Last Friday afternoon, I decided to kick off work early and go see Superbad. It was the first time I've intentionally seen a movie the day it opened since my best friend Zoe Greenberg and I skipped Grade 11 geography to see Pump Up the Volume, a then-anxiously anticipated, now-forgotten, Christian Slater vehicle about a pirate radio station run by teenagers. Zoe and I were smitten, and spent the next semester burping the Pixies while trying to affect Samantha Mathis's fetching side part. That's what girlfriends are for.
More recently, however, I've been spending my time listening to CBC Radio One and trying to affect the look of a house not entirely furnished by Ikea. In case you hadn't noticed, friendly readers, I'm getting older. Not officially old, mind you, just a little less obnoxiously ... young. And the funny thing about being less young is that it makes you nostalgic. The huge advance buzz for Superbad, for instance, got me thinking back to those teen bonding years when your best friend looms larger than anyone else in your life - parents, teachers and boy-crushes included.
So I called up a few girlfriends to see whether they were free, but was quickly shut down by the logistics of adult life. One was working late, one was out for drinks with colleagues, another was making dinner for her husband and kids. This is what it's like to be an unencumbered less-obnoxiously young woman: You have no one to go see a teenage-boy gross-out comedy with on a Friday afternoon in August.
Bummer.
I ended up seeing it with my bachelor pal Mike (affectionately known as the Joke Machine, for his refreshing ability to obliterate every attempt at serious conversation with rapid-fire wisecracks) and was pleased to find that Superbad is as supergood as I hoped it would be - a teen buddy movie that is disgusting and sweet in all the right places. As Defamer.com said recently of the newly anointed king of comedy, writer-actor Seth Rogen: "Once you've done for penis cartoons and menstrual blood what Judd Apatow did for crowning babies, it's not too early to look for new worlds to conquer."
It seems I was not alone in my enthusiasm. The movie raked in $31.2-million at the box office last weekend, making it Hollywood's No. 1 opener.
Watching two pubescent man-children sweetly bumble their way around the screen for almost two hours got me wondering why there aren't many similar movies aimed at women, and to the extent that there are, why they are crap or depressing or both.
Take Thelma and Louise. While arguably the most successful female buddy movie ever made, the price these women paid for enjoying each other's company is harsh. One is raped, the other is robbed and in the end they both drive off a cliff. In Steel Magnolias, Julia Roberts dies of diabetes complications after having a child, and in Beaches Barbara Hershey is stricken down with the big C. In the Witches of Eastwick, Susan Sarandon, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer are put through the (literal) hell of sex with Jack Nicholson and in Ghost World Scarlett Johansson and Thora Birch drift apart after high school and make each other miserable over a middle-aged male character actor. It would seem that girls who get along in the movies either have to die or sleep with Steve Buscemi.
Even more disappointing is the fact that there are so few movies about women just enjoying one another's company. As the screenwriter Susan Isaacs wrote in The New York Times almost 20 years ago: "For decades, Hollywood has been turning out female buddy movies, although not exactly churning them out. The numbers are nowhere near those of the male buddy film, probably for the simple cultural-historical-sociological-sexist reason that women are considered neither as important nor as interesting as men."
But such claims sound outdated in the era of America's Next Top Model and The Bachelor, when watching women sell each other out has become a lucrative televised spectator sport. Perhaps the dearth of female buddy movies has more to do with our discomfort at watching women get along. Stories of female betrayal have long held our attention (think of anti-buddy movies like All About Eve or Working Girl), while gender experts like Susan Shapiro Barash publish books on our predilection for bitchiness, like last year's Tripping the Prom Queen: The Truth About Women and Rivalry.
In her book, Barash writes about the "myth of female solidarity" and does her best to make a case for the fact that women are generally out to get each other. "Sadly, the old cliché is true," she writes. "Men punish the weakest member of the group; women punish the strongest. All too often we are there for our friends when they're feeling fat, lonely, underpaid and unappreciated. But when they lose weight, get a guy or land a much-deserved promotion, we disappear."
It's a horribly cynical view of female friendship and one that has rarely (how I wish I could say never) been backed up by my own experience. I grew up in a female-dominated family, attended a woman-centric university and have only ever reported to female bosses. Without the women in my life, I'd probably have ended up a desperate housewife married to a corporate lawyer in the suburbs of Edmonton, which is, incidentally, my worst nightmare.
It's a fear shared by novelist and critic Katrina Onstad, who also laments the lack of good female buddy movies. Her theory? There aren't enough quality movies about the intricacies of female friendship because women don't make enough movies.
"In Hollywood, men are the ones who make movies about women bonding," she points out. "Women, in general, don't get the final cut."