How teen flicks normalize sex assault
Using a comedic lens, it becomes easy to ignore an insidious premise
Sexual violence is everywhere in film and TV. That’s what researcher Sarah Projansky argues in her nonfiction book
Watching Rape. 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.
“I have a not-so-fun party game that I sometimes play when people are suspicious of that claim,” she said.
“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. 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.”
And only then does a light bulb go off.
Now, a year into the revelations of #MeToo, are we collectively stopping to re-examine some of these movies.
Last spring for the New Yorker, the actress Molly Ringwald looked back on some of the movies she made with writerdirector 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.”
These portrayals aren’t just relegated to movies from the ’80s. The thing about tropes is that they persist — notably in movies that centre on a particular demographic: middle- to upper-class suburban white kids.
“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. She includes older films such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High from 1982 and Revenge of the Nerds from 1984. But also, tellingly, more recent entries including Superbad, from 2007 starring Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. The latter made $121 million at the box office — a lot of people saw Superbad — solidifying it as a beloved addition to the genre.
When you Google the film’s title, here’s the synopsis t hat pops up: “Two inseparable best friends navigate the last weeks of high school and are invited to a gigantic house party. 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 kickstart their sex lives before they go off to college.”
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.” I think that’s right. “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. So it has a trivializing effect. A sanitizing effect. Whereas what Molly Ringwald was saying was: No, the endpoint was sexual assault, it wasn’t simply eliciting a laugh.”
Let’s talk about Superbad. 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 pointof-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.
But 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. Of course the movie doesn’t paint the boys as monsters. That’s what makes this trope so effective — they’re not the villains here. And here we butt up against the limits of comedy. 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.”
The plan is laid out while the guys converse on the high school soccer field.
“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). Then he enthusiastically advises Evan do the same with his crush (played by Martha MacIsaac): “When you guys are s---faced at the party, get with her.”
Here’s the thing: “At no point in the movie do these guys realize: Oh wait, this is bad,” said Halffield.
Superbad was a movie that Megan initially loved — in part because it captured something that felt true: “Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen started writing that film when they were13 and they didn’t finish writing it until they were 18. Clearly the stories they were writing were autobiographical. These were actual kids writing about their lives and I think that’s why the film spoke to a lot of people. There’s a realness to these young males — certainly to me. It reminds me of how I acted and how my friends acted,” he said.
We’re meant to root for Seth and Evan even as they lay the groundwork for assault. Even as they seek out a loophole to consent. “It’s passed off so innocently in teen movies, and that’s why it can be kind of insidious,” said Megan, “because it doesn’t take but five minutes to go to any college town on a Friday night and see this at play.”