In the "controversial" film "Observe and Report," which opened this weekend, Seth Rogen's character Ronnie takes Anna Faris's Brandi home after a night of tequila and recreational anti-depressant consumption. Brandi is stumbling and half-conscious. The audience at my Saturday afternoon screening grew audibly uncomfortable as Ronnie began kissing Brandi after she puked on the lawn.  

But when the screen flashed to Rogen "pumping away" while Brandi lay on the pillow, vomit on her face and eyes closed to oblivion, a line was crossed - "sketchy" became "illegal." 

Here's the oft-circulated response Rogen (the actor) has to the scene:

SETH ROGEN: When we're having sex and she's unconscious like you can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the fuck are they going to make this okay? Like, what can possibly be said or done that I'm not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next thirty seconds? . . . And then she says, like, the one thing that makes it all okay:

BRANDI: "Why are you stopping, motherfucker?" 

Some critics, even some feminist ones, have said that this line from Brandi constitutes consent. But such an utterance can't absolve Ronnie. The scene is a clear-cut date rape. Even Faris has gone on the record acknowledging this (emphasis mine): 

"When I read the script, I thought, ‘Well, this is Warner Bros. This is a studio movie, so this is all gonna be softened up. It's a comedy, right?' So when we were shooting it, even the date-rape scene - or as I refer to it, ‘The Tender Love-Making Scene' - I just thought, ‘We'll shoot it, but it's not gonna be in the movie. I don't have to worry about that one.' And yet there it is." 

So there's a popular movie out in theaters that plays a date rape for laughs. As Jill at Feministe wrote, in and of itself, that might not be horrifying. I'll jump on the "not a humorless feminist" bus and argue that in the right hands, nearly anything taboo can be funny. I adored "The Aristocrats" and worship "Borat." 

But Brandi's "why are you stopping?" line and the way Rogen and director Jody Hill have described it puts the scene firmly in the problematic realm. Instead of showing the audience how depraved Ronnie is (which is ostensibly the point of the film and this scene), Brandi's "funny" line shifts the focus towards her - a classic "she was asking for it" implication that makes Ronnie's actions go from horrifying to a-ok. Brandi is further victimized by Ronnie later in the film when he angrily smashes the glass at the makeup counter where she works, and then once again when, after she's nearly been attacked by a flasher, calls her out in public for (willingly) sleeping with his rival.  This is supposed to be a moment of triumph for him and humor for the audience because Brandi has been so uncool to him that she deserves it. 

Dana Stevens wonders aloud if her horror at the film is misplaced, and like many comedies, "Observe and Report" functions as a dark send-up of anxious masculinity. (A bevy of male critics have embraced the film as such, rape and all). Indeed, such a parody does seem to be the film's goal. Ronnie is objectively morally repugnant, and the cheers he gets at the film's end in reward for a grotesque act of violence are supposed to indict society's need for "heroism." The movie wants to implicate its audience and Ronnie is meant to be revealed as a false hero. 

But the film fails to achieve its goals in every single way.  Just as Brandi's characterization as a slut who craves even non-consensual sex swats away questions about Ronnie's culpability during the date rape scene, the film's cast of malevolent secondary characters gives Ronnie free reign to cross every line imaginable including gratuitous hard drug use, beating up teenagers, indiscriminate shooting, and harassing people of color. Apparently, they were all asking for it. 

Ronnie's journey reveals little about any psyche permeating our culture. Instead of an outsize emblem of the tough-cop wannabe, Ronnie is a mentally ill, delusional person (he is literally a bipolar disorder sufferer who goes off his medication) who craves violence as a means to self-esteem.  Given the shooting sprees that have rocked our country recently, it's just hard to find that hilarious. 

Amanda nails the essential problem in her critique of Jody Hill's first comedy, the Foot Fist Way: 

The satire is over, and the whole thing is a nerd's revenge against evil women and more successful men. And even though the movie starts off satirizing the cult of masculinity, at the end of the movie, the basic rightness of the cult is upheld. 

This is a problem that permeates comedies during our current "bromance" era. When I got home from "Observe and Report," I turned on the TV and caught the sex scene from Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up" in which Rogen's character continually makes his pregnant partner change positions in bed due to his neurosis about jolting the fetus. I found this disturbing in the wake of "Observe and Report" - the woman's body and needs were secondary to the man's paranoia. She was expendable while he was making the audience crack up. To me, the date rape in "Observe and Report" is a natural progression from the "Knocked Up" mentality of sidelining women for dude-induced yuks.

The Seth Rogen archetype appearing in both films is an apparent loser who within each story's context ends up an unlikely good guy. The fact that a slimmed-down, cleaned-up Rogen is positioning himself as a "leading man" in public reinforces my feeling that he and his comic posse are not deeply interested in mocking themselves, but rather using their slacker-dudeliness as a platform with which to mock everyone else. That's not a parody of masculinity, but a classic example of male privilege.

I admit it, my comic tastes don't require feminist subversion: I loved the British flick "Hot Fuzz," which was a graphically violent parody of action films that had an actual heart. And I long for the halcyon days of the mainstream "Frat Pack" comic vehicle - where the buffoonish protagonist is billed as a manly hero but inevitably revealed as the butt of the joke. In contrast, the Rogen-Apatow-type character who's dominating the "edgier" blockbuster comedies now always has to make someone else into a bigger joke than himself, and often that person is a woman. How subversive. 

"Observe and Report" was a waste of Anna Faris's considerable comic gifts, a waste of two hours, and a wasted effort to critique an aspect of our society that cries out for a critique. David Edelstein chastises anxious feminists by saying "humor isn't safe." I'd retort that just because a scene is "unsafe" doesn't give it humor.