Luke Ford

After watching a summer’s worth of lowest-common-denominator big-tent movies such as Knocked Up, Carina published an acclaimed essay Oct. 21 complaining about the lack of complex female leads in dumb comedies.

Yeah, well, I’ve got a great essay in my drawer complaining about the lack of Torah observance among shiksas. Who wants to publish it and then host me to read excerpts from my masturbation diary?

Only anti-Semitism can account for the world’s stubborn unwillingness to view me as I view myself.

As there is no female claim to victimhood that won’t get its own support group and polite coverage in the media, Zocalo sponsored tonight’s discussion at — where else? — NPR in Culver City (who knew that Jefferson Blvd took such interesting curves though not as fascinating as the ones shown off by Megan and Carina).

If Carina had written about the lack of female characters in the National Football League, she would not have received a less effusive reaction.

Zocalo billed the program thus:

Does Hollywood misunderstand women or is it the other way around? Responding to the recent onslaught of studio films featuring unemployed, socially maladjusted men and the bland (and usually blonde) bombshells who love them, Los Angeles Times film critic Carina Chocano recently wrote an essay about the lack of substantial roles for comedic actresses. “The idea that a girl might play anything other than ‘the girl’ in a studio comedy,” wrote Chocano, “is so far out of the mainstream that it’s considered an experimental concept, not to mention a major financial risk.”

Carina Chocano and Meghan Daum visit Zócalo for a thoughtful and witty conversation about women and humor, women and Hollywood and whether or not there’s any truth to the increasingly conventional wisdom that diminishing female roles are a direct result of diminishing female audiences.

Carina looks like Ugly Betty Gone MILF. She has braces and a thick hive of disheveled hair. Her short skirt hikes up to her waist when she sits down, revealing many interesting dimensions to her ideology that have been insufficiently revealed in this summer’s movies such as Knocked Up.

I’m sure Chocano has many provocative things to say about Hollywood but she hardly has a chance tonight.

You’re thinking that Hollywood’s patriarchal power structure reached out and shut her up.

You’re wrong.

What prevents Carina from getting a word in edgewise is fellow traveler Meghan Daum who won’t shut up.

I don’t mind. I like assertive women who are cute and funny and smart and Megan is all of these things and more. She can roll over me like a tank any night.

I can see having dinner with her and all night she complains about how tough life is for women. Then we order drinks and she burns her bra and proclaims she can outf— any man.

Yowza mate!

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming of objective reporting presented in the present tense just the way you like it.

Megan says women are harder on themselves than men. That they struggle with perfectionist complexes.

Yeah, well, how come none of these perfectionist complexes revolve around pleasing a tubby tortured twink like me?

I’ve noticed that when I ask women about their biggest moral struggles, they usually say something lame like "I’m too nice."

If I posed that question to Daum, she’d probably answer, "I fear voicing my opinion. I need to learn to be more assertive. I’m too hard on myself."

Carina complains repeatedly that this summer’s movies were not realistic and that she could not relate to any of the female leads.

In other words, none of them were Latino movie critics for the L.A. Times.

Why am I here? What is the purpose of my being? Can I reconcile the existence of an all powerful all beneficent deity with the existence of such evil as tonight’s show? Am I trying to punish myself for boinking too many porn stars?

The conscious part of my brain says I needed to do something social tonight and it was either this or pray in shul.

The horror, the horror!

I’m not sure which choice would be more painful.

Eureka! There’s a cry of sanity from the audience. A TV writer says he and his peers took quirky lines out of the mouths of minority characters because activist groups complain too much about such things.

End result? Fat white guys got the best lines.

"I don’t know if women want to laugh at themselves."

Meghan earnestly assures us that she and Corina and co "can laugh at themselves."

Yeah, well, how do you like this blog post?

A woman in her 20s complains that all the 16 year old girls in Superbad looked like models and all they talked about was giving blowjobs.

She said this was bad.

Meghan said this was bad.

Carina said this was bad.

The fat chicks behind me said this was bad.

Because I’m wearing a yarmulke, I fear voicing dissent on this score, but in my heart I don’t want young boys, black or white, having to tread my lonely path of no (satisfactory) oral lovin’ till 30.

Relax the head and the throat will follow.

Corina complains that all the important cows in Barnyard were male and there was no Queen Bee in the Bee movie.

There’s time for only one more question.

Just when I think I’m going to get out of here with my heart intact, a woman — who else? — cruelly digs in the knife.

She brings up the movie Waitress (my only meaningful date in a year, going west where the skies are blue, but rejection soon followed, blame Google). Its leads were women. It was written and directed by women. It focused on womenly themes.

Meghan concludes: "Waitress is not reaching the people who need it most."

What do Meghan and Corina think summer comedies are? The holy eucharist? Christ, they’re low-brow entertainment. They’re dumb as rocks. They’re witless a la The 40-Year Old Virgin.

Smart people read books. Goyim go to movies to seek meaning.

Only someone with an empty life could get worked up over dumb flicks not having sophisticated female leads.

Afterwards, there’s a lavish kiddish.

Despite the vibrant program featuring thinkers and doers speaking on some of the most pressing topics of the day, bringing together an extraordinarily diverse group of Angelenos, creating a non-partisan and multi-ethnic forum where participants can enjoy a rare opportunity for intellectual fellowship and race mixing, I look longingly (a violation of Zocalo’s rules) upon Corina and Megan and flirt with the idea of talking to them but realize if I do I’ll never be able to write about them in my deranged style, and instead I depart as partisan, mono-ethnic and chaste as I came.

Fran emails: "Hey, Luke, I read your blog and I was waiting for you to say that Carina spoke like a Valley Girl, using "like", "ya know" and "um, that’s interesting" in every sentence. She struggled to finish a thought, and stay on subject. But I guess you were too busy looking up her skirt to notice."

Carina writes Oct. 21:

WATCHING "Lars and the Real Girl" recently, I had the feeling that I’d seen this story before. The movie stars Ryan Gosling as a lonely weirdo who purchases a life-size sex doll, imbues her with a saintly personality (she’s a celibate paraplegic missionary who loves kids) and introduces her to his brother and sister-in-law as his girlfriend, Bianca.

Naturally, they are horrified, as is everyone else in the small Midwestern town where they live. But on the advice of the town shrink, they all agree to play along with the illusion that "Bianca" is real until Lars is good and ready to snap out of it.

But a funny thing happens to the town after they agree to treat Bianca as a person. They start to enjoy spending time with her alone. They embrace her as part of the community. They elect her to the school board. They succumb to mass delusion, forgetting how crazy it once seemed.

It was during the everybody-loves-Bianca montage that it hit me why Lars and Bianca looked so familiar. "Lars and the Real Girl" may be a self-consciously cute, low-budget art-house comedy, but its central conceit is a perfect metaphor for what’s happened to male and female characters in mainstream comedies. He’s a schlub, she’s beautiful. He’s active, she’s passive. He’s maladjusted, she’s placid. He’s unreliable and immature, she’s patient and forgiving. He’s funny and charming, she’s conventional and dull. He’s the subject, she’s the object. He’s human, she’s a piece of plastic with a fantasy projected on it.

When actress Isla Fisher remarked on the dearth of decent comedy roles for women earlier this month ("I realized after ‘Wedding Crashers’ there aren’t that many comic opportunities for women in Hollywood," she told Details magazine. "All the scripts are for men and you play ‘the girl’ "), the comment was widely picked up, with most of the headlines making some allusion to feminism. The idea that a girl might play anything other than "the girl" in a studio comedy is so far out of the mainstream that it’s considered an experimental concept, not to mention a major financial risk. It seems that not a week goes by without a dust-up about the alleged misogyny of studio executives, or a lament about the state of women’s careers in Hollywood, or an explosion of frustration on feminist blogs.