AMY SCHUMER’S ‘TRAINWRECK’: A CONSERVATIVE CRITIQUE OF THE HOOK UP CULTURE:

Finding true love and settling down is so much a part of the Hollywood script that it may seem a leap to call it a conservative movie just because of that.  But the reason I walked out wondering if Schumer or Apatow were among the Hollywood crypto-conservative cadres has more to do with what came before the ending.  Ms. Schumer is famous for sexually explicit humor, a kind of caustic feminism, and a certain generational outrageousness.  And yet, in her maiden film, she consciously depicted every single sexual encounter of her liberated heroine as dreary and unenviable.  They vary from tedious to visibly empty and frustrating. The viewer is forced to wonder why she lies there, when it’s doing nothing for her; why she goes home with someone just because he asks; and what it means when she says that she likes sex, when she clearly does not like the actual sex she manages to have. No young woman watching this movie, including the 19-year-old I was with, could walk out of the theater thinking anything about the protagonist’s lifestyle was appealing. The movie could be used as part of aversion therapy. All of that changes, of course, when she meets the good doctor, and has to figure out how to have a real relationship.

A conservative moviemaker could do worse than to depict the millennial hook-up culture as so empty that marrying a doctor and joining the suburban bourgeois looks like salvation.

To be fair, even Klute ended with Jane Fonda’s character chucking her lucrative call girl career and leaving swinging New York to go live in the country with Donald Sutherland’s small town detective character, a remarkably conservative ending despite both actors being at the peak of their far left anti-American activist phase.

I’m sure it added several million at the box office, which must have pleased Fonda, even as she was insisting, “If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist. . . . I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism.”