Day Ten: Knocked Up

Technically there's no rule against watching a movie I've already seen more than five times, and tonight I desperately needed something familiar and funny and warm. My busy semester caught up to me this week; I'd spent the last couple of days recovering from the weekend and kept awake at nights thinking of all the work I have to do this week and next. And then this morning in Cinema and Ideology we had an intense discussion about America and the world and the current economy, and suddenly all day I was feeling sick and uncertain and unloved and frightened by the prospect of living in this world. It built up on top of me all day, until tonight talking to a friend I just started bawling thinking about human beings starving and being tortured and abused and laughed at and murdered, people feeling trapped or despairing or unloved. It all hit me at once that the world is not really a happy place, and I can't do much to make it happier. I'll graduate and enter the workforce in a year, or maybe in four or five years if I go on to grad school, and then I'll spend the rest of my life working and worrying about money and then I'll die.

So with this existential crisis weighing on me, I naturally decided to watch Knocked Up. Even though The 40-Year-Old Virgin had come out two years earlier and been popular, I think Knocked Up really kicked off the Apatow empire, and it remains my favorite of those films. There's just so much reality and joy in it, in the forming of unconventional families and figuring things out little by little, even as the dirty jokes keep coming. I love the parts where the five guy roommates are just sitting around smoking weed or otherwise killing time and ragging on each other. Their scenes feel very natural, and they're also hilarious. It's very similar to the dynamic on one of my favorite TV shows, How I Met Your Mother, where five friends sit around and try to one-up each other with clever and/or dirty puns. I love how, in both cases, the jokes aren't only for the audience's benefit, as with many sitcoms; the characters and the actors themselves are obviously having a great time. My favorite character in Knocked Up is the one played by Jay Baruchel, because his delighted laughter at his friends' jokes has to be real.

So is this the salve for my malaise? Finding small moments of happiness, blissing out to silly movies? It seems a selfish solution; I mean, who am I to veg out and cackle at jokes about pubes while there are people suffering? But what can I do? Work hard, try to be a good person, and luxuriate in some cheerfully raunchy movies from time to time--I guess that'll have to work.