Why I Love Jude Apatow Movies

Jude Apatow may be a producer, but he's a perfect example of how a producer can have a deeper creative influence than a writer or a director. I just saw Knocked Up, a film that is foul-mouthed, bare-breasted, and drug-laced and of more redeeming social value than almost anything Hollywood makes. I thought similarly about the Forty Year Old Virgin and his television series, Freaks and Geeks (somewhat cleaner). And the reason I like his productions so much is the way they draw character out of stereotypes. In what other situation would a black bouncer after being completely lambasted by a middle-class white woman in the threshold of middle age take her aside and admit that he can't let her and her pregnant sister (Katherine Heigl) into the club because, "you're old and she's pregnant" but will also tell her that he also has to enforce the club's racial quotas, too. Or in what other movie will a little girl "google" murder and look at pictures of murder victims without quite realizing the horror and the verity of their deaths. Oddly enough, I think Apatow brings us the real world. In the real world, people do not have such spectacular scripts, but they do have to confont the very same things characters in Apatow productions do. After I watch a movie like Knocked Up, most other movies seem like fantasy, which is not a bad thing.

I also like the way these movies treat marriage. It's easy to treat marriage as the inevitable boredom and conflict after the first flushes of love, partially because the first flushes of love happen years before the typical wedding day. It's also easy to treat marriage like the picture you want the kids to see as in the early years of the television sitcom, where at worst, Mommy is an incompetent. Instead, Apatow productions portray marriage as the estate entered into by two people who grow so deeply intimate with one another that such intimacy with other people in future is likely to be impossible. And it scares them. And they act out in ways designed to maintain their independence and personhood or their sexual availability. But in the end, they decide to spend their time with the person who can drive them to their deepest emotional lows and bring them to their greatest emotional highs because the only thing that presents the illusion of a better life is chemistry, which is pathetic in the end.

OK. It's not God's love for humanity expressed in Jesus Christ. But it's a good picture of the kinds of lives we lead as imperfect creatures.

Apatow's Will Ferrell movies are pure fantasy, though.