wears shirts for sonic youth, nirvana, and public enemy but i don't think it's a statement about him being a douchebag.
but yeah, in general there's something about apatow's movies that kind of makes me uneasy. except for superbad anyways which he only produced.
*Deletes my blog about this same subject that I was saving for June*
Good bless you, Brandon.
One.
I didn't mean conservatism politically per se, more just - well for example, the blatant pro-life sentiments in Knocked Up. But as far as middle of the road and conventional values go, what's more middle of the road and conventional than listening to Missy? I don't really see that they're making some connection between hip-hop and being awful or immoral - maybe irresponsible in the case of Shimmy Shimmy Ya but I don't think that's exactly unfair to ODB, do you?
Armond White on Apatow/Hip hop (in a review of "what happens in Vegas")
"Men are reduced to boys and women to bitches—a reflection of the worst hip-hop stereotypes infiltrating the fantasies of rom-com’s typically white middle-class characters, as Superbad proved."
Yeah Brandon I don't get what or why you are going for with the whole Rogen/Liquid Swords shirt thing. It's really kinda obnoxious to assume that Rogen doesn't deeply love that album, or just thinks it's bad-ass. It's really fuzzy territory to go into making snap judgments like that based on whatever. "I don't think Rogen sees it beyond that." What's your evidence there? Is that based on you knowing the guy? It's this kind of superficial surface type of thing that an otherwise excellent post can do without. Just sayin.
Man, Brandon, I've always thought the exact opposite. This seems like a big misreading of the signs on your part, not to mention a didactic, preachy tone coming across.
Walk Hard spans many American pop musical genres of the past fifty years and makes fun of all of everything it touches, they savage Bob Dylan for chrissakes. Do you think that was done because Apatow and Kasdan hate Bob Dylan? Did they cast one of the best rappers on the planet in their movie alngside Lyle Lovett and Jackson Browne because they were making fun of him? Dude, that was supposed to be the mushy, touching part of the movie.
Also, Liquid Swords and Fear of a Black Planet are two of the best rap albums ever made, those shirts only say that Seth Rogen has good taste in rap.
It seems pretty clear that far from disrespecting rap, Apatow is actually one of the few that actually treats it with respect and puts it at least on a par, if not outright favors it, with other genres.
"It's probably quite hard for a guy like Apatow, so clearly stuck in his own head, to think of the freedom and excitement music could and still does possess- in part, because he's decided to skewer it in this big, dumb movie- but anyone with a working knowledge of pop history should be able to fall-back a few decades and realize just how rowdy Elvis Presley, or Jerry Lee Lewis were and frankly, still are."
I'd imagine Apatow probably relates to the more overtly obscene rap lyrics. His movies, after all, are notoriously filthy. There is a featurette on the bonus DVD of a dick giving an interview, this is not a squeamish man. It is deeply odd that you sat through this entire movie, plus Superbad, plus 40 YOV, plus Knocked up and the thoughts in this post are what you internalized.
db-
As I said, there's none of the fun joshing/joking with his rap parodies the way there is with as you mentioned, the Dylan parody. That's the difference.
The thing about Apatow is his use of dirty language and sex is always for comedy or is always used as a sort of outer shell of the characters warm, warm, ultimately-just-wanna-find-a-girl hearts. I think Apatow doesn't see the same thing when rappers use the same language.
Jason-
Yeah, I'm talking out of my dick about Rogen. He just bugs me. Not in movies but his real persona, like when he's interviewed, he seems like a douchebag. I didn't include that aspect of his t-shirts in my actual post, I understand it's just a bullshit personal thing (not that the whole post couldn't be seen that way...).
tray-
I think it's interesting that you see 'Knocked-Up' as "pro-life". Do you think its suggesting that? I'm not grilling you, I'm curious.
dart-
You should still write on this. I'd love to see what you'd have to say still.
Yeah, Knocked Up is blatantly pro-life. What thinking woman wouldn't get an abortion in that situation? You have a career, a TV career at that, one totally contingent on her looks and weight, you hook up with a guy who's worth 800 bucks, and you just decide you're having the baby? Without even considering the possibility of getting an abortion? I guess it's always a risk to draw inferences from how characters act and say this is how the director thinks we ought to behave, but I think it's pretty clear the movie's pro-life - especially when the one person who suggests an abortion, the mother, is given lines like (and I'm paraphrasing) "why don't you get rid of it and later when you're ready you can have a real baby." So yeah, I thought it was clearly pro-life, although I think he tried to sneak the message under the audience's noses to such a point that most people don't even see it's there, they just think it's part of the absurdity of the premise.
I'm not saying the film wasn't pro-life, but I think it's a serious mistake to assume that 'all thinking women' would get an abortion in that - or any - situation. That's part of the 'choice' in pro-choice - not everyone wants to get an abortion. Also, as a debatably lighthearted movie about getting knocked up, there wouldn't be much lightheartedness if there was serious abortion consideration, and there wouldn't be much movie if there weren't a pregnancy to go through. The situation is an accidental pregnancy. Without the situation, there is no movie. Perhaps it is passively conservative, but I agree with the above poster that said that there's nothing inherently wrong with that. The film didn't push some agenda that made the viewer (well, me at least) think that abortion was somehow evil or anything. It just presents another side. Another choice.
I'm not really a huge fan of the movie, either. I didn't think it was particularly funny. I just wanted to point that out.
Oh, I'm pro-life myself, so I'm not complaining, but I thought the movie dealt with the issue in such a sneaky and intellectually dishonest way that I wasn't at all pleased with it. Whereas Juno, though I hated it, was much more fair.
A bit late to the discussion here, I know: While I don't agree with everything in this post, it's certainly an interesting point to be made.
I agree that with a lot of Apatow-related movies, deeper analysis seems to reveal some disturbing messages. Previous commentators covered this better than me, so I won't further pursue it.
I would like to point you to this Complex Q&A with Rogen & RZA, if you haven't already seen it.
http://www.complex.com/CELEBRITIES/Cover-Story/Seth-Rogen-RZA
And the accompanying video of the photoshoot:http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=14563295
Bong bong.
"because really, if you love someone you also want to fuck them, so why not say it?"
this is why i read yr blog brandon!
i know the quote is outta context and i'm way late on the comments, but dang! this sentence has been stuck in my head for two days straight. much more informative and compelling than any of the recent "comedies" i've seen. could care less about judd apatow, but the creepy rocknroll song analysis is always good! i still can't get that sentence outta my head...
This is a pretty great conversation going on. I'm glad something I wrote could inspire it.
I mispoke I think, but I wasn't disagreeing with a 'Knocked-Up' reading that says it conservative or do I see it as bad, it's just interesting and highlights a lot about how people think of the pregnancy/abortion issue, especially in "art"
Can't rememeber where I read it, but a review of Tony Kaye's recent abortion doc 'Lake of Fire' said the movie was in some ways "pro-life" because it shows in detail, in real-time, an abortion. As if showing the act means he's opposed to it. Meaning, if he showed it as ONLY positive, then and only then would he be pro-choice. I'm pro-choice by the way...
How pro-choice are you? I mean, in what sense, like are there levels to it where say, it's mitigated by environmental factors?
I'm not sure how I feel about it considering once there's conception, unless there's a miscarriage there's going to be a child, but there are some serious considerations of external factors beyond the baby that need to go into discussion of abortion and once the pro-life groups drop the notion of the soul then it's obviously not considering what it's like to raise a kid in the projects, or in a third world country where there's child prositution and families sell off children to pay debts (though, that's not necessarily particular to the third world, apparently there are cases in the united states too) and if it's an accident and there's no way for a couple to properly raise the child besides auctioning it off to an orphanage, which in turn might not have particularly adequate child care, then the situation doesn't lend itself to platitudes and planned parenthood is perfectly aware of that, they're not just there to clean up the mistakes young rich white people make and are therefore necessary.
I think the reason a movie like Knocked Up draws ire is because it's intent is conflated with the ideals of its more vocal proponents. Just because the conservative women of america condone it doesn't mean they made it. Kind of like John Darnielle's argument against Tom Breihan in which he accuses Breihan of conflating Kool Keith's condescending white audience with his intent in the Dr. Octagon album.
I agree with anyone above who said that the anti-abortion sentiment of the film was merely an age old plot device to keep the film floating, and to reflexively give reason for its characters to grow up or mature and those kind of old-fashioned storytelling techniques don't lend themselves particularly well to the present circumstances, like the one's laid out in Tony Kaye's film? But what's deemed as a universal solution in the movie is far more particular to a white (upper? big house!) middle class couple than if the characters were undergoing the same situation in the fifth ward, or Romania under Ceascescu (4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days is excellent, by the way, have you seen it? It's harrowing and unsparing in detail but still sympathetic towards the decisions made by it's main characters).
Apatow, though, actually had kids and I think he was probably just drawing from that. But since his personal experience doesn't reflect on that of young, poor black male from the outskirts then it's deemed inconsiderate.
First, to answer this question, which will unfortunately turn this discussion into an abortion discussion but oh well.
I'm a pragmatist. Abortion is a necessary reality of the world and opposing it for moral, religious, or even reasons connected to "responsibility" is silly. Abortions have always happened in one form or another. There's a long history of far worse and more horrible for "child" and women ways to rid of children. As long as America in particular, cannot find a way to utterly reject the religious influences that oppose any and all forms of birth control, then we must have abortion. Sorry.
In a thousand years, abortion will probably be looked-at as some fucked-up weird thing people used to do, that has since been solved in better and wiser ways. For now, it's what we got. Get over it.
Can you link me to the Darnielle thing on Breihan, Akmat?
Moving on-
Have any of you seen this post which is about my post? here. It's ultimately frustrating because she doesn't get it, but still- kinda interesting...
Also Akmat, I'm confused as to what a "poor black male from the outskirts" has to do with this discussion or Apatow. I'm not even calling you out, but I don't really get your point. It seems like you're saying that only poor people or worse should have abortions?
Haha! I honestly did not intend for it to look that way, and the suggestion horrifies me. It's one of the reasons I haven't picked up freakonomics, that and that book doesn't sound particularly insightful, more pop analysis than anything.
I suppose the impetus in writing that poor black outskirts descriptor was that apatow's white, privileged background coupled with a blase overlooking of abortion was deemed contentious because the realities of some people who do have abortions weren't taken into consideration. Obviously people of other races and classes have abortions too for a variety of reasons. It was an overgeneralization when I mentioned a black person from a not so nice area who might have less options to consider when pondering the fate of being late, what I meant to be sympathetic towards people who do get abortions somehow got horribly misconstrued as a proposal for population control in the slums!
Hopefully your defense of abortion wasn't aimed at me too (though it was just a direct response to my question about your stance, certain rhetorical devices had me taken aback a bit! all's good though, i'm just up late and paranoid), I was just defending the argument that conception is the life's starting point on scientific grounds, without any overt religious references because I don't follow that nor do i follow any notion of a soul, by life I mean simply what ends up being a physical person. But at the same time, a simplified argument such as that doesn't take into account external realities, though I must say, you're use of the word pragmatist sounds closer to your question of my intentions! ha...? And also the EH Carr I picked up a few days ago.
Here's the JD on TB thing:
http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2006/06/madison_not_london.html
Akmat-
I was being funny with my thing on why I'm pro-choice, it wasn't aimed at you, that's the speech I give everybody. It's easy to dismiss or invoke the "slippery slope" of being a pragmatist, but I think you know what I meant, which is basically, for now, the abortion solution works, so I'm okay with it. It's not on some eugenics type shit or something.
And I wasn't accusing you of some 'Freakanomics' or worse thing, I just didn't see the connection to Apatow because as Tray and others have pointed out, even people like the female in 'Knocked' would consider an abortion.
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