Thursday, December 30, 2010

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or, What a Girl Ought To Do With A Naked, Pudgy Man

Clearly the wrong course of action.
The correct option, according to the film.

I kept wondering if Rachel was a figment of Peter's imagination.  To Peter she isn't an other at all.  Her otherness falls along the contours of his fantasies and insecurities.  And his psychology is written following a lazy cliche of masculinity: he feels inadequate, and to get the girl he must become a man, he must prove his manliness (by jumping off a cliff after her, by heroically purloining a naked photo of her from the bathroom wall, by being productive and self-sufficient).  She is completely circumscribed by and accessible via his poorly written conception of the other.  She is the phallus and nothing more.  What dull excrement.