Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up and the Female Body on Film
First, let me say that I suck for not posting in so long. I know. I know. I do.
If I tell you that I got a last-minute job teaching writing, would you show me some mercy?
What if I said that a requirement of the teaching thing was being a full-time student and taking a full load of grad courses? Would that melt your cold, cold heart?
In penance, I will now post a media critique I wrote of Judd Apatow’s movie Knocked Up. Enjoy.
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When a nude female body is shown in popular film, it is most often a sexual object. By “object” I mean specifically that which is the recipient of some action, whether the advances of another character or the recipient of the gaze of the viewer. Especially when displayed in movies whose target audience is males 18-34, the female body is an object whose purpose is to be seen. In Judd Apatow’s raunchy comedy Knocked Up, Apatow toys with viewer conceptions of the female body, switching back and forth between women as sexual recipients of the male gaze and women as maternal figures (interestingly, he casts his own wife as one of the characters). In the movie, the female body takes on a primary role, albeit a dual one.
The movie’s simple plot is as follows: the overgrown and under-mature Ben, played by Seth Rogen, has the one-night stand of his dreams with Alison, played by Katherine Heigl. The tryst results in a pregnancy, and the pair attempt to form a relationship for the sake of the soon-to-be-born child.
In the film, Apatow’s choices surrounding the female body both define and subvert the cultural expectation. To show, or not to show? For much of the film, the nude bodies he shows are male. These male bodies are not sexualized or objectified; instead, their nudity is played for laughs. Ben’s band of merry men are a group of slackers who smoke pot and watch R-rated movies in a half-hearted attempt to develop a filmography website, searchable by actor, which will allow users to skip directly to nude scenes. Interestingly, almost all instances of nudity in the film are those shown in service to the characters’ website documentation process. These shots are framed within a television screen and tinted so as to be easily recognizable as television. The film audience becomes ultra-voyeuristic, watching the characters as those characters watch the nude scenes. The characters are obsessed with the nude female body, and their obsession makes a promise to the audience that Apatow fulfills in an unexpected way.
These “televised” nude scenes are a direct counterpoint to the two (not-so-sexy) sex scenes featuring the two main characters. In both scenes, bodies are covered by blankets, and Katherine Heigl’s character wears full-coverage bras. Far more of Seth Rogen’s soft, fleshy body is revealed than Heigl’s conventionally attractive female one. Once Heigl’s body does appear on screen, it is an increasingly pregnant one. What does it mean, this intrusion of the maternal body into a sex comedy? In Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies, Rebecca Kukla says: “Beginning in the late eighteenth century, mothers’ bodies became peculiarly public in several senses… Their mundane practices… now became a matter of great social import, performed for the public benefit and open to public scrutiny” (66). This process began two centuries ago and continues today, as shown by Rosalyn Diprose. In her book The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment, and Sexual Difference, notes that “the labor of pregnancy has also been privatized but remains, paradoxically, open to public scrutiny in the interest of the health and welfare of the social body” (26). Importantly, Alison’s pregnancy is a performance, something to be observed and judged by the other characters (even the most ridiculous of Ben’s friends become involved). Alison’s career as a television interviewer places a spotlight on her pregnancy as performance. As Alison’s boss tells her, “the bigger you get, the higher the ratings.”
This performance results in a film where the visual image is overwhelmingly maternal, especially considering the constant references to female sexuality within the dialogue. The second sex scene in the film involves a hugely pregnant Heigl, and the scene is set up to be as awkward for the characters as it is for the viewer. The one instance of explicit “full frontal” female nudity in the movie is the opposite of titillating. Apatow’s characters reference female nudity over and over in the dialogue, setting up an audience expectation that the viewer will, at some point, see the (sexualized) female body. When Apatow makes good on that promise, in the last few minutes of the film, the shot is framed as a full-screen close-up of a baby’s head emerging from the womb. Theater audiences, predictably, cringe. Apatow has fulfilled the audience’s anticipation of the explicit viewing with an image of the female body that is a maternal one, not a sexual one. He has taken the cultural expectation and subverted it. The characters within the film see the female body as a sexual object whose purpose is to be seen, but the audience is forced to view a maternal body during an act that defines maternity.
The other incidental occurrence of female nudity is during a scene set in a strip club. Although the nudity is brief and not explicit, this also constitutes a nude female body in the act of performance. During this short scene Rogan’s character, Ben, makes a scatological reference, which from a Freudian perspective further demonstrates his stunted sexuality and inability to interact with a female body in an age-appropriate way.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is a scene in which Alison and her older sister (played by Leslie Mann, Apatow’s wife) are denied entrance to a club. The doorman refuses to admit them because Alison is noticeably pregnant and her sister is “too old.” In this scene, Apatow allows the doorman to voice the concern of viewers that pregnant or older women fall outside the realm of those women who may be seen as sexual objects. Alison and her sister end up sitting on the curb of an empty street. They cannot be admitted to the on-screen club, and the implication is that these bodies are also often excluded from the “club” of women who receive defining film roles. Apatow asks the viewer: if the female body cannot be viewed as a sexual object, where does it belong?
At first glance, Knocked Up may seem to belong to the genre of lowbrow comedies; certainly with its raunchy dialogue and strip-club scenes, it does not feel entirely out of place there. However, as with all of his films, Apatow uses mainstream entertainment to pose intelligent and provoking questions. By forcing the viewer to look at the female body in an alternative way, Apatow provokes a reaction that forces the question: are the viewer’s expectations of the female body on film the same as the expectations of the characters? Why does the explicitly nude maternal image provoke a much more shocked reaction among audiences than an explicitly nude sexual image? The characters on screen are only interested in the sexualized female body; this is a marker of their immaturity. By subverting cultural expectations of the nude female body on film, Apatow allows the viewer to conceive (pun intended) the meaning he invests in the female body apart from the explicitly sexualized dialogue spoken by his cast of overgrown boys.
WORKS CITED
Diprose, Rosalyn, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment, and Sexual Difference.
New York: Routledge, 1994
Kukla, Rebecca. Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
