At This Recording, Tyler Coates reviews Keith Gessen’s All The Sad Young Literary Men, a book that I’m admittedly curious about, but absolutely refuse to read in hardcover unless someone gives me a copy. It is one of those new fangled novels that wants to tell people in their late 20s and early 30s who live in New York and have creative aspirations and complicated desires what it feels like to be a person in their late 20s and early 30s who lives in New York and has creative aspirations and complicated desires. It is sort of related to movies, by several degrees: Keith Gessen co-founded the literary journal N+1, the latest issue of which I read on the way back from Cannes; the co-founder of N+1, Benjamin Kunkel, wrote the novel Indecision, which Andrew Bujalski is allegedly adapting for Scott Rudin, to some chagrin from those of us who like Bujalski but hate that novel.
Anyway. Towards the end of his (largely negative) review, Coates brings up a blog post written by Gessen’s former girlfriend, Emily Gould. If you live in the world New York on the internet, you’ll know that Emily Gould used to write for Gawker and was recently eviscerated by that site for writing an extremely long cover story for the New York Times Magazine about dating another person who used to write for that site. Less press was given over to an earlier evisceration of Emily by Gawker, in which publisher Nick Denton basically accused his former employee of sleeping her way to the top (of what? The Gawker hate list?) by sleeping with Gessen. I thought that Denton’s post was really, really gross. I thought the NYT Mag piece was just unnecessary––although I applaud anyone who can make five figures off of blogging.
Okay, but seriously: this is a blog post about movies. Here it comes:
In her “review” of her ex(?) boyfriend’s book, Gould noted that after finishing it, she text messaged the author and made a snide comment about it being appropriate for a Judd Apatow adaptation, I guess primarily because a main character “finds himself” when he accidentally knocks up a girl and the happy couple decide to keep it. To which Coates (apparently no fan of either Gould or Gessen) responds, “It’s a valid point, though; if made into a film, wouldn’t we find our three literary heroes played by Seth Rogan, Jason Segel, and Paul Rudd?” I’m not sure it *is* a valid point––although I probably should have no opinion on this, having not read the book, it’s hard to imagine any of those three actors in any kind of contemporary literature adaptation. But I was more interested/troubled by the parting snark that wrapped up Gould’s post on the book and its character’s Apatow-like weaknesses:
For these men, women are a category problem, an enduring mystery, a species apart, given to fits of inexplicable hysteria and whimsical, merciful lowerings of standards. They might be unhappy but they could never have the problems these men do; they just wouldn’t even understand how to have such complicated problems. There could never be any point in writing an entire book about the sad young literary women.
Coming from a writer who has endured more than her fair share of shit for making her own sadness and youth the subject of her literary ambitions, it seems like the implication is, “Boys are getting away with something that I’m not getting away with. No fair.” And maybe that’s a fair point. And I don’t know much about books, or who buys them or reads them. But I do know about movies, and why they’re made and who pays to see them, and I have Something To Say about why there can be an entire of genre of (essentially) gross-out comedies that take the neuroses (or, “complications”) of young men seriously, and why there isn’t a parallel filmic genre for women. Are you ready? Here it comes:
We keep saying we don’t want it
Yeah, okay, maybe…except that young women spend a lot of time and money telling Hollywood that we don’t actually want anything complicated at all. We are responsible for turning 27 Dresses into a hit, thereby reverse validating the gender depictions of Knocked Up (which I’m on the record of not thinking were THAT bad) and tacking at least a year or two on to the Katherine Heigl reign of terror. We are the ones who, whether proudly or guiltily, sucked up the quick carb binge of Sex and the City, pretended it was a political triumph for five minutes, and then immediately turn the box office back over to man children and, well, children children. When distributors do take a chance on actual films that actually treat women as though we’re, like, complicated human beings who actually, like, think about stuff, we don’t show up.
I know it’s easier to blame our lack of representation on our ex-boyfriends and the super-producers who are getting rich off them. But I don’t buy it.
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