TOWARDS A GENDER ANALYSIS OF THE PINKY VIOLENCE FILM: part 4

(Note: You can find the preceding part of this essay--and links to the two previous parts--here.)

4. A Woman’s Place

There is a sequence in Criminal Woman: Killing Melody that invokes not only the two major elements of pinky violence I’ve discussed so far—the specter of rape and torture & titillation—but a third one also: a woman’s place. Reiko Ike’s character Maki is running a Yojimbo –style double-cross on two yakuza clans, but it is unknown to them that she is behind the scenes pulling the strings to force them into war. In a scene following two or three similarly softcore in their content, Maki seduces one of the yakuza and he takes her home. After watching her shower, he pulls a gun on her and takes her back to his clan’s headquarters to torture her into telling him who sent her.


The torture itself is presented in nowhere near as sexy a fashion as in Girl Boss Guerilla, but as it follows several scenes of rough, panting foreplay, it serves as something of a climax to them. Maki refuses to talk no matter what the men do to her. Miki Sugimoto’s character, Masayo, steps in to take over. The two of them, unbeknownst to the yakuza, knew each other in prison and have a begrudging respect for each other based on the fact that every time they duel, they come to a draw. Masayo knows exactly who Maki is, and she also knows that she’ll never talk, no matter what they do to her. So she takes the opportunity to exact a bit of revenge on Maki. She says that a woman can torture another woman better than a man, then presses a lit cigarette into each of Maki’s nipples.

Here director Atsushi Mihori cuts in a few reaction shots of the goons watching. Unlike the torture scene in Girl Boss Guerilla, where the reaction shots are used to implicate us (the viewer) in the torture of this woman, and throw our own titillation back in our faces, the reaction shots in Criminal Woman: Killing Melody serve only to reinforce the idea that we are supposed to be turned on by what we see. Despite the utter unsexiness that is (for me, at least) inherent in the image of a woman’s breasts being singed with a cigarette butt, the looks on the faces of the goons indicate that the situation is highly sexually charged and they are deriving enjoyment from it. As a male viewer, I am unconciously taking some cues from the men onscreen vis-à-vis my reaction to what is being presented. However, as these men are the badguys (and low-level ones at that), perhaps I am meant to react negatively to their positions.


As Masayo continues to torture Maki, she leans in and secretly hands her a knife. While helping the men oppress her, she slips her the tool of her own liberation. Maki will later use this knife to escape from the same man she seduced earlier when he comes to take from her what she had once freely offered. In an earlier scene, Masayo walks into the bar where Maki’s gang have set up shop. She declines their offer to join up with them against the yakuza boss Oba, who she reveals as her lover. She says though she isn’t in love with him, “I still belong to Oba, after all.” She is only with him for the money, but she doesn’t allow herself to act in her own self-interest until he is dead. In this way, she is similar to the girls in Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess.

The girls of Worthless to Confess meet and bond in the same fashion as those in Killing Melody: behind bars; the film follows the same first act structure, as well. Our heroine meets and proves herself to the others in jail, before we cut to some time later when she gets out. In Killing Melody, Mako gets out of jail bent on revenge and the other girls pledge to help her. In Worthless to Confess, Rika, played by Reiko Oshida, leaves the girls’ juvenile detention center with only the vague goal to live a straight life from now on. She finds that her friends from inside are losing that same battle.


Unlike those in some other pinky violence films (e.g. Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter) the men in Worthless to Confess don’t necessarily assert their ownership over the women. The women, of their own accord, are willing to sacrifice themselves for men, whether they are good men or not. Mari’s husband is sick, and she’s willing to get naked to support him. Midori’s husband is a degenerate gambler, and she’s willing to steal from her father to support him. Rika is willing to do “anything” for her employer, Midori’s father, which she has to prove (to the yakuza shaking down the old man) by getting naked. At the last moment, Rika is stopped from showing herself, though she is willing to. Rika is probably the most positive female character in any of the films I’ve been discussing here. Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi famously decreed that Reiko Oshida would never have to take her clothes off while playing her—but that doesn’t stop the script from forcing Rika to prove she’s willing to take her clothes off.

The representatives of the older generation in the film pay lip service to traditional values. But, unlike many Japanese films of a prior generation, Worthless to Confess doesn’t pay much attention to this conflict. One girl’s mother says “You girls need to work hard and become good wives,” and the girls just smile and say sure, sure, knowing that those old values don’t really apply anymore, and there’s no sense arguing about it. Despite their casual dismissal of those old-fashioned values, all of the girls stick by the men in their lives out of a deeply ingrained sense of duty, as does Masayo from Killing Melody.


When one of them says, “Giving up now won’t do my man proud,” before joining in a bloody raid on the yakuza, she echoes a character from Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom. In that film, the only prominent female member of the faculty, Ms. Michiko, says, “It’s a wife’s duty to clean up her husband’s mess.” Her husband is being blackmailed for sexual relations with underage students of the school, costing the Chairman of the district a ton of money. To right this wrong, Ms. Michiko offers her body to the Chairman. He takes the deal and what follows is the most lasciviously presented of any sex scene I’ve yet scene in a pinky violence film. When director Norifumi Suzuki has Ms. Michiko look directly into the camera as the Chairman is rubbing her with an electric massager, the film actually becomes pornography.

Check back in soon for the conclusion to this first stab at a gender analysis of pinky violence.

TOWARDS A GENDER ANALYSIS OF THE PINKY VIOLENCE FILM: part 3

Click here to read part 1: introduction and here to read part 2: Girl Boss Guerilla, Torture & Titillation.


3. Sex Hunter and the Specter of Rape

Girl Boss Guerilla sometimes compromises the viewer's identification with the girl gang who are its protagonists by switching point of view when it comes time for the demands of the exploitation film to be met. However, its heroines are allowed to win, the tragic demise saved for the one likable boy in the plot. And the film ends on a note of sisterly unity, the Red Helmet Gang riding out of town the same way they rode in. The girl gang in Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter are not privileged in such a way. They are constantly protesting their independence and strength, and the men in Sex Hunter are always telling the girls that they own them, or fighting other guys for them, or rescuing them. Despite their protests, the girls are pretty ineffectual and non-central to the plot, which turns on a boy-boy rivalry ostensibly over race but really over who is loved by head chick Mako (Meiko Kaji).


Sex Hunter is basically a teen melodrama. It participates in many elements of the genre established by Rebel Without a Cause, with one important difference: there are no parents in the equation. Indeed, there are no authority figures at all. The difference between a film like Rebel Without a Cause and this one is that Sex Hunter is not interested in setting up an opposition between society and the teenager and depicting the protagonist’s struggle for acceptance. Instead, it presents actual delinquents, real tough chicks that hang out with criminals, do drugs, and commit petty robberies. The moral universe is defined by the participants of the subculture—not by society or any opposition to society. The film doesn’t make any moral judgments on the characters (at least the ones we are supposed to be rooting for) but as a viewer it is sometimes difficult to maintain the same neutrality.

Sex Hunter, to its credit, is a rather complex film, and director Yasuharu Hasebe manages to load it with ideas. The aforementioned “rivalry ostensibly over race” cries out for an analysis by someone who is much more conversant with the sociopolitical situation in Japan in 1970, especially as regarding race relations. My interest in the film—and the true concern of its villain, Baron—lays elsewhere. Baron’s intention is to run all of the “half-breed” children of American G.I.’s out of town, by force if necessary. He declares this goal after the girlfriend of one the Eagles (Baron’s gang) falls for a ‘half-breed.’ Baron tells of a childhood scene, witnessing his sister being raped by G.I.’s, as an excuse for his vehemence. Baron’s rival Kazuma is a half-breed also on a mission determined by love for a sister. He has come to town to find his long-lost sister, armed only with the memory of what she looked like as a child and the fact that her name is Megumi. There is a scene early on in Kazuma’s quest that, as mentioned above, seriously shakes the neutrality of the viewer’s moral judgment.


Outside of the club where Mako and her gang hang out, Kazuma confronts a girl named Megumi he thinks may be his sister. She tells him to get lost and pulls away from him. Just then, Mako and the girls walk up. Thinking they’re interrupting a sexual assault, the girls grab ‘Megumi’ and throw her in the back of a parked car, telling Kazuma, “Do it. We’ll watch for you.” When he recoils, having not intended to rape anyone, one of the girls says, “Shit. You’re a wimp.” So we have, again, this juxtaposition of ‘sister’ and ‘rape,’ and we have the disturbing complicity of the supposed protagonists in the rape of another woman.

Matt Kennedy, president of Panik House, a company who released several pinky violence films on DVD in the U.S. before going out of business, says on the commentary track to Girl Boss Guerilla, “Rape is always presented in Japanese film as a cause and effect punishment. It’s not used necessarily salaciously… It also doesn’t have the same horrific stigma as it does in the U.S. and Europe. It’s just a cultural difference. I’m not quite sure how I think about that as I say it, but it’s definitely a cultural difference.” A major plot point in that film involves a character handing over his sister to his yakuza superiors to be punished by rape. Near the end of Sex Hunter, Baron is incensed that Mako and her gang have sided with Kazuma and the half-breeds against his Eagles. In retaliation, he pimps the girls out to some businessmen for what he later describes as a “gang rape.” I cannot say that the small percentage of pinky violence films—or Japanese crime films in general—that I have seen thus far necessarily support Kennedy’s statement. However, the idea of rape is always present in these stories, looming like a specter over the female characters.

These pinky violence films are fascinatingly contradictory contraptions. They are undoubtedly “sexploitation” films: motion pictures that are produced and marketed with a high degree of female flesh on display. But they are also often about exploitation of women as well. Male domination over and use of the female body is a recurring plot point, as well as an economic imperative, throughout these films. Female Yakuza Tale hinges on the use of the vagina as a transportation device for illegal drugs. Lynch Law Classroom shows how the patriarchy uses one part of the female population for sex and turns them against the part of the female population they can’t use for sex. In Sex Hunter, the more Baron is confronted with the fact of his physical impotence, the greater his need to control and dominate women, and lash out violently at his surroundings. Eventually the Eagles degenerate into rapists—presumably to give the girls what they didn’t get when they escaped from the businessmen—and though Baron can’t participate, he oversees the scene and exhorts his right-hand man to join in. When his buddy says they are all acting like a bunch of “impotent losers,” then reveals that he, too, is a half-breed, Baron goes off the deep end and kills him.


Check back in tomorrow for part 4: A Woman's Place.

TOWARDS A GENDER ANALYSIS OF THE PINKY VIOLENCE FILM: part 2

Click here to read yesterday's introduction.


2. Girl Boss Guerilla, Torture & Titillation

The breast tattoos sported by the Red Helmet Gang in Girl Boss Guerilla are a perfect visual illustration of the central organizing principle of the pinky violence film. The heroines are always strong, and independent (often to the point of being literal outlaws), but they are also always made to display their bodies and be exploited for the very fact of their femaleness. At the beginning of Girl Boss Guerilla, the gang of girl-biker protagonists are annoyed by some biker boys who are following them. The girls lead them to an empty lot and kick their asses—but not before leader Sachiko whips out her naked breast to display the tattoo on it. The tattoo is a symbol of street authenticity—the yakuza that the Red Helmet Gang will eventually come into direct conflict with also decorate their bodies with this kind of tribal marking. But the fact remains that Sachiko’s tattoo, because of its placement on the breast, is also a symbol of femininity—possibly denied femininity. In order to signify her authenticity to these guys before beating them up, she must reveal her body to them.

Later, we see the biker girls of the Red Helmet Gang inducting a new member: they are all naked from the waist up and three of them hold the new girl down while Sachiko tattoos her breast. It is the first of several scenes in Girl Boss Guerilla when the audience is confronted with the cross-section of titillation and the visible fact of pain inflicted upon a woman. This is a major motif in the pinky violence film; rare is the film that doesn’t contain at least one scene of torture. The title of a genre-typical film like Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition & Torture gives away its intentions. The trend is taken to insane levels in Girl Boss Guerilla director Norifumi Suzuki’s Terrifying Girls High School: Lynch Law Classroom. In that film, though, all of the violence is inflicted by other girls—albeit at the instruction of the all-male faculty.


In Girl Boss Guerilla, the female-to-female violence is not of the same type as in Lynch Law Classroom, where the Disciplinary Committee chases down individual girls and subjects them to bizarre and imaginative torture techniques. The violence between women in Girl Boss Guerilla is all of the “catfight” variety. Three such scenes—where two girls face off in a one-on-one duel to settle a score—happen in fairly rapid succession, the first two in back-to-back scenes. The first is merely brutal, with the girl from the Red Helmet Gang choking the local girl until she gives in. The very next scene presents the same situation with two different girls—and punches up the sleaze factor considerably. Sachiko rips the shirt off of the other girl (who is wearing a long, tight, and possibly leather, skirt to a gang fight) and the other girl attempts to do the same to her.

The climax in the series comes a few scenes later with the face-off of the two stars of the genre, Miki Sugimoto as our heroine Sachiko and Reiko Ike as the returning boss Nami. Sachiko slaps Nami and we cut to the middle of a river, apparently Nami’s chosen spot for a rumble. However, the possibility of the scene having the mood and tone of a wet t-shirt contest— despite the similarity in content—is severely complicated not only by the music, but also the presentation. It is not uncommon in Japanese film to get a sequence scored to a musical performance featuring one of the actors in the film, and pinky violence is no different. In Girl Boss Guerilla, this fight is chosen for the centerpiece musical moment. The song is a mournful one, the female singer intoning, “No matter how senseless the fight, I’ll accept/Even a woman must follow the code/A girl boss, a drifter…” Meanwhile, the visuals are becoming more and more romantic, the fight becoming less defined, explication giving way to more abstract representations of physicality. As the song fades out, the girls stop fighting and begin giggling, sitting together, soaking wet in the middle of the river. In the next sequence, they are friends.


It soon becomes apparent that not only does Miki Sugimoto’s character Sachiko only give respect to other women after an equal display of violence, but that the same violent display must precede her attraction to a man. Sachiko’s relationship with the boxer Ichiro is the only overtly sadomasochistic relationship I’ve seen so far in my contact with pinky violence films. After Ichiro saves her from the yakuza guys beating her up, Sachiko tells him, “I want you.” He rebuffs her but she insists. He says, “I’ve never heard of a girl rapist.” She responds: “I’ll attack you,” and there is a quick cut to a hotel room where she throws him on the bed. Ichiro gets up, punches her in the face and starts ripping her clothes off, saying, “I’ll do the attacking here.” This is followed by a lovingly and intimately photographed sex scene between the two of them.

In the same way that the catfight scenes and the S&M love scenes build into romantic climaxes, Girl Boss Guerilla presents a series of scenes in which the men of the yakuza punish the girls for overstepping their bounds. The whole Red Helmet Gang is rounded up and beaten with sticks in a scene that turns out to be mere foreplay for a much more brutal and intimate beating of our heroine alone. The camera lingers over images of Miki Sugimoto’s body being endlessly assaulted with a series of wooden stick-like weapons of different types. She’s hanging from the ceiling, naked but for her panties. By the time she has been tied to the table and they begin to beat her there, the viewer has been seriously confronted with a contradictory rush of arousal and disgust.


But then director Norifumi Suzuki does something remarkable by doing something ordinary: he cuts in two reaction shots. They are off-kilter, from a low angle (possibly through Sachiko’s eyes) and careen from extreme frame left to extreme frame right, or vice-versa. Each presents a yakuza henchman leering salaciously, one chewing gum and giggling, the other rolling a cigarette suggestively around in his mouth. What is striking here is how the point of view has so swiftly and inextricably shifted. The viewer (provided he is male) is confronted with two images of himself, and it is not a pretty sight. Immediately after being sort of punished for sort of enjoying the torture of the woman we’re supposed to be rooting for, Reiko Ike’s character Nami bursts in and saves her, completing the reversion of point of view back to the girls.


Check back in tomorrow for part 3 of the pinky violence gender analysis, The Specter of Rape.

TOWARDS A GENDER ANALYSIS OF THE PINKY VIOLENCE FILM: introduction

A few months ago I was introduced to the Japanese exploitation genre known as pinky violence at Cinebeats. In that article, Kimberly Lindbergs traces a brief history of the sociopolitical environment Japanese women were facing in the late 60's and early 70's. I searched around for other material on the genre and found this great article by David Wilentz, which covers mostly different films from the ones I will be discussing. In it, Wilentz writes that these films "seemed to prove that the quickest path to female empowerment is paved with misogyny and bloodshed." This is a prescient observation, and Wilentz goes on to argue--as do most other commentators on the subject--that the pinky violence film cries out for a gender-based discussion. This essay, presented in five parts over the duration of the week, is my attempt to lay some groundwork for that analysis.


1. introduction

As the 1970’s dawned, several lines of development in Japanese film converged with world cultural changes to allow for the unique environment necessary for the birth of the exploitation genre known as “koshoku rosen” or pinky violence. In the booklet included with Panik House's Pinky Violence Collection boxset, Chris Desjardins, author of Outlaw Masters of Japanese Cinema, defines pinky violence as "a Japanese pop slang term for ultra-violent movies featuring female protagonists and varying degrees of softcore sexuality." The ‘pinky’ half of the equation comes from the pinku eiga, a particularly Japanese brand of sex film that came to be in 1962 with the appearance of Flesh Market (Nikutai no Ichiba). In retrospect, the early pinku eiga look extraordinarily arty when compared to contemporary American equivalents and extremely tame when compared to contemporary European equivalents.


At the same time, major Japanese film studios like Toei had begun to treat stories of the yakuza (Japanese organized crime groups) in a similar fashion to the traditional samurai film. These were called ninkyo eiga, or chivalry films, and were most often period pieces set in the years from the turn of the 20th century to the 1920’s. Meanwhile, director Kinji Fukusaku was busy trying to inject a level of realism into treatments of modern-day yakuza with pictures like Wolves, Pigs and People (1964) and Japan’s Violent Gangs—Boss (1969). A new term for this genre defined by its documentary-like nature, jitsuroku eiga or “true account film,” was coined when Fukusaku began basing such films on true stories in Battles without Honor and Humanity (1973).

As the 1960’s continued, Japanese film studios faced a similar predicament to that faced by American studios in the 1950’s: the ubiquity of television. The content levels of both sex and violence were ramped up in order to draw the public back to the theater. Mixing the two made for spectacular financial rewards and by the end of the decade both Toei and Japan’s oldest major studio Nikkatsu had gotten in on the action. The pinku eiga spawned a violent strand, exemplified by Toei’s eight Joys of Torture films (1968-1973.) Each film in the series was directed by Teruo Ishii; they were an inciting incident for the pinky violence films, and Ishii himself would go on to direct a full-blooded pinky violence film with Female Yakuza Tale (1973). Nikkatsu, meanwhile, were throwing their hat in the ring with the sukeban film, soon to become another major element of pinky violence.


Sukeban is a Japanese word meaning “delinquent girl” or (more literally, as it is a contraction of “suke” and “bancho”) “girl boss.” Toei had apparently originated the genre in 1960 with the Bad Angel (Zubeko Tenshi) films, but none were successful until Nikkatsu’s Stray Cat Rock (Nora Neko Rokku) series began in 1970. It is here that my study begins. The pinky violence genre mixed elements of both types of yakuza film, jitsuroku and ninkyo, with the more violent pinku eiga, and had main characters who were sukeban.

The following is an opening—and obviously limited—attempt at a gender analysis of the pinky violence film based on the six examples of the genre I have seen thus far. The selection of the films was based on availability and personal interest. As I see more films in the genre, my perceptions of it may change. But with the six films I've seen so far, five different directors are represented, as are all four of the women considered the major stars of the genre (Reiko Ike, Miki Sugimoto, Meiko Kaji and Reiko Oshida). The chosen films cover a four-year period, spanning the genre’s beginning and acknowledged highpoint. They are:

Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (Nora-neko rokku: Sekkusu hanta) (1970) dir.: Yasuharu Hasebe


Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess (Zubekô banchô: zange no neuchi mo nai) (alt. English subtitle: Unworthy of Penance) (1971) dir.: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi


Girl Boss Guerilla (Sukeban Gerira) (1972) dir.: Norifumi Suzuki


Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition & Torture (Yasagure Anego Den - Sokatsu Rinchi!) (alt. English title: Story of A Wild Elder Sister - Widespread Lynch Law!) (1973) dir.: Teruo Ishii


Terrifying Girls High School: Lynch Law Classroom (Kyofu joshikoko boko rinchi kysoshitsu) (1973) dir.: Norifumi Suzuki


Criminal Woman: Killing Melody (Zenka onna: koroshi-bushi) (1973) dir.: Atsushi Mihori

In the days that follow I will attempt to open up areas of inquiry and create several lines of flight towards a gender analysis of the pinky violence film. I will be discussing, amongst others, the following elements of the genre: torture & titillation, the specter of rape, and a woman’s place.

Check back in tomorrow for part two: Girl Boss Guerilla, Torture & Titillation.

THOUGHTS ON GENDER IN "SINGIN' IN THE RAIN"

(You can subtitle this one, "Reusing a School Paper for My Blog #1.")


Throughout Singin’ in the Rain Gene Kelly’s character Don Lockwood rejects the image of available, mature sexuality, represented by Jean Hagen’s Lina Lamont. Furthermore, that kind of open ‘sexiness’ on the part of a woman is continually connected with a materialistic, money-hungry attitude. In the somewhat climactic “Gotta Dance” sequence, there is another ‘sexy’ woman (Cyd Charisse)—this one Kelly does go after. But, though she seems to be attracted to him and wants to continue dancing with him, she goes with the villain dangling a jeweled necklace in front of her. Aggressive sexuality on the part of a woman is very obviously associated with materialism.

Don passes over the glamorous—not to mention ambitious and gold-digging—Lina Lamont for the chaste, smart and tomboyish Kathy Selden, played by Debbie Reynolds. But before Kathy comes in the picture, Don is already ignoring Lina in favor of chumming around with his pal Cosmo (Donald O’Connor). The opening “dignity, always dignity” origin story for Don includes Cosmo in every scene. They’re presented as closer than friends: a double-act, a package deal. The “Fit as a Fiddle (and Ready for Love)” song-and-dance routine—with Don and Cosmo moving in unison, climbing onto each other’s backs and playing each other’s violins—hammers home the point early and often.


Kathy is apparently not only enough of a tomboy for Don to pay attention to her—she’s masculine identified from the first time we see her, driving her own car and wearing a short haircut—she’s self-sacrificing and willing enough to be in the background for him to keep paying attention to her. The film doesn’t only contrast Kathy and Lina in the realm of sexuality. It says that not only is Lina ‘sexy’ and Kathy merely ‘cute,’ and thus non-threatening, but Lina wants the spotlight and Kathy is willing to concede it, and Lina is evil and Kathy is good. No case, therefore, can be made that Don chooses Kathy over Lina because he merely finds her more attractive or more appealing. Kathy is the perfect woman as far as Don is concerned because she is non-threateningly attractive (looking cute and strikingly like a baby duck in the scene where she pops out of the cake and Don falls for her), and good, and willing to do whatever it takes to make Don’s career succeed, no matter how much she has to take the backseat for it to happen. Oh, and she’ll even hang out and pal around with your buddies, as evidenced by the “Good Morning” routine with Don, Cosmo and Kathy all clowning around together (Cosmo notably ending up with Kathy’s hat on—and Kathy wearing his.)

One final complaint: despite all the faults I have enumerated above, Kathy is introduced as being smart, opinionated and sarcastic—all good qualities from where I’m coming from. When Don drops into her car, she doesn’t even know who he is, despite the fact that he’s the biggest star in the world, and this is Hollywood. She tells him she wants to be on the stage saying of movie actors, “They don’t talk, they don’t act, they just make a lot of dumb show.” In short, she’s a radical, independent thinker. Then, the movie totally sells her out when her romance with Don begins. She even admits to buying “five or six” star magazines a week!

Question: is Kathy the precursor to the teen comedy roles played by Annette Funicello, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Hilary Duff and countless others over the years?

MASCULINITY IN "THE 40-YEAR-OLD-VIRGIN"

The 40-Year-Old Virgin (unrated DVD version) accurately depicts the insecurity, homophobia and general neurosis at work among a group of straight men by distilling the major elements of modern masculinity into a constantly fluctuating subversion and reassertion of stereotype.

Andy, the titular virgin, is so humanized by Steve Carell’s performance that we sometimes forget that he is a high-concept creation, his quirks calibrated for maximum punchline potential rather than for insight into humanity. (Right?) At the beginning of the film, Andy’s lifestyle is prepubescent, centered around action figures and videogames. His only friends are an old couple he watches Survivor with and at work he is unable to communicate meaningfully with either co-workers or customers. Despite this, and despite the film’s many serial killer jokes, Andy doesn’t come off as creepy or deeply abnormal. He seems like a pretty regular guy, and innocent, above all. We don’t identify with him, but we also don’t feel sorry for him or laugh when he is made the butt of jokes by his co-workers (I’m thinking specifically of the scene in which a minor character tells him “we’ve got to get you some punanny,” but a few other scenes as well.) The situations Andy finds himself in are only the result of naïveté, never social unease or stupidity like in the comedies of, say, Ben Stiller or Will Farrell. The flashback to three failed intimate situations in his past serves to reinforce the notion that Andy is merely inexperienced, not a weirdo or even in need of advice on how to get a woman into the bedroom. He just seems really uncomfortable once he gets them there (which is borne out later when the freak from the book store takes him home with her.)

Andy is surrounded by a group of men who are, quite realistically for a bunch of straight guys hovering around 30, sex-obsessed and casually homophobic. When they find out Andy is a virgin, they are so appalled by the discovery that they decide to take matters into their own hands. But their greater amount of experience doesn’t translate to wisdom. The more these guys try to interfere with Andy’s life, the more their own issues come to the forefront.

Romany Malco’s Jay is so insecure he cheats on his girlfriend constantly. Once his masculinity is given the ultimate proof in the form of his unborn son’s extraordinarily large penis, however, he is able to settle down and be faithful (we assume.) Paul Rudd’s David is the attractive-but-normal guy, until he starts talking too much about love, describing sex with an ex-girlfriend as like “sharing one heart.” This overly sensitive character is then subverted again when his love-talk turns to stalker-talk. Later his mention of celibacy immediately calls forth accusations of homosexuality from Seth Rogen’s Cal (mirroring the virginity-revelation scene when the guys assume Andy is gay after he describes the tactile qualities of a woman’s breast as being like “a bag of sand”) setting off an almost never-ending series of “You know how I know you’re gay?” jokes. In a later scene, Cal resorts to physical violence to coerce David into sleeping with a woman again, flicking and punching his testicles, giving physical form to the thesis these guys have been operating from regarding Andy all along: if you’re a man and you don’t want to bang as many as chicks as possible, there is either something horribly wrong with you or you are gay (which may just be the same thing.)

Cal, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to talk to women at all. Despite all his advice to Andy about listening and how he sleeps with women even though he’s “ugly as fuck,” we never really see him with a woman. The same pattern of stereotype subversion and reaffirmation at work through the character revelations in Jay, David and Andy, also come into play here with Cal. His stoner persona is given texture when he is revealed to be the most sensitive and insightful of the bunch, which he blames on the fact that he has a keen interest in human nature, since he’s a novelist. Later, of course, the stereotypical stoner is reasserted when we take a mocking look at Cal hard at work on his novel: “But Dad, I don’t know how to love. You never taught me how.”

(I’ve just realized that I’ve gotten this far into this essay without saying anything about any of the women in the film and, honestly, not intending to say much about them in the rest of it either. In my attempt to write something about the men I have totally excluded the women. So, before I return to the main flow of my argument, allow me to say: Catherine Keener gives an incredibly warm and wonderful performance as Trish, the woman that finally gets Andy to take his toys out of the box. Christopher Guest regular Jane Lynch is hilarious as the boss lady Paula, doing an amazing job of being just one of the boys and a woman in a position of power in the workplace all at once. None of the other women depicted in the film are given the second level—the substance behind the stereotype—that the men get.)

The (I’ll admit pretty bland) main theme being articulated throughout the film is stated early on by Mooj (played by the Don Rickles of Bangladesh, Gerry Bednob): life isn’t about sex, it’s about passion, people, connection. But without one, apparently, you can’t have the other, because Andy, by denying himself the physical act of love, has denied himself the emotional access to it as well. As I said above, though, Andy doesn’t appear creepy or hopeless, just inexperienced. After Trish gives Andy her number, the guys take him out to the bar to celebrate. This sets off an initiation ritual sequence in which Andy is inducted into the boys’ club in a big way, performing a number of firsts that most people would have gotten out of the way when they were teenagers. He gets drunk, smokes pot, watches porn, and pees in public. Later we see Trish giving him driving lessons and (in a big plot point) encouraging him to sell his toys, which she justifies, when challenged, by saying she’s just “trying to help [him] grow up.”

The 40-Year-Old-Virgin spends most of its time waffling back and forth between two impulses. To embrace the stereotypes and ram home the punchlines on the one hand, or to attempt to actually say something about people on the other. This is probably why its characters are always stopping and starting, on the verge of being a real person one moment, then collapsing back into sitcom posture the next. But, just maybe, the pattern of character development I’ve been highlighting has another purpose. Maybe it’s actually saying something about the way we grow up. And something that happens when you’re growing up is that you regress, every time you have a growth spurt, you reach backwards to what you’ve left behind. When Andy glimpses what adult life might really be like, he hesitates, retreats back into childhood, holds on tighter to his sealed up action figures. He gets over it by the end, of course. Everybody grows up eventually. (Or at least, everybody in a comedy does. For the tragic—and true—version, see Charles Crumb, the brother in Crumb.)

Because I have rambled all over the place and done a rather poor job of keeping focus on my supposed thesis, I feel justified in ending on a digression: If this film had depicted even one homosexual character, gave the opportunity for that voice to be expressed for just one moment, all those “you know how I know you’re gay” jokes would’ve been a whole lot funnier.