He seemed like a strikingly troubled man at the time for someone who was 39, the toast of Hollywood, and happily married with two gorgeous kids. Gilbert: I went back to a profile of Judd Apatow that came out in 2007. And hers is: learning to congratulate him for learning some stuff about pregnancy and adulthood. It is really striking that his growth arc is: learning some stuff about pregnancy and adulthood. And I remember feeling like that seems a little bare minimum to me. There’s a moment as the birth scene is imminent when Ben recites a fact that makes it become clear that he’s read a single thing about pregnancy and what’s happening to Alison’s body, which she-and the film by proxy-really celebrates. And if you step back for a second, it’s like: Hold on, something is not quite right here. They’re charted as two equally urgent needs, two equally urgent paths of growth.
#Knocked up meaning movie#
Giorgis: Yeah, it’s strange the extent to which the movie equates Ben growing up-and becoming a man because he is going to become a father-with Alison’s need to loosen up. She is written out of so much because her role is fundamentally just to be an instrument for someone else’s development. But the question is not: Will Alison grow up? The question is: Will Ben grow up? And I think one of the things that I found pretty pernicious in my viewing of the movie this time around is that Alison serves as a kind of a vessel, a means to help Ben grow up, to help Ben become an adult and a father. He’s this sort of man-child slacker who’s very charming but kind of stuck in arrested development.Īnd the question in this movie-as in so many of Judd Apatow’s films-is about growing up. The movie’s empathy and gravity are aimed at him. To your point, Sophie, you might think in a movie about pregnancy, the character who is centered and elevated and celebrated would be Alison. There’s a lot of turning these people into ideas, and I wouldn’t mind that so much if the terms weren’t so sort of unevenly split. And in the movie’s defense, these aren’t just characters they are tropes. This movie is a rom-com, a buddy comedy, a raunch comedy. What do the two of you make of Alison? Is she just a foil for the men in this movie to have a cool, fun time around? She gets pregnant, and there’s no real discussion of her thoughts about what to do. She gets promoted by no apparent effort of her own. And eight weeks later, Alison finds out that she is pregnant.Īnd, Megan, what I took away from your piece is the weird absence of Alison as a character with any desires, motivations, dreams, goals. It makes no sense that they talk to each other, let alone have sex. Giorgis: And while celebrating out in a club one night with her sister, played by the director Judd Apatow’s real-life wife, Leslie Mann, she meets Ben Stone, played by Seth Rogen. If we’re going to be ruthless about Knocked Up, I should say I really love that scene. I should say that’s a hilarious scene with Kristen Wiig, and one of the highlights of the movie. Gilbert: Before we get into it, let’s do a brief rundown of the movie: Katherine Heigl plays Alison Scott, a producer on E! Television, who gets promoted to on-air talent. I have no distinct memories of it, and yet rewatching it, I had moments of déjà vu that made me wonder how I thought about it at the time. Hannah Giorgis: Yeah, very much the same. Megan Garber: It’s funny I don’t remember seeing Knocked Up in 2007, whether it was in a theater or a Netflix DVD, but what I can definitely say is that I was very much struck in this viewing by its pernicious myths in the guise of comedy. Do you remember what you thought of it years ago compared with watching it again in 2022? Megan, you wrote an amazing piece about Knocked Up and its many flaws. It’s a massively successful movie about an unwanted pregnancy in which the word abortion never actually appears. And we thought Knocked Up in particular is an interesting way to look at this subject. So we wanted to use this episode to explore how Hollywood shapes our conversations about pregnancy and abortion. The final decision won’t arrive ’til June, but as it stands right now, it’s fair to expect that abortion rights around the country will be severely curtailed. Supreme Court is willing to overturn Roe v.
The recent leak of a draft decision revealed that a conservative majority on the U.S. The film turns 15 on June 1, but this anniversary also arrives at a unique moment for the movie’s subject. Sophie Gilbert: This week on the show, we’re rewinding back to 2007 to talk about the Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
0 kommentar(er)
