Random Movie: Trainwreck (2015)
An exceptionally good argument against being straight.
I have access to a preposterously large number of movies. I’ve decided to take a random number generator, pick a movie, watch it, and write about it. Today’s film: Trainwreck (2015).
Half-way through Trainwreck Lebron James makes a joke about living vicariously through Dr. Aaron Connors (Bill Hader). Conners is in a new relationship with Amy (Amy Schumer), James is married. The joke is that if you're married long enough, you need sexy stories from other people, because it's just not sexy anymore.
This joke is barely there, a throwaway line that isn’t emphasized at all. But it exists, a standard statement. The concept, that he’s married, that sex is either boring or nonexistent. He’s Lebron James. I don’t know him or his wife, but I can’t imagine a scenario where you’d be married to Lebron James and not having lots of sex with Lebron James. But the joke hangs in the room, as if to say that there is no happy ending for a straight relationship.
At the beginning of the movie, kicking things off, Amy’s dad (Colin Quinn), goes on a long speech about how he can't handle monogamy to his daughters, talking about playing with dolls in increasingly absurd scenarios. It’s there to set the tone, and explain why there’s something wrong with Amy, and explain away why she’s not yearning to be a wife.
Judd Apatow has to be the world’s straightest director, but his films often have a surprisingly negative view of heterosexuality. You want sex, you want it desperately, but you are always heading towards an inevitability where you’re not going to have the sex you want. Married couples in Apatow movies don’t really like each other, they’re not fun, the longer they’re together the more they resent each other and the less happy they are.
It’s a very sex-negative movie. There are several scenes where Aaron is upset that Amy has had a lot of sex before she met him, she tells stories about sex and the other women in the room stare at her aghast. Aaron has had three other partners total, and this is treated as evidence that he’s a good guy - he’s had enough sex that it’s not uncomfortable for the audience, but not so much that he’s some kind of harlot. The sex scenes themselves are rarely remotely sexy - it’s unclear why anyone’s in dogged pursuit of this singular goal since they mostly don’t seem to enjoy it, and everyone but John Cena keeps most of their clothing on.
That John Cena character is also an example of how the movie rejects anything remotely queer, As Steven, Amy’s almost-but-not-quite boyfriend at the beginning, he makes multiple references to having sex with men. While there’s some okay wordplay happening, and Cena throws himself into it with puppy dog abandon, it’s still weird that this is the entire joke. Her nephew is a kid named Allister (Evan Brinkman) who is given both queer and autistic coding, as a special boy who doesn't like the typical male interests. At one point his grandfather says he probably would have beat him at school. This is presented as evidence that the grandfather isn’t a great person, but he’s still treated as a loveable oaf.
As presented, the homophobia laced throughout feels like an actual phobia. It’s afraid of anyone who isn’t falling into the expected roles that people fulfill. Queer people are rejecting the arc of the movie, and it giggles in the background because it’s afraid of admitting that they might have a point. The end goal of the movie is to be in a happily bland heterosexual marriage. Amy is a trainwreck because she drinks, smokes pot, and has sex with men - she is unmarriageable. At the end, she triumphantly discards her liquor and drugs and goes off to a world of heterosexual monogamy. She’s becoming more domestic, because that is what you do when you get married. Aaron is already pretty domestic before they even meet. You become domestic, you fit the roles that you were given, and if you can’t fit them you’re a villain.
In a fight with Amy, sister Kim (Brie Larson) says “I'm not a crazy person because I got married and got pregnant with a child, that's what people do.”
That’s what I believed for most of my life. I grew up in a small town, with a large religious community - Catholic, not Jewish like Apatow. I believed that this was our destiny, whatever we were in life that was the end goal - marriage, child, end. It was what was done, what was expected, that was the path we would take in life. In spite of the fact that I was definitely gay, I tried to push my life onto that track. I was in a straight relationship that was headed towards marriage before it got inevitably derailed. I assumed I'd have kids even though I don't even like kids. It took me too many years and too much pain before I realized that this life track, this single type of accepted relationship, all of what I was told as a young boy surrounded by religion, just didn't make sense for me.
Maybe it doesn't even make sense for Apatow. This is a movie by someone who doesn't particularly like being straight, forcing his characters towards a goal he seems to wish he didn't achieve. It's not a positive depiction of the straight lifestyle, nobody is really happy living within it, and at the end it was bleak. Our leads will now live a life they don't want, trying to force themselves in a box where they don't fit, and try to avoid letting their attraction curdle into resentment. It's a happy ending because they've achieved what straight people are supposed to achieve. It's a sad one because there's nowhere to go from there.
I feel like Apatow throws every movie into a blender and it just becomes an episode of Home Improvement.