Seth Rogen Hates America and So Do I

...after seeing his latest movie.

In 2009, "Seth Rogen movie" is a genre unto itself, guaranteeing a mediocre leading man and his tossing off of lazy half-jokes that America has grown to kind of like sometimes. The films themselves also deliver all the usual time-honored traditions of modern American cinema: women-hating, man-hating, casual racism, no real plot, a future unrated DVD release and this week's most oft-repeated one-liners. (Thanks, Will Ferrell!)

But in 2009, none of it has to "mean anything". Contemporary American culture often treads in irony to keep from drowning, but it's lost on anyone who isn't hip to the self-loathing that being a Young American in 2009 is capable of inciting. Seth Rogen and other consumer outfits like him (Girl Talk, Urban Outfitters) straddle the dividing line of "mainstream" and the "alternative" culture that has become its own lucrative non-statement.

Observe and Report (if only the film's greatest offense was merely being as boring as it's heinous title) finds itself in a really weird time in America, and shows that we're still not done repenting for all of our sins of the past eight (60?) years. The humor of the film is incredibly dark; its center is sexual violence rendered a joke, and it's leading character is a loathsome authoritarian, an incapable mall cop with a sleeveless USA t-shirt and inflated ego in lieu of any humanity. His dream of becoming a real police officer is rooted in "doing God's work." The film, shot in New Mexico, is painted with images of the American landscape as a natural and cultural wasteland-- the mall and suburbs make up the entirety of the setting. The leading character is clearly loathed by the brand-name actor/personality playing him, a fact that is doubtlessly lost on a large portion of his audience. The film effectively takes America's most defining and deceptively innocuous elements (the dream of a "better life", malls) reveals them as insidious and wrong, then dares us to laugh. And we do. I'm wondering what kind of culture chuckles easily at-- almost at the familiarity of-- Rogen's character's alcoholic, emotionally abusive mother.

Rarely during a film (that's not a documentary on the military-industrial complex) have I been consciously overcome with the sense that America is a dark and disgusting place, made up almost entirely of drunk makeup artists/"sluts", born-again virgins, unjustified self-righteous authoritarians and food courts.

The film opens with the Band's "When I Paint My Masterpiece," which Bob Dylan wrote in 1971 the about his experience as American in Europe. The song reprises halfway through the movie, while Rogen's character is getting the shit kicked out of him by a dozen policemen in the mall (in a sequence that doesn't really make any sense, and as with the barn-burning scene in Pineapple Express, seems to be the whole reason that the movie was made in the first place-- you can imagine Rogen and his connected posse sitting around and talking how cool it would be to make a movie with this specific scene involving gratuitous beatings/blood/fire/explosions/cops/etc.) The use of this song-- written by the most celebrated song writer of modern America and performed by a bunch of guys in love with the idea and history of that country, which wasn't even theirs-- as a backdrop for slow-motion pans of plastic mall culture and fat American asses cuts a little too close to the bone, as does the rest of the excellent soundtrack, which features no songs recorded after approximately 1988. The soundtrack is easily the best part of the movie, but doesn't do it any favors by proving only that there is nothing true or of any value in contemporary America, least of all the lazy nihilism of Observe and Report.