Superbad

The comedy in Superbad works, I think, because of the absurd innocence behind the characters’ attempt to lose theirs. From the Animal House perspective—which generated a large degree of commercial, youth-oriented schlock in its wake—the kids are cynical narcissists living for the trashed weekend hook-up. In Mean Girls, the kids are the slick products of a sophisticated farce—honestly depicted, but detached from reality. Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, however, who wrote the first draft of Superbad while they were adolescents themselves, are far from detached; they are only so far beyond high school age—and have made much of themselves in the meantime. Thus, they portray the banal, rockin’-the-suburbs rites of passage with very balanced nostalgia.

The last-party-of-high school, trying-to-buy-liquor-underage, gotta-get-the-girl coming-of-age superstructure of Superbad is nothing new. And, technically, neither are Seth (Jonah Hill) or Evan (Michael Cera); the corpulent bore and his lanky sidekick predate the teen movie by a long shot. Even the much-lauded deluge of “dirty words” is just Porky’s: The Next Generation. Don’t other critics get that censorship (and teenagers’ vocabularies, upon seeing these movies) is continually getting laxer? (Using swear words isn’t really boldness on the filmmakers’ part.) What works is not the all-too-universal plot line, but the lovingly absurd point of view, which consumes it. With the penis drawings and, in a lazier way, the dialogue, Goldberg and Rogen are livening up the usual circumstances; it becomes a farce, all right, but one that teenagers would want to write about themselves. The writers (Rogen was 25 when Superbad came out) aren’t reliving their high school past; they’re rewriting it as they wish it had been—but, fortunately, they’re not narcissists.

Why else would Rogen (also executive producer) cast himself as one of the cops that picks up Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and takes him for a joyride to prove that grown-ups can have fun, too? (He’s not trying to convince just Fogell of that.) Teen movies often feed into teenage self-absorption and pretend that the adult world is like some weird, parallel dimension beyond the viewer’s scope (or interest). When adults are actually given dialogue, it might as well be the wonk-wonk-wonk of the Peanuts’ parents. Mom and Dad don’t make an appearance in Superbad, either, but the sequences with those strange creatures beyond the drinking age are generally the best. Quasi-virginal Seth acts as a shrewd pragmatist, blackmailing a shady addict into drawing them to a lurid house party. David Edelstein of New York compared the scene where Evan is made to sing for a group of cokeheads in a bedroom to Dean Stockwell’s orgasmic ditty in Blue Velvet, but I think Edelstein got it in reverse. As in the David Lynch film, the kids aren’t the surreal spectacle, the postlapsarian grown-ups are. It’s a strange world these twenty- and thirty-somethings are mired in, but the great irony is that this is just what the party Seth and Evan would be relegated to in a few years time—high school is indeed a “magical” age.

The unscrupulous cops—Animal House brothers that, much to their chagrin, graduated—are even queasier role models. Their target-practice, drunk-driving tomfoolery would be a nightmare in Training Day; it’s a testament to these filmmakers that it comes off comically in Superbad. The teen-triumvirate wants to get out of high school “accomplished”; the policemen want back in. The cops’ sentimentality keeps them from being immoral buffoons, but the level of sentiment is just right: they don’t want to get back into the pool so much as they just want to dip their feet in. Otherwise, the fantasy would become acridly anti-adult, and the cops’ woebegone misanthropy would be a stone-cold bummer.

I’d be remiss not to mention the actors, though they’ve been greatly publicized elsewhere. Cera’s Evan is not naïve: he’s sweetly, shyly moral. He’s in opposition to the brutal masculine figure who’d come back into style with the Burger King commercials of a few years back; in fact, his femininity is made into a joke—but not a cruel one. Cera blends goodwill with good timing, and exudes a cowboy’s laconic chivalry and conscientiousness without the kind of ego that fosters pretensions of superiority. When he says, matter-of-factly, that he wants to respect women, you believe him. Hill, on the other hand... I can identify with the bullies who want to beat this violently undersexed loudmouth up. But his seeming authenticity in this role is also his strength. It’s almost impossible (and undesirable) to play this role without irony; he doesn’t, but neither does he wink at the camera. Mintz-Plasse is such an authentic dork (being as he was, an actual high school student at the time) that saying anything more about him would be superfluous. (Except maybe, Why does everyone think his McLovin license is such comedic gold? It just passed over me, I guess.)

I’m sure that Superbad will soon join the pantheon of generational teen movies, somewhere between Empire Records and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and up there it deserves a place. I’m certain, too, that this is exactly the kind of movie that will become iconic of this generation and decade (even though its 70s-chic will seem confusing), and will gloss over, to some, all the bad memories of high school. One shouldn’t forget, however, that it has the failings of all its antecedents, as well: the two-dimensional, all-their-shit-together mythical girls, for instance. But, it’s a small, winsome movie (even a nicely lighted one, for what it’s worth) that gears one up for illicit summertime partying.