The 40 Year Old Virgin
starring Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Leslie Mann and Jane Lynch
written by Judd Apatow and Steve Carell
directed by Judd Apatow
I waited a long, long time to watch this DVD. A single copy of it was in my local rental shop, but it was out so long I began to think that it had been stolen. I remember reading one review in the newspaper. I forget if it was a favorable review or not, but the title alone is so titillating that I wanted to see it. And it was …… a BIG disappointment!! I did not think it was clever, witty or especially funny. It wasn’t thought-provoking or meritoriously socially relevant. I watched the entire thing, plus all the bonus features, but I was on the verge of stopping it mid-way any number of times. The story has a good ending, but that does not redeem it for all the wasteful and extremely tiring juvenile sexual humor that fills it.
It might be taken as a statement about the (artificial) status of sexual activity in American society - at least, adult sexual activity - or about the merits of just saying NO to any number of social pressures in order to be one’s own person. The common view is this: sex is a normal (adult) human activity, therefore to be a fully, normally socially adjusted adult one hasto be sexually active. There is a mis-placed cultural expectation that every adult is sexually active, and that middle aged virginity amounts not only to a sexual and social deviance, but to a social and psychological pathology. It’s balderdash, of course, but that seems to be a common view of current American culture.
The church that I grew up in in Canada - the United Church of Canada, which is the country’s largest Protestant denomination - has made sex a platform of Church doctrine. Any kind of sex - hetero or homo - is now a matter of UC doctrine.
That is one of the things that drove me away from that denomination. My position that sex and sexuality are such private things that they are no one’s business were officially disdained by Church authorities. The Church - and the majority of the public - seems of the mind that everyone’s sexual life is fitting for publicity, public consumption, and public knowledge. This position is one that says that public sexuality enhances one’s humanity, while my objection is that such public revelation diminishes one’s humanity. Furthermore, the thinking is that since adult virginity amounts to psychological and social deviance as well as diminished humanity, nurturing and maintaining socially and psychologically developed people is a public concern such that their sexuality is an equally public matter. That is such bad thinking, how can I count the ways of its badness?
I think it’s fine to be a 40-year-old virgin. And the final message of this movie agrees with me. But on the road to that conclusion we are subjected to the entire battery of public pressure to have sex. I felt like turning the DVD off because that battery was being over-played to the point of boredom and even nausea. Let me suggest that sex and sexuality are important. Yes, really important. But not that important.