There’s David (Paul Rudd), who adopts most of the character conceits-crying, obsession, longing-of a teenage girl. There’s Jay (Romany Malco), who, despite having a girlfriend, treats women as conquests, immature-man-style. Andy, a 40-year-old who collects action figures and rides a bike to work, is a grown man who isn’t fully an adult-who is trapped, by circumstance and by choice, within a kind of self-imposed arrested development. Nor is it the simple attainment of a certain age, be it 18 or 21 or 40. What is clear, though-and what The 40-Year-Old Virgin makes especially clear-is that whatever makes an adult now, it isn’t, in general, the thing that has defined adulthood for so much of human history: the having of sex. What makes someone an adult? Turning 21? Graduating from high school? Trading in a Craigslisted IKEA coffee table for a brand-new IKEA coffee table? The benchmarks vary, tantalizingly and frustratingly. The Beloved Filipino Tradition That Started as a Government Policy Sara Tardiff
#40 year old virgin movie#
The way we distinguish between children and- another movie of the genre-grown-ups. And it has less to do with cultural conservatism and more to do with something even more basic: the way we think about adulthood. Because when it comes to Apatovian atavism, there’s another way-a bigger way- in which The 40-Year-Old Virgin and the genre that it helped to spawn are conservative. And it’s not at all, necessarily, a bad thing.īut it is not, however, the whole thing. “By marrying raunch and moralism,” the conservative columnist Ross Douthat noted in 2009, “Apatow’s movies have done the near impossible: They’ve made an effectively conservative message about relationships and reproduction seem relatable, funny, down-to-earth and even sexy.” Whether their emphasis is bromance or romance or a combination of the two, they often adopt the rom-com’s culturally conciliatory view: that individual fulfillment comes through a kind of self-abnegation, through surrender to something greater than oneself-a couple, a family, a collective.Īnd the films have made that case both despite and with the help of their plots’ occasional reliance on poop and pot and penises. And also, you could add, in their parochialism (so many bros, a-bro-in’!) and their sexism (Katherine Heigl’s very valid criticism of Knocked Up as painting its women “as shrews, as humorless and uptight,” and its men “as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys”). It’s often said that Apatow’s films are fundamentally conservative, or at least driven, fundamentally, by conservative values-in their celebration of harmonious coupledom ( Trainwreck, Bridesmaids), in their insistence on the fulfillments of having children ( Knocked Up, This Is 40), and in their denigration of casual sex ( The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall).