I just finished reading yet another blithely laudatory review of this “new” DEATH OF A SALESMAN that everyone is creaming their pants over—in the most respectful, urbane way possible, I mean—but I find myself compelled to write not about this play—which quite frankly I don’t really want to see ever again—but about another bastion of contemporary high culture, a little film based on a scarcely-remembered TV show called 21 JUMP STREET. It’s a movie about two cops who try to blend in as high school students in order to stop…drugs? Something like that.
I loved this movie and suddenly—because I have paranoid schizophrenia?—feel the need to defend it.
Or perhaps not so paranoid, although that is precisely what a paranoid schizophrenic would say (this ouroboros only leads to madness, I assure you). Yesterday in discussing the movie with one friend who actually saw it and eloquently-enough “thought it fucking blew” I started to question exactly why I, actually, didn’t think it blew. But really, how can I not respond to the following:
“I didn't know you liked cheap, middle America humor”
and
“I am so shocked that a film snob like you liked this”
First of all, I’m a movie snob not a ‘film snob.’ A film snob has wet dreams about like—I dunno-- Kurosawa, and I just think I’m right all the time. Secondly, I LOVE cheap middle American Humor -- that’s what our country was built on, Lewis and Clark giving each other dead-arms n shit. (Disclaimer: Sorry Brett don’t mean to pick on you—you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time with this one)
I pride myself in my movie snobbery—tautology, ahoy!—but specifically because it is so boundary-less. I love a horror movie that is a right horror movie; I love a soporific Estonian melodrama if it is a correctly soporific Estonian melodrama; and I love a high school teen comedy when it gets the genre right, or turns the genre on its head smartly. 21 JUMP ST, a teen comedy or something in the way of a buddy-cop movie, does both those things—it gives you the very-real pleasures of “those kinds of movies” but also gives a smart-but-not-too-clever wink-wink in the direction of “this is parody, bitches, come along for the ride!” So MIDDLE AMERICAN HUMOR doesn’t, on the outset, turn me off – in fact it thrills me if I feel it’s being wielded by filmmakers not as a parochial limitation, but rather a tool in their arsenal for telling stories.
So that’s the first reason I like this movie. Subtle genre nods – such as a fast cut to a “chase sequence”—only to reveal Channing Tatum is on a bicycle and is trying to awkwardly pedal across a lawn—isn’t ground breaking comedy, but it is perfectly acceptable physical humor. Or ICE CUBE as the stereotypically angry black sergeant—he goes balls-to-the-wall with it instead of trying to round out the character (Tangent: I wonder how Samuel L Jackson will handle his role as Nick Fury in THE AVENGERS; he’s too “good” an actor to embrace such arch-‘blackness’, but I feel like the role really could use that). Surely there are earlier movies that have, to varying success, utilized this approach to parody. But it’s a good framework for a film, which, yes comes down to a matter of tone—and that really is something you either see or don’t see. I don’t feel like anything in 21 JUMP ST was done “just because” – and purposefulness is really one of the best criterion in judging any directorial endeavor.
Second, and when the movie really broke out as excellent for me, was in its depiction of modern high school. As they prepare for their first day as ‘fake’ high school students, Channing Tatum chastises Jonah Hill for “two strapping” (wearing your backpack how it’s supposed to be worn, instead of the cool, hanging-off-one-shoulder, I-don’t-give-a-crap look). Surely this is signifier for “cool” in some cheap but categorical way. When they get to school, however, they find that everyone is “two-strapping” now – lame is cool again, in the forever repeating circle of trends. All you have to do is wait long enough (so save those hammer Pants).
It seems simple enough, but I think ever since AMERICAN PIE we’ve had some sort of filmic arrested development in the depiction of high school – it’s always jocks v. nerds, football players and cheerleaders, “mean girls” and geeks. It’s a ridiculous economy that isn’t based on untruths, but doesn’t reflect the weird, postmodern milieu of the suburbs of 2012. As the surely-insipid AMERICAN REUNION looms ahead, I think it’s good to reflect on the lazy way we’ve defined this setting, and the damage it does to story telling. This isn’t about trope, or filmic posturing—which is of course the very brand of movies like SCARY MOVIE or NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE. It’s about something infinitely more and also less subtle—tone. We don’t dismiss the scenarios in 21 JUMP ST entirely, this isn’t some cartoon where one frame informs the next not at all, but we also allow for a comic elasticity. We let it get away with its clichés, and it rewards us by bringing us into the joke.
High school, 2012: Everyone is two strapping; caring about the environment is cool now(???), a gay black kid is one of the popular guys. I cannot overstate how splendidly transgressive a throwaway line is like this one: this cool kid, not feeling the vibe at the house party going down, comments “let’s get out of here, there’s not even any hot guys.” That is a hilarious, carefully observed line. I also happen to think it’s progressive, not because “gay” can be cool, but because it is both aware of and doesn’t take for granted the assumptions an AMERICAN PIE would come out of the gate holding on to. There are some other “gay jokes” here that I feel are less successful, but mostly because they are bad jokes, not because they are mean spirited. There’s no denying the homosocial aspect of the buddy cop movie in general, indeed aren’t Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill a little “gay for each other” – indeed, isn’t the movie as a whole a little “gay for” Channing Tatum, whose godly physically appearance is just this running gag among all the characters, male and female. It’s okay to be gay for your buddy; gay for an actor; gay. But it’s okay only because WE DON’T NEED TO SAY THAT. (Glee does, by the way, which is why it is infinitely less evolved).
High School is different now, sure. And the cool kids are different too – Dave Franco (James’ equally offbeat brother) and Jonah hill’s love interest Brie Larson are these oddball hipsters, and I think it’s so smart not to just cast pretty people in these roles. You cared about them in a way that is actually quite surprising, I found. They are funny and odd and stupid in a great—realistic way. So this is the third reason I like the movie—I feel like it encourages some fun performances. No MONEYBALL turn, but Jonah Hill delivers the skinny version of SUPERBAD, and Channing Tatum—who I already admit I have a thing for—rises to the occasion with some really excellent comedic work. I have never seen him so suited for a role, and so funny. Partially it’s because the role is really just him – a hunky, dumb guy who just sort of fakes his way through doing his job – but it’s to the credit of the actor and the director that this is the route they go with it.
Ultimately this movie pulls off a great trick – it straddles the gray area between parody (a ‘farce’ of the buddy-cop movie) and pastiche (mélange of influences, bequeathed ideas, hackneyed images, idiosyncratic diversions) in a funny, interesting, and in my opinion ORIGINAL way. An original remake of an 80s television show that wasn’t very good in the first place? Starring actors de jour who can get laughably hit in the nuts but don’t exactly offer anything in the way of comedic grace? I wouldn’t have thought it, I didn’t think it; I do now.
It’s not a perfect movie, but it takes the risk that smart people can have fun at stupid movies, and doesn’t need unrelenting silliness (Will Farrell/Jim Carey) or heart-on-its-sleeve-amidst-the-dick jokes bathos to know it’s worth our time. Run, don’t walk.
Holy hell.
