We saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall at the local second-run movie theatre. We ached for cheap laughs to rest our weary neural synapses and refresh our parched prefrontal cortex pleasure centers. We wanted to sit in a theatre with the chortling masses and bond with them over mutual amusement from mindless debauchery. And, similar to how the movie’s hero was desparate to forget all about his TV star ex-girlfriend by fleeing to Hawaii, we want to forget all about Forgetting Sarah Marshall the second that we left the move theatre and stepped back into our reality of intellectual discontent.
Except, I haven’t completely forget about it. The dialogue, plot, gags, and most of the characters are forgotten, but one image remains burned in my mind: That of main character Jason Segel’s thrice-shown full-frontal male nudity. This joggles recall of the various sex scenes, which were non-nude but rather graphic all the same.
Mass-market romantic comedies aimed at older teenagers and college students have gotten a lot sexier in the past ten years. Back in my day, movies did not show repeated and lingering full-frontal male nudity. Every sex scene was so ambiguous and restrained that you could never be completely certain that intercourse is supposed to be occuring. The dirtiest mainstream movie was perhaps Screwballs, which featured characters named Purity Busch and Bootsie Goodhead getting their bikini tops ripped off. How quaint.
I tried to imagine myself as the parent of those hooting teenagers surrounding us in the theatre. Surely this is not the sort of movie the whole family can watch together without supreme discomfort, but I don’t think I’d mind if my son or daughter saw this movie unaccompanied. The film contains no violence other than a few fistfights, it’s not completely inane, and Jason Segel is so unattractive that I would have no fears of his naked body corrupting my teenager. His body is just that disturbing.
