“She’s going to be at the party and she’s going to be drunk and she likes me at least a little enough to get with me,” Seth says of his crush (played by Emma Stone). The plan is laid out while the guys converse on the high school soccer field. The boys do “toy with the idea that alcohol and sex should not mix,” Halffield writes in her paper, but “at the end of the day, it does not stop them from attempting to use alcohol for this purpose.” And here we butt up against the limits of comedy. That’s what makes this trope so effective - they’re not the villains here.
Of course the movie doesn’t paint the boys as monsters.
Evan (Cera) and Seth (Hill) are the movie’s heroes - endearingly dorky, comically profane and obsessed with sex - and it is their close friendship and chatty comedic boorishness (whenever we see their point-of-view gaze in the direction of a woman or teenage girl, the camera zeroes in on her breasts) that gives the story shape and purpose.īut you can’t escape that nasty premise, no matter how humorously it’s dressed up - no matter how exuberantly it’s passed off as teenage raunch. Whereas what Molly Ringwald was saying was: No, the endpoint was sexual assault, it wasn’t simply eliciting a laugh.” “But the humour is derived from the ineptitude of these teenage boys,” Moorti said, “and sexual assault gets folded into that and it becomes an accessory to the humour. Sujata Moorti is a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Middlebury College, and here’s what she told me: “The people who make these movies probably don’t see themselves as endorsing rape.” Together with their nerdy friend, they spend a long day trying to score enough alcohol to supply the party and inebriate two girls in order to kick-start their sex lives before they go off to college.” When you Google the film’s title, here’s the synopsis that pops up: “Two inseparable best friends navigate the last weeks of high school and are invited to a gigantic house party. The latter made $121 million at the box office - a lot of people saw Superbad -solidifying it as a beloved addition to the genre. But also, tellingly, more recent entries including Superbad, from 2007 starring Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. She includes older films such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High from 1982 and Revenge of the Nerds from 1984. “The comedic lens can often overshadow the fact that sexual assault was committed,” said Claire Halffield, whose 2017 honours thesis as an undergraduate at DePauw University analyzed a number teen comedies. The thing about tropes is that they persist - notably in movies that centre on a particular demographic: middle- to upper-class suburban white kids. These portrayals aren’t just relegated to movies from the ’80s. Last spring for The New Yorker, the actress Molly Ringwald looked back on some of the movies she made with writer-director John Hughes with a more discerning eye: “If attitudes toward female subjugation are systemic, and I believe that they are, it stands to reason that the art we consume and sanction plays some part in reinforcing those same attitudes.” Now, a year into the revelations of #MeToo, are we collectively stopping to re-examine some of these movies. And I’ll say, ‘Well, what’s the last film you saw?’ and I can tell them where the sexual violence was in the film.” “If someone asks me at a party, ‘Oh, what do you do?’ and I say, ‘I wrote this book and I argue that sexual violence is in pretty much all film and television,’ the response tends to be: Oh, that can’t be true. “I have a not-so-fun party game that I sometimes play when people are suspicious of that claim,” she said. A professor of media and gender studies at the University of Utah, Projansky told me she gets skeptical looks from people when she makes this observation. That’s what researcher Sarah Projansky argues in her nonfiction book Watching Rape. Sexual violence is everywhere in film and TV.