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‘Trainwreck’
Makes the Case for Monogamy
Katrina Trinko
July 22, 2015
She’s no fan of monogamy, she is baffled when her boyfriend talks about
marriage and she’s all about the one-night stand.
You’d think she’d be the heroine in a Hollywood movie. Instead,
she’s…well, a “Trainwreck.”
(And “Trainweck” is not some new slang for “super cool,” in case you’re
wondering.)
Director Judd Apatow’s latest movie follows the formula he’s become
known for: excessive raunch paired with family values. “Trainwreck”
begins with a dad telling his two young daughters that monogamy’s
unrealistic, asking them if they’d want to commit to playing with just
one doll for the rest of their lives.
Then he explains that that’s why their mom and dad are getting divorced.
The sexual revolution and feminism
Twenty-three years later, Amy (played by Amy Schumer) is a loyal
daddy’s girl, playing the field aggressively. She, also like her dad,
uses drugs (one memorable scene involves her smoking weed out the
window of a hotel during a professional luncheon) and drinks copiously.
(Spoilers follow.)
But instead of coming off as a strong, sexually “liberated” woman who’s
being true to herself, Amy only appears deeply troubled.
The more men she touches, the more closed off she becomes: when she
does sleep with a man she feels connection to, she requires him,
post-sex, to place a pillow between them and stay completely on his
side, just because she can’t bear a non-sexual touch. At the funeral of
their dad, her sister Kim snaps at Amy in some variation of “Stop
pushing me away!”
Because that’s what Amy does, and it’s never more poignant than at the
funeral of their dad. If there is one person Amy loves, it’s her dad—a
man she herself describes in her eulogy as an “a–hole.”
Her father’s daughter
Pairing a romantic comedy storyline with a daughter’s struggle to cope
with her father’s multiple sclerosis, nursing home experience and
eventual death may seem like a surprising script move.
But it’s an inspired one—“Trainwreck” is the first Hollywood film I can
recall that truly considers what it’s like to grow up as a child of the
sexual revolution, what it’s like when your own parents have rejected
the ideal of lifelong, monogamous marriage.
Amy and Kim have responded in very different ways to their parents’
choices. Kim takes their mom’s side, while Amy is loyal to their dad.
Kim has married and is devoted to her stepson and husband. Amy doesn’t
seem to give marriage a second thought.
“Trainwreck” suggests that the children of the
sexual revolution face a certain tension: that it’s hard to accept and
cope with that the parents you love may have made choices you cannot
defend or repeat.
Yet, after her dad’s death, Amy slowly begins to show signs of change.
Was her prior behavior something she had chosen, or was it something
she adopted because she loved her dad, much the way a small child will
imitate her parents? Did she truly hate monogamy—or did she feel that
to embrace it would be to betray the dad she loved, the dad she
defended, the dad she wholeheartedly supported, warts and all?
These are the questions raised by “Trainwreck,” which, thankfully,
doesn’t pretend it can unravel Amy’s motivations or posit a simple
“moral of the story.” Nor does it seem realistic that Amy had no
attraction to a non-monogamous lifestyle.
But “Trainwreck” suggests that the children of the sexual revolution
face a certain tension: that it’s hard to accept and cope with that the
parents you love may have made choices you cannot defend or repeat.
In some ways, Amy is almost the anti-teenager, the woman trying so
desperately to keep her dad on a pedestal that she’s willing to decide
her whole values system according to what system keeps her dad up high
and revered.
Promiscuity and Intimacy
But as we see, Amy’s paying a high price for that. Her relationship
with sports doctor Aaron Conners (played by Bill Hader) is her uneasy
foray into monogamy. It’s a genuine struggle for her: she is suspicious
when he calls her after they sleep together, and she is confused by
Conners’s willingness to help her with her dad.
Yet she keeps dating him, keeps not sleeping around—to the extent that
Conners is shocked when Amy’s brother-in-law references Amy’s past
sexual history, a topic she’d been loud and proud about in the past.
Her relationship with Conners isn’t the only area where Amy struggles
to handle intimacy. Amy may not be using a pillow as a physical barrier
between herself and her brother-in-law and nephew, but she’s showing a
similarly cold attitude. She has buddies, but no friends she has
serious conversations with.
Amy’s lack of intimate relationships becomes a topic during a heated
fight she has with Conners. He tells her that she and her magazine
friends are content to judge people from afar.
In a world where snarky sites like “Gawker” thrive and where millions
watch reality shows like the Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise,
perhaps mainly to judge, Conners’s statement becomes especially bold:
are we, thanks to our sexual promiscuity and the perhaps necessarily
concurrent disdain for intimacy, becoming increasingly distant from
each other?
Do we judge and snark and mock because we’re not close enough to anyone
anymore to remember people’s humanity?
In her lowest moment, Amy tries to sleep with a man she doesn’t even
like—someone she’s only treated with disdain before.
It’s a painful scene to watch, to see Amy physically connect with
someone she cannot mentally connect with at all. The gulf between mind
and body, between spirit and flesh, seems enough to tear anyone apart,
to make clear the usefulness of pot and alcohol as numbing buddies—and
to suggest that Amy may shy away from intimacy from people because
she’s so accustomed to sexual intimacy including some kind of painful
disconnect.
Of course, because this is a romantic comedy, the movie doesn’t end
with Amy’s lowest moment, but with her accepting a family group hug
(and the intimacy that comes with that), and reuniting with Conners
after their huge fight.
But “Trainwreck” defies the usual romantic comedy formula by tackling
head-on the question about whether monogamy and happily ever after are
even still relevant in our current culture, where so often we seem to
value passion above commitment, where “Sex and the City” may seem more
relevant than “You’ve Got Mail” or “Sleepless in Seattle.”
“Trainwreck” doesn’t just give Amy a happy ending; it also vehemently
argues that monogamous, committed love is still the happy ending we all
should want—because the alternative necessitates avoiding intimacy and
genuine love.
Read this and other articles with photos and links at The Daily Signal
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