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Pop Culture? What’s That?
By Izzy Grinspan / June 4, 2007
I’ve been reading Knocked Up coverage all day (I mean, in between the usual editorial duties) and growing more and more baffled by what strikes me as a glaring omission. Everyone seems to have one of two takes: Judd Apatow has a regrettable, though probably unintentional, inability to draw realistic female characters, leading him to write a movie that regrettably, but probably unintentionally, upholds all sorts of old-school conservative values. Or Judd Apatow is a feminist hero who created Freaks and Geeks’ Lindsey Weir (the most realistic high school girl since Daria Morgendorfer), which is why it’s OK that Knocked Up made the tough girls at Jezebel cry.
I very rarely disagree with Pandagon; for the most part, I fall into the second camp. If Knocked Up’s celebration of family is conservative, then the only truly progressive take on procreation is “I’m agin’ it.” (Which perspective isn’t problematic as a personal choice, of course—just awfully limiting when applied to the world at large.) But there’s one thing about Knocked Up that struck me as really condescending towards my gender, and it’s this: None of the women in the movie seem to understand jokes.
At least, not good jokes. Katherine Heigl’s character certainly finds Seth Rogan funny—which is important, since his sense of humor is his most appealing quality. (And it’s really appealing; you could certainly get knocked up by worse.) But the best lines in the movie occur as part of a game of one-upmanship among the dudes. These jokes are all creative but not terribly obscure riffs on pop culture: say, telling someone hairy that he looks “like Robin Williams’ knuckles.” To appreciate them, you need to have lived through the past thirty years of American pop culture and/or watched approximately three hours of VH1—nothing more.
So why are the movie’s principal female characters left out of the loop? In one scene, Rogan asks Heigl what she would do if Doc Brown flew down in the De Lorean and offered to take her back to a time when she hadn’t yet slept with him. They’re both agitated: Heigl’s just hinted that she wishes she hadn’t gotten pregnant. But that doesn’t explain Heigl’s complete incomprehension. She doesn’t know who Doc Brown is. She’s never heard of the De Lorean. “Do you know what he’s talking about?” she asks her sister, who confirms that she, too, is baffled by this insanely obvious piece of trivia. What exactly were they doing while Back to the Future was becoming a monster '80s hit? Brushing their hair?
Back before I got all betrothed, my roommate and I used to spend a lot of time bitching about the “You know a lot about music for a girl” boys. These guys were everywhere, and they were deeply confused about the depth of female pop culture knowledge. This meant that they were easy to impress: Express interest in anything other than Laguna Beach, and they’d think you were some kind of savant. But it also made it difficult to have a conversation with them, since nobody wants to play Rain Man to some guy’s Tom Cruise (“You know that trick where you express an opinion about the Batman franchise? Can you do that again for my friend?”) What was so confusing about these guys is that all of us, male and female, have been marinating in cultural references since birth. It’s the easiest kind of knowledge to acquire, regardless of gender. Which makes the expectation that women won’t have it—well, kind of totally sexist.
That’s not to say that I don’t love Judd Apatow, or that I thought Knocked Up was in any way a misogynistic movie. It’s just that if you’re watching it for retrograde values, forget the abortion stuff: What’s really conservative about it is the expectation that women don’t know anything about the most obvious stuff there is to know.
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You don’t even question the stereotype of a woman.
I noticed the things she pointed out too. And why is it that the “funny” sidekick in animation flicks are always a male while the female characters are: the teeth-grinding mommy (Marge Simpson), uptight perfect student, or the vain priss? See, you DO have a choice in drawing female characters: three.
Why is it that all married women must be the wife from Family Guy? The fun killer. The Mommy of the house. The uptight one.
Also, there’s math involved. If you HAPPEN to have any female character with wit, it must be balanced out on a four/five to one ratio with funny guy characters. You CANNOT have four females that cracks jokes not related to PMS, running her fat thighs down, or eye-rolling the husbands (both which ARE allowed — all you can eat).
Why can’t the wife be the fun overweight one? Whatever happened to Roseanne?
Uh, no, I think not! The recent DirecTV ads featuring that trivia must be aimed squarely at people who watch too much TV, not people old enough to remember DeLoreans as I'd previously thought.
That aspect of the dinner conversation was clearly constructed to show that the guys are off in watching-lots-of-cable-TV land, not that the women are airheads.
My previous comment has a similarly crafted pop culture reference that those guys would have gotten immediately. How many of you even noticed it?
by the age of ten, bushmen or australian aborigines or amazonian indians know 10,000 plants and animals.
the typical ten-year-old in the west knows 10,000 brand names and other pop culture references.
Children are oh so capable of learning. So what are we learning, and does it serve us to do anything except critique romantic comedies?
I didn't get the Doc Brown and De Lorean reference when I watched the movie. And I am, in fact, 23. Does this make me one of those dumb females who doesn't get good jokes? I'm not sure, but I do know that I've only seen the original Back to the Future one time. And I'm pretty sure I was about 10.
 Also, speaking as someone who hasn't had a TV or cable for five years, knowledge of pop culture is NOT necessarily easy to acquire. I often get stuck in conversations about America's Next Top Model and Lost and have absolutely nothing to say and no way of following the conversation because I've never even seen commercials for these shows.
Not that Alison and Debbie in the movie are living without TV… but I want to make the point that knowledge of pop culture is certainly not a given.
Anonymous, you are not fooling anyone. Rogan is an Irish name so we know at the very least you are not Irish or WASP. Alot more can be inferred about you from the way you constructed your statements but I’ll save you the public embarassment of revealing that (and your IP address).
On another subject, I am sick of movies and other ‘pop’ culture that depend on the viewer having an an encyclopedic knowlege of past pop movies, past pop music, past pop literature and the like.
Is it that hard to write something original without constantly cross-referencing pop culture or is this just a pandering way for the scriptwriter to ‘bond and identify’ with their audience? It’s not a Apatow slight against females; it’s a bizarre slight all these people whose entire identity and sense of worth depend on Hollywood and Madison Ave make against all those whose identity and self-worth don’t depend on Hollywood & Madison Avenue.
In the movie, Ben (Rogan's character) says that he's 23. So he's exactly the same age as Heigl's character, if not younger. Â
(Sorry to be obsessive. I realize I have a bee in my bonnet about this…)
"What exactly were they doing while Back to the Future was becoming a monster '80s hit?"
Heigl's character is probably about the same age that she is, which would make her about 7 when "Back to the Future" came out. How many minor characters do you remember from movies that came out from when you were in 2nd grade? If that number is really high, you might want to reconsider how much time you spend watching cable TV–unless you were born in 1970….
Debbie (the older sister) is played by an actress who would have been 13 and consequently more interested in Michael J. Fox than the car or the mad scientist.
Apatow is actually married to the actress playing the older sister, and those are his kids, so it's not like he's imagining that the Jewish guy sometimes ends up with the blonde girl.
 I saw this movie after checking out the reviews and was confused. I decided I have finally passed over that invisible time/space barrier of the advertising gurus. Those guys were in my son's room 15 years ago. They should have moved on by now. I got the pop culture jokes. I loved the ones about the guy's hair and beard. But I already heard enough bm and fart jokes to last a lifetime during my son's high school years. Those guys were more pathetic than funny or maybe I was just in a bad mood. The girl had too much potential to put up with those yahoos and that's as deep as my analyses went.
You know from Woody Allen to Judd Apatow to Seth Rogen, they all want to marry hot blonds and convert them, and have better looking kids.
Um, I don’t think anyone has the stats on this one, but as far as I can tell from tv and music videos, _every_ man is encouraged to want “goodlooking blond shiksas.”
So what kind of pop culture is it that mandates that all ugly Jewsh nerds must marry goodlooking blond shiksas? Why don’t Jews want to marry Jews?
which Jews is this, Anonymous Antisemite?
I've seen Knocked Up twice now. Once in the afternoon at a kind of artsy theatre with mostly arsty adults in the audience. They got the pop culture refs. Then I saw it in the middle of the night at a big cineplex with mostly other teens and early twenty-something big state college types. They did not get the pop culture refs.
I'm willing to believe that the chars in the movie are different on pop culture not because of gender, but because of the suburbs. The women in the movie are nice, tame, women whose ambition is to live in the suburbs. The men, however, are from a different subculture in which pop culture literacy is paramount.
Fifty years ago, jews rewrote white history, white comedy and drama, and called it “pop-culture”. And we whites accepted it and in the process lost our identity and centuries of civilazation embodied in our classics.
I don’t agree that cultural knowledge is the easiest knowledge to acquire.
It takes years of work.
Repeat this line three times:
“Public sector bad, private sector good.”
You now qualify for a Ph.D. in economics and a slot as a right-wing economic pundit.
Now that’s easy.
So “40 Year Old Virgin” was about the explosive joy of “saving it for the right woman” a/k/a abstinence – and “Knocked Up” is about the beauty and wonderful character building exercise which is pregnancy and childbirth – but the one string that unites it all is Apatow’s not-so-latent homophobia … how many gay put-downs can one guy squeeze into a script before being bas ass crosses the line into simply being bad?
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