Superbad: Pussy Control

I would do terrible, disgusting things to hook up with [this girl], man. Unforgivable things.
- Jonah Hill as "Seth", in Seth Rogen-penned Sethtastic Apatow/Seth flick Superbad.

OH, MY FUCKING GOD, JONAH HILL'S VOICE. I HATE IT SO MUCH. I mean, sorry to be immature, but: really. High-pitched, nasal, whiny, insistent, raspy-squeaky like a rusty hinge - it's an instrument of torture, making everything he says instantly unlikable and creepy on the basis of sound alone, even before you process its meaning. Only for you, Reader, would I put myself through one hundred and nineteen minutes of the noise emitted by Jonah Hill's face. Only for you would I watch Superbad.

I did not even watch the theatrical Superbad! I watched the unrated, extended cut! This cut, of course, reflects the pure and uncompromised vision of the people involved, which could not be articulated in the original version due to the money-hungry studios and their commercial demands: it gives us more insight into the aliens who live in the Abyss and explains what is up with the sandworms and shows us what happens after the Hobbits get back to the Shire and also clears up the whole question of whether Deckard was a replicant. Ha ha, no, not really, it just has more dick jokes in it.

The basic premise of Superbad is that dicks are good and vaginas are bad, but vaginas are useful in that one can put one's dick in them to achieve orgasm. The movie opens with a very basic statement of this premise: Michael Cera and Jonah Hill are discussing varieties of Internet porn they enjoy, and one young gentleman suggests to the other a site he finds both tasteful and expedient in ensuring orgasmic pleasure. "You don't see dick going into vagina, though, which is a problem for me," says the other gentleman - Jonah Hill - in his stupid, terrible, grating voice. "Have you ever seen a vagina by itself?"

He then shakes his head and makes the most disgusted face I had ever seen a human being make up until that point in my life.

Anyway, Seth (Jonah Hill) is very upset about the fact that his friend Evan will be going to a good college in the fall and that he himself will not. Seth would very much like a "girlfriend" that he can dump within the next two months after treating her to lots of terrible sex, because he needs to be good at sex by the time he goes to college. The girl he would like to ineptly fuck is Jules, who is in his home economics class; he demonstrates this by performing a little pantomime act for his friends in which he pretends to do sexual things to her body while she is not aware of it. (Foreshadowing!) Jules is a lovely young lady, but much like the Freak Woman Masturbator in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, she suffers from some kind of tragic nerve damage and lack of peripheral vision that renders her unable to notice someone pretending to lick her ass when that person is directly to the left of her and about three inches away.

Seth's friend Evan also wants a "girlfriend," and would specifically like a girl named Becca to be his girlfriend. Seth makes clear that this is a pitiful and disgusting emotion on Evan's part because he likes this girl as a person and does not like to talk about how she seems skilled at "taking dick." The dynamic is best summed up in the following dialogue:

SETH: Is this about Becca? Is this about that girl, man?
EVAN: I like her.
SETH: Who cares, man? She's a FUCKING GIRL!

It is hard to convey the snarling fury and contempt in Jonah Hill's voice on the words "fucking girl." In any other movie, it would be gross and I would hate it and/or make jokes about it. In this scene? This particular scene? It is all of that, but I am not laughing, because it is actually scary.

Also scary: the fact that the movie can very clearly be read as a story about attempted date rape. The boys need to get booze for a party at which the girls will be present, so that they can get the girls drunk enough to slip their penises into them. This is initially presented as a normal, non-rapey thing: buy the girls booze as a favor, they'll appreciate it, people will get drunk and uninhibited, then they'll screw. I, like pretty much every woman in the universe, have had the experience of engaging in consensual sex while drunk (I have actually had pretty much every human experience, including the act of writing in this very blog, while drunk) so this in and of itself does not pose a problem. However, the equation of booze + appreciation + affection = sex gradually becomes booze = sex, which in turn slips into truly incapacitating amounts of booze = sex, until Evan is protesting that he "respects" Becca too much to fuck her while she is "out of her mind wasted" (it's "unethical," he says, which is as close as the movie ever comes to the r-word) and Seth looks him straight in the eyes and says, "I don't see why you have a problem with this."

They never actually do put their penises in these women, by the way: Evan turns down a massively wasted Becca, who then calls him a "little bitch," in an Observe-and-Reportesque moment about how upset women get when you don't take advantage of them, and Seth forces a kiss on Jules after she refuses to get drunk, whereupon she is as disgusted as anyone unexpectedly kissed by Jonah Hill would have a right to be (like, if Rodney Dangerfield had a baby with David the Gnome: this is the physical appeal of Jonah Hill, I submit to you) and refuses to go further, putting him off for "another time," at which point he snaps and shouts, "NO! There IS no other time," and there's that Highway Chainsaw Killer note in his voice again, and then he abruptly falls over into her face and the woman who refuses to fuck gets a black eye, ha.

Between these two points there are various wacky adventures and dick jokes. Like, there is the whole thing with their friend, Fogell, who changes his name to McLovin and is abducted by two cops at which point it is even more painfully clear than usual that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg began writing this script as thirteen-year-olds, because - whoa, can you imagine if, like, cops liked to get high and party? That would be crazy! (Ladies and gentleman, please take note that the people who originated this story are, in fact, named "Seth" and "Evan." This is instructive, both in that it reveals the precise extent of their imaginative powers, and in that Seth was written by and was originally supposed to be played by Rogen, who apparently conceived of this character as a self-portrait, and this is one more example of why you never want to be trapped in an elevator with that guy.) I will not be addressing any of this because it is boring. (For example: "Fogell" can, with a cunning vowel-replacement strategy, be prounounced as "Fag-ell," and the comic potential of this device is indeed exploited to the full.) I will focus merely on the defining moment of the movie: the scene in which Seth is attacked by a rogue vagina.

So, he's at this party, right? And this random girl is dancing with him all sexy, right? And she's drunk, right? So she's your typical Apatovian Drunk Slut - but how, oh, how to utilize her comic potential? Simple: when she pulls away, Seth discovers that she was on her period, and that her blood is on his pants leg.

Now, you will forgive me for saying this, but I have now watched two separate films about men discussing their various manly bodily functions in great detail, and I feel inclined to share: I have never in my entire life bled that much in the space of a dance. It is an entire Ultra Heavy Flow tampon's worth of blood, and it's thick and clotted and sticky in a way that you would notice, were it coming from you. We see that she's bled on other guys, so she's been on the rag for a little while, yet it never occurs to her to wear a tampon or a pad or even (based on the amount and texture of blood) underwear beneath her skirt, which makes her a Crazy Drunk Slut, in true Apatow fashion, but also unlike any woman on earth who has ever had a period.

Seth, of course, freaks the fuck out and is more disgusted than I have ever seen a human being and all the men around him are equally disgusted and amused, and Seth yells endlessly about how he's going to vomit and oh God get it off get the awful terrible menstrual blood that every human being with a uterus has at one point or will at one point shed off of him, and of the movie's 119 minutes it feels like about 118.75 minutes are spent watching him act like the biggest fucking baby in the entire world about the fact that women menstruate. I mean, you thought Woman Who Is Capable of Masturbating was bad: wait until you meet Woman With a Normal Human Adult Reproductive System.

This, I would submit to you, is the entire point of Superbad: awful non-male women with their awful non-male vaginas, which you maybe need to fuck in order to get off, but which, if left uncontrolled, will touch you and contaminate you with their filth. The entire point of the scene is that this person is female, that she has a body that looks and functions differently than Seth's male body, and that this makes her monstrous. The movie ends with a scene of Seth and Evan lying next to each other, saying "I love you" to each other several dozen times, and spooning, and a lot of critics have pinpointed this scene as being "sweet." It's just another joke about gay being gross and funny, in my opinion, but on the other hand: good for them, I guess. They'll never love anybody else.