Review of Bridesmaids (2011) by Shiira — 14 Jun 2011

"You're putting the p**** on a pedestal," Jay complains to Andy Stitzer, the sexual naif in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin", the 2005 gross-out comedy that stole the genre's mantle away from the previously undisputed kings of good-natured sexism, Peter & Bobby Farrelly.

It's Jay's opinion that Andy's apprehension towards women stems from his overvaluation of the vagina. The "p****", according to the video equipment salesman, is not some "great big goddess named "P***alia" whom you can never approach.

He tells Andy to stop psyching himself out. When it comes to uneasiness concerning female genitalia, however, nobody can beat the Catholic church. As a matter of fact, both Jay and the Orthodox officials seem to believe that the female sex and the female sex organ are one and the same.

At the outset of "The Magdalene Sisters"(or what I like to call, "The Song That Bono Forgot to Write"), a wedding is in progress, where Bernadette, through no fault of her own, gets raped by a first cousin, but be that as it may, ends up at an asylum for "fallen women", because in the church's eyes, a compromised vagina is a compromised vagina, regardless of how it ended up that way.

Recalling the scene in "Porky's" where Pee-Wee and his friends turn the girls' shower room into a peepshow, "The Magdalene Sisters" too becomes a gross-out comedy, but this time nobody is laughing, as two nuns, acting more like adolescent boys than servants of the Lord, objectify and humiliate a lineup of buck-naked girls by comparing their breast sizes and pubic hair density in a contest.

Furthermore, whereas the teacher howls like a wolfess when she has sex with a fellow colleague, the priest is "not a man of God", but a dog(a practitioner of "outercourse", as defined by the health clinic counselor in the Apatow film), who receives oral sex from a mentally-challenged girl.

Catholicism keeps people(especially women) in bondage, just like the action figures Andy retains in their hermetically-sealed boxes. As chance would have it, the virgin's follicle-rich chest, metaphorically speaking, could be a hairshirt, sometimes called a cilice, made from goat's hair that sinners wore as penance for their transgressions.

Jay, who complains to Moog, "Why are you always telling me to f*ck a goat?" can't watch the waxing, because down deep inside, he knows that the wrong man is being punished. Unlike the asylum priest, Andy doesn't practice even the most mildest form of outercourse.

When the virgin receives a box of porn from David, he ends up watching "Everybody Loves Raymond". Not wanting to be obvious about the sexism(and running critique about said sexism) that subsists in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin", the filmmaker punishes the next best thing to a woman: an emasculated man, so it's Andy, who unfairly pays for the subjugation of women, a filmic chastening facilitated by a stealthy conservatism that belies the numerous references to extreme sex acts, among them, bestiality and anal intercourse.

Encapsulated in his raw, bloody nipples is an auto-criticism of the film's sexual content. "Knocked Up", shares with its predecessor the same silent dialectic in which Catholic dogma gets masked by a seemingly nihilistic purview, save for the fact that Alison never considers abortion as a viable option to her, initially anyway, unwanted pregnancy.

At least "Juno" goes through the motions of feminism when the pregnant teen visits a clinic before she has second thoughts about the procedure. Likewise, the fetus is a person to Ben. The expectant father worries that his penis will reach the unborn child during intercourse, therefore scarring the developing infant for life.

In other words, "Knocked Up" endorses the belief that the fetus has a consciousness. "Bridesmaids", on the other hand, is free of the latent Catholicism abiding itself surreptitiously in the aforementioned films.

It's no accident that Wilson Phillips makes a cameo late in this uber-chick flick, performing the soft-rock classic "Hold On" at Lilian's wedding. The early-nineties refugees give the women permission to behave badly without any patriarchal moralizing.

They help their sisters "break free from the chains" of traditional religion by infusing the diegesis with paganism. Unlike Catholics, who believe that only humans have a soul, pagans practice animism, a conviction that everything has a spirit.

Indeed, the pedigreed girls seem to be practicing animism in the music video for their 1990 smash, where they sit on rocks atop a mountain, surrounded by trees, not crosses. The great outdoors is their church.

In "Bridesmaids", what do you know, they perform in the open air. So if Becca and Rita want to experiment with lesbianism, no robed man is going to judge them. The same goes for Annie, who has rigorous sex with a f*** buddy, and talks openly about oral sex with Lillian.

As equal opportunity anarchists go, it's hard to beat this wedding party.