Over at Slate, Meghan O’Rourke (with whom, incidentally, I took about half a semester of intermediate photography in college before I dropped out of the class because I felt like I was out of my league) has an interesting essay on the movie Knocked Up, arguing that although it tried to be sensitive to the women characters, it failed in the way of most of the great man-boy comedies of our era. She writes:
Its plot follows a schlubby slacker guy, Ben (played by Seth Rogen), learning to shape up and become a good domestic partner to the pregnant Alison (played by Heigl). Stylistically, though, the film treated women and men very differently. Knocked Up made time for men to explore their choices on-screen in almost existential ways; they ask themselves whom they want to be, they joke around, they assume the right to experiment. Women, by contrast, are entirely concerned with pragmatic issues. We never see Alison or her older sister, Debbie, pursue or express her own creative impulses, sense of humor, independent interests; their rather instrumental concerns lie squarely in managing to balance the domestic with the professional. It’s as if women’s inner worlds are entirely functional rather than playful and open. Knocked Up was, as David Denby put it in The New Yorker, the culminating artifact in what had become "the dominant romantic-comedy trend of the past several years—the slovenly hipster and the female straight arrow."
I think this is pretty much true. Judd Apatow, who wrote and directed Knocked Up and 40-Year-Old Virgin, gets what makes a certain kind of guy interesting and funny. He understands the existential drama, and the comic potential, in the man-boy’s struggle to grow up without losing touch with the joys of silliness. He doesn’t have nearly the insight into girl-woman’s parellel struggle (although Alison’s sister, who’s played by Apatow’s wife, is, not surprisingly, the most fleshed out female charter in the movie).
One of the reasons that my wife and I like Grey’s Anatomy so much, I think, is that in many ways it’s telling these girl-woman stories, and consciously (but not, for the most part, in a heavy-handed way) inverting a lot of the gender stereotypes. On Grey’s it’s the women who don’t want to grow up, who have a hard time time committing to relationship, who get drunk with their buddies rather than deal with the dilemmas of adulthood. I don’t like the show for feminist reasons; it’s just that it’s a perspective that seems fresh, and I suspect that it owes a lot to the fact that the show’s creator is a woman.
