I Love You, Man

It has been slow-going over the last month of moviewatching. Somewhere along the line, going to the theater ceased being very much fun.

Part of it was that since I had caught up on moviewatching, there were only a few choices each week that didn't involve going into the City. That meant I couldn't pick and choose among half a dozen films, depending on my mood. I was more constrained, and frankly, I just wasn't in the mood to see some of the stuff coming out lately.

But it seemed like something deeper was going on, something having to do with the situation of current events. I have been up late nearly every night, sifting through the hundreds of web news articles and blogs, following the news like a short wave operator in 1940 trying to glean all the latest reports about the Battle of Britain.

We are witnessing, I believe, the most significant and amazing events in our lifetimes, right up with the fall of the USSR.

As far as movies go, it's not that I don't need distractions, or narrative, or art right now. In fact I probably need those more than ever. But what started to stick out in my mind was the movies I was watching already seemed to be from another era. Culturally, in some sense, they felt dated, inevitable relics of the time only a year or two ago, when they were written and produced, before the conflagration broke out, as it now has.

That feeling, more than anything else, the one that movies now in theaters are disconnected from the reality we are now experiencing, was probably why I had lost my enthusiasm.

But that wasn't going to keep me from actually going to the theater. I was determined to soldier on.

Two weeks ago, I drove over to Leominster to see I Love You, Man, the comedy that had topped the box office, and which was getting good reviews.

During the opening credits,the familiar Dreamworks logo came on the screen. In a comedy, this is indication of one sure thing: lots of lowbrow raunch to come. Indeed the first couple minutes included cunnilingus humor, a harbinger of plenty of oral-sex-related material in the rest of the movie.

Much of the humorous funny raunch in I Love You, Man is in the trailers, including the fart gag during the real estate open house scene. But as I've noted before, it's almost as if Dreamworks and the other studios think they need a raunch coating to sell this kind movie. There's enough of this kind of material to cobble together to make trailers packed with it, to be sure, but it doesn't necessarily mean the movie will be crammed with this kind of humor.

As per the title, this was a movie about men, and the contemporary concept of manhood. In the Postmodern view, there are two kinds of straight men. On the one hand, you have the crude, caveman overgrown-boy types who cannot act but through their own infantile ego needs, oblivious to the needs of others, and especially to women. On the other hand, you have the emasculated and feminized types who live at the mercy of the cavemen and the women in their lives. Gay men, interestingly enough, are allowed to span the duality between action and empathy, and to have fully-developed male personalities.

For a Postmodern comedy to be interesting, therefore it needs to not only further this duality about straight men, but to make some kind of fresh commentary upon it, to stretch the canons of existing storytelling to put these kind of men in some new and interesting situation that challenges our (and their) assumptions about male character. On the whole, I Love You, Man seemed fairly successful in this regard, and while I watched it, I found myself intrigued about where the story was going to go.

Paul Rudd plays a Los Angeles real estate agent who dreams of building live-work developments in the shadow of downtown (already this feels like part of the lost world of pre-2008). In the opening scene, he proposes to his girlfriend after an eight-month courtship. On the ride home, we see that whereas she has many friends, with whom she freely shares her sex-life details, he is rather alone and friendless when it comes to other men. His own father prefers the company of his gay brother over him.

The protagonist is thus one of the empathic feminized males who can have female friends but who has no connection to the barbaric hyper ego-assertive males that move in the world around him. An inferior comedy would simply show his difficulties in coping with this, and take this duality for granted with delving deeper. But this movie was thankfully not inferior, and the story charts his voyage of discovery as he tries not only to find a real male friend (who can thus serve as the Best Man at his wedding), but also to get into touch with his inner action/expressive male.

The story moves to a higher level when it connects this voyage of self-discovery back to the original male-female love story by having him question his motivations for proposing marriage at the moment that he did. This creates a temporary rift between himself and his fiance that can only be healed by his discovery of his true male nature (as it should, in a classical sense). In other words, the male-liberation story leaps to the wider issue of how manhood in the Postmodern era effects male-female romantic relationships, and addresses specifically why women should be interested in this topic, since it touches on their well-being very directly.

I liked most of this movie, and my heart was sufficiently warmed to give a damn about what happened to characters. It certainly was fresh enough, and funny at times, to deserve to be at the top of the box office rankings when it came out.

One minor quibble: the movie went through over an hour and half before it decided it had to have a character blurt out the title as a line of dialogue, in literally the last couple minutes of the film. It was completely unnecessary, and should not have been included. Thor has worked up an elaborate theory on the use of the title within movies themselves, something I'll have to write about some time.