The Movie You Can’t Make Today

Five seconds on the internet—heck, maybe in person too—and you’ll hear the magic words: you couldn’t make that today. Mores shift. Tastes change. TV in the Eisenhower years seems unlikely to have broadcasted a teleplay of 120 Days of Sodom (1785, 1899). Gen Z wants fewer sex scenes in movies. Brian De Palma balks. This particular lament, however, has a particular meaning: we’ve become a bunch of over-sensitive dimwits who can’t handle boys palling around. I’ll leave the truth content of that declaration for others to decide. I do, however, think I’ve found the movie they’re talking about. Friends, Saving Silverman (2001). When Adam Carolla says he wants to make anti-woke comedy. This, this is what he means.

Three twenty-somethings who look like thirty-somethings play in a Neil Diamond cover band for spare change (any guesses as to the name? That’s right. Diamonds in the Rough). J.D. McNugent (Jack Black) is a failed subway training manager. Darren Silverman (Jason Biggs) calls bingo at an old folks’ home. Wayne Le Fessier (Steve Zahn) is the most successful: he fails to chase raccoons out of crawlspaces. Friends since birth, their delicate equilibrium breaks down when Darren finds a thoroughly domineering girlfriend, Judith Fessbeggler (Amanda Peet). His two oldest friends kidnap her, hoping Darren will assume she’s dead and move on.

A controlling, emasculating girlfriend is only the beginning. Behold how she uses her psychosexual female powers to convince JD he is gay. Notice that she suggests her husband take her last name after they marry. Appreciate how she demonstrates her power over Darren by refusing to have any kind of sex with him (she offers him lotion, a tissue, and a Playboy) while demanding that he please her six ways to Sunday. Judith openly admits her mastery. Tied to a chair, she mocks J.D. and Wayne, gloats about her total power over Darren. She fools them again and again.

Saving Silverman is an R. Crumb comic with none of the self-hatred. It is awash in early-2000s male terror. They made, I fear, a walking castration fantasy. And that the thing: the film is so blissfully unaware that it’s letting it all hang out. It bears all. It simply is.

In its way, the movie doesn’t mind laughing at itself when it catches a glimpse. J.D., it seems, is actually gay. He ends up marrying their old football coach (R. Lee Ermey), a man so masculine he impaled a referee for a call he disagreed with during a football game. Darren is a little weenie. Judith’s power is real, as is her intelligence. We are not asked to sympathize with her. Yet she is attractive; she easily outwits these three bozos. Saving Silverman is not yet conscious of its masculinity. It doesn’t mind throwing the opposition (what opposition?) a bone or two.

In other words, the movie sticks to another motto of today’s complainers: it’s only a joke. Maybe. But sometimes a joke is more than a joke. Sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar. Had this been made today, it would be far, far more than a joke or a cigar. One thing, however, of which I am sure is that no other culture (or at least not ours now) could produce such an authentic document of male fear, a movie so raunchy, it doesn’t even realize how frightened it is.