seriousfic

Someone has it out for Anna Faris. That's my story. How else do you explain a pretty harmless girl-oriented comedy (girl-com?) like What's Your Number? ending up the center of a controversy over feminism, comedy, Hollywood, female actors, and all sorts of other stuff above the average rom-com paygrade.

But out of all the analysis a dumb little movie about the girl from Scary Movie and the dude from Captain America hooking up inspired, the one that stuck with me was a cutting one-liner describing the brand of feminism in Faris's previous movie, The House Bunny—"love yourself for who you are, but get a great makeover." (There's a third-wave feminism joke in there somewhere.) What's Your Number has a similar mixed message: heroine Ally Darling eventually learns that it doesn't matter how many lovers she's had, yet it still turns out that her final beau is within the magic number of twenty and she's overjoyed that "He's her twenty." It's that kind of half-assed feminism that brings me to Chris Evans' character in the movie, who ironically is more problematic than Anna Faris' heroine.

Chris Evans plays Colin, Faris' next-door neighbor and the he-slut to Ally's neurotic sex-positive. Ironically, for two attractive people with few qualms about casual sex who live in close proximity, it takes, well, the entire movie for them to think of giving a relationship a shot. Maybe he was still really broken up about that Peggy Carter thing.

Anyway, Colin is something of a lothario whose preferred 'letting her down easy' move is to abandon the latest conquest during the morning after and hide in Ally's apartment. Which seems, surprisingly skeevy for a rom-com? It's a little like Tom Hanks casually making Jew jokes before getting together with Meg Ryan. Okay. You went there. Not sure what we're doing here now. Let's… get back on the highway and pretend we went to see the world's biggest ball of twine instead.

The thing is, I have no idea what this plot development means. Is it just supposed to be a raunchy meet-cute? "Oh, wacky single people and their sex-capades, always getting the newspaper while only holding a towel in front of their naked crotch because pants can wait, but Mark Trail has to be read now!" Okay, maybe it's a little unfair to judge a movie on feminism when it's just trying to be a dumb little date movie, but let's think about the subtext here. I guess the joke is that women are so clingy that Colin has to hide from them, and Ally isn't clingy, so he gets together with her for… having no emotional attachment to him… or something? That's not really female-friendly.

And let's run this down just in terms of story. Colin says he's doing this to "avoid hurt feelings." Okay, let's imagine that your average one-night-stand is going to think "Oh, it looks as if that great guy I met disappeared right after I had sex with him. I guess I'll show myself out of his apartment and forget all about him." Where does he meet these people? If he goes to Bar A, meets a single girl, fucks her, and ditches her, does he then start going to Bar B to meet women? Because it seems likely that eventually he'll run across a woman he's pulled a dick and dash on already. In which case she'll A. Not realize he ditched her and want to reconnect, or B. cause a scene.

It just seems a lot more trouble to go through than making it clear that he's not looking for a relationship and would just like to have casual sex, but you know, before he fucks a girl. Is there really a vast majority of women who would be unwilling to have sex with Chris Evans unless he makes a commitment to them? Especially in a movie supposedly glorifying a female protagonist who has casual sex?

Maybe it's also unfair to compare What's Your Number to Bridesmaids, but Bridesmaids had Jon Hamm playing a similar character, someone who just wanted to use Kristen Wiig sexually and then give her the heave-ho, and he was an antagonist. In fact, What's Your Number has the same character too! Zachary Quinto plays Ally's latest boyfriend, who only wants her for sex and ditches her when she suggests a tiny commitment like accompanying her to her sister's wedding. If only he had run out while she was sleeping instead of expressing his honest opinion about their relationship when asked, maybe they would still be together!

So, what makes Colin a better choice for Ally than Zachary Quinto, besides the fact that Colin doesn't eat people's brains to gain their superpowers? Well, when it's time for Colin and Ally to hook-up, but not really-really hook-up, the hook-up before a misunderstanding makes them break-up and then get back together again. When it's that time, Colin declares that he's going to give up his philandering ways and devote himself entirely to Ally—which is exactly the kind of thing you would say to make a girl think she had a shot with you, thus prompting you to hide in your neighbor's apartment. But no, he means it.

And yet… earlier in the movie, Ally correctly breaks down the male idea of the "perfect woman," summing it up as being a lady in the streets but a freak in the sheets while never acknowledging how a woman would become said sheets-freak. Then Colin turns out to be the exact gender-reverse of this, a bad boy lady-killer who's willing to give up his playboy lifestyle for one special lady.

It's such a weird failing of storytelling that the protagonist and her love interest are in complete mirror images of the same situation, yet the movie not even doesn't comment on it, it seems to be completely unintentional. How crazy is that? In other movies, you're obliged to pretend two disparate characters have this kind of thematic connection. Like in action movies, how your villain can be a Nazi war criminal and your hero can be the nicest guy who ever lived, but you have to make believe they could be bosom buddies in another life.

Colin's sexual Olympics are supposed to make him more desirable/unattainable/badass, as befits a male character, while Ally's make her more sympathetic and fallible. Is it telling that of all the boyfriends she recalls, Ally doesn't seem to have enjoyed her raunchy sex-filled craziness with any of them?

I think that's, in the end, the movie's failing. It's trying to get to two audiences: the one that wants to enjoy Ally's slutty antics and the one that wants to call her out for being a slut, so she ends up happy that she's a slut, but then only being a slut for one guy, or something…

Empowerment!

Cross-posted to Fempop.com