You may remember that, back when the year's big comedy hit Knocked Up was in theaters, there was a minor outbreak of editorials and critical think pieces wondering if it erred in not having its heroine give more serious consideration to the possibility of getting an abortion. (Then again, maybe you don't remember that. We didn't mean to imply that you don't have a life or anything.) Now the movie is out on DVD, and as tempting as it might be to have that debate again, its star, Katherine Heigl, has opted to give us something new and exciting to argue about by telling a Vanity Fair interviewer that the movie that may help her to someday price herself out of network TV series work is "a little sexist." Her grounds for this charge are interesting, not least because they take some of the earlier comments made about the film and turn them on their head. When Knocked Up first appeared, some observers took the not unreasonable position that the hero and heroine might not be the best two people to be building a life together because she was a serious career person and he was an eternal adolescent and no-account slacker who, while maybe a fun date, could not be counted on over the long term. Heigl's translation of this goes: "It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys." He may be a big kid, but that doesn't necessarily mean that she wants to be regarded as a tight-ass. (Or, to use Heigl's exact term, "such a bitch.")
In discussing this argument, Meghan O'Rourke makes some good points, especially with regard to the greater level of metaphorical and comical imagination at work in the dialogue scenes between men (such as the Vegas hotel scene between Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd) than in those moments where the women, Heigl and Leslie Mann as her sister, work out their feelings. There's a long Hollywood tradition of romantic comedy heroines who are kind of batty (such as Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby) and even sometimes sort of, well, slutty (such as Melanie Griffith in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild) loosening up tight-assed men, and I don't know that many men, watching those movies and identifying with Cary Grant or Jeff Daniels, felt bad about seeing themselves as needing to be made over; most of us are probably just smitten with the idea that some gorgeous woman would care enough to go to the trouble. There's a tiny amount of sanctimony in Knocked Up that makes itself felt in the rapid montage of Rogen entering responsible adult life in what seems to be less take that it takes some of us to get the cable company representative on the phone. If anything, Judd Apatow may be too sensitive to women's concerns; he's not as comfortable portraying them as ridiculous as he is with the men. Of course, the final word is that however these issues look on the op-ed page, in comedy, what people really appreciate is not seeing someone grow up and becoming worthy to raise a child with their partner but getting to laugh. A cold-eyed observer might wonder whether the moment Heigl sensed there was something "sexist" about the movie came not on the set but when she saw it with an audience and realized that nobody was laughing during her scenes. And a really cold-eyed observer might wonder if that's not as much the fault of the actress droning her dialogue as that of the writer-director who wrote it for her. It's not as if being tight-assed and funny is a problem for Leslie Mann.