September 19, 2007
superbad
Though the immediate point of contact is earlier-summer Apatovian comedy Knocked Up, an equally apt comparison might be Grindhouse. That film too basked in a period sensibility that fell just short of being an actual period piece, the surface punctured by evidences of the contemporary that read as something between anachronisms and telltales.
The effect is less pointed in Superbad, less self-conscious, but still ubiquitous — from the post-Lovebug font of the posters to the costuming to the period-specific contrived naiveté about the sexual codes of teens, the film floats in a hazy late-Seventies/early-Eighties cloud of reference. The vast majority of the songs are from some shifting past era: the Bar-Kays, Van Halen, Sergio Mendes, Curtis Mayfield, Black Sabbath and Jean Knight, you get the idea. Music, say, from the youth of the two cops who shepherd at least one of the kids through the narrative.
The film was written by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, reputedly when they were in high school themselves. The two leads, played by Michael Cera and Jonah Hill, may be meant to represent Goldberg and Rogen in the time of the script's writing, in the past — but their true proxies are of course the two cops, who while remaining hopelessly juvenile, now have the mysterious and comical authority to make things work out for the poor kids. They are Goldberg and Rogen in the present; one is even played by Rogen.
It's exactly this confusion which generates the period uncertainty, and the puzzlement each time the film's present comes pricking through in some slang, or a song by The Rapture or The Coup: the film simply doesn't know what time period it is depicting. This makes it oddly discomfiting, and is surely the most interesting thing about it. The only efficient way to resolve the confusion would be to understand the two cops as the leads, despite their lesser roles, and the unfolding story to be a fantasy about high school as it survives in the pot-basted recollections of the film's two side players, with contemporary kids recruited to walk through the main parts, baffled by their own clothing and ignorance.
One might note that movies are like dreams: every part in them is the makers in some facet. But this would be to fall into the trap of understanding movies as having singular makers, as being expressions of singular consciousnesses. Hollywood films are directed by money — and money, it would seem, wishes to be uncertain about what time it is, what high school is like, what kids are like. This is perhaps a predictable development: Mean Girls, after all, signaled that Hollywood had completely and flawlessly comprehended its own codes for the teen comedy, and could deploy them in perfectly serried rank — a development which inevitably presages the wistful decline of any genre. No wonder Superbad would helplessly float back toward an era of otherwise-inexplicable salience which just happens to be the cradle of the now-dying genre (emerging, arguably, between 1979's Rock'n'Roll HIgh School and 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High). Lodging its fantasy in the moment of birth, Superbad arrives as a marker of the genre's death. And so another form of the youth movie will have to be developed in the lab of summer releases, and it is to this task that we can expect to see, are already seeing, the Great Director turn.
Posted by jane at September 19, 2007 08:19 AM | TrackBack