Like most of what passes for satire in Hollywood, Ivan Reitman’s
My Super Ex-Girlfriend, is too self-referential. The movie
business’s satire of anything outside the movie business (see
Primary Colors, Wag the Dog or Mr. Reitman’s own
Dave) is inept, while its satire of itself (see The
Player) invariably stumbles over the fact that it is too much
in love with itself to stick the knife in. Yet Mr. Reitman’s film
also has its points. It begins with what amounts to an announcement
that it is in “Seinfeld” territory as its hero, Matt Saunders (Luke
Wilson) and his sidekick, Vaughn (Rainn Wilson), argue about what
super-power they would choose if they could have just one. Like
similar hypothetical discussions between Jerry and George Costanza,
this tells us that they recognize the essential silliness and
childishness of the whole super-hero concept, but that they are
content to remain children in this respect (as in others) and, in
fact, are rather proud of themselves for it. They would think
themselves pretentious to express genuine skepticism.
Matt, on a dare from Vaughn, approaches a mousy-looking Uma
Thurman — or as mousy-looking as it’s possible for Uma Thurman to
look — in a subway car and asks her out. She shoots him down, but
just then a mugger grabs her purse and sprints out of the subway
with Matt in hot pursuit. Matt gets the purse back while at the
same time showing us that he is far from being a hero, even of the
non-super kind. Yet Miss Thurman, going under the name of Jenny
Johnson, tells him that she is helping people all the time and that
this is the first time anyone has helped her. “You’re my hero,” she
tells him.
Of course, it’s a joke, like everything else in the movie. She
happens to be “G-girl,” a superhero (heroine?) with, apparently,
pretty much unlimited powers, including the power to give Matt the
kind of experience in bed — the coy synecdoche for which is that
the bed smashes the bedroom wall and breaks — that keeps him
coming back for more even though it swiftly becomes apparent that
she is also nuts. Well, neurotic, manipulative, insecure and
paranoid — not qualities usually associated with superheroes.
And here we must touch upon a delicate subject that remains
largely subtextual — or subsexual — in the movie. It is that a
female superhero is really a contradiction in terms, though the
ruling unisex ideology in Hollywood doesn’t allow it to say so
explicitly. All the male superheroes are wish-fulfillment
fantasies. Boys, particularly if they are nerdy and timid, like to
imagine themselves in possession of powers that allow them to
man-handle the world and make them invulnerable to those they fear.
With those powers there traditionally come modesty, chivalry and a
gift for understatement. Girls are not immune to such temptations,
but their fantasies don’t usually take the same form. They don’t
dream of knocking missiles out of the sky with brute force like
Superman but of magically manipulating husbands or boyfriends with
a twitch of the nose, like Samantha Stevens on “Bewitched.”
G-girl — we are never told what the “G” stands for, though both
“Girl” and “Goddess” are suggested — is the physical, Superman
sort of hero because she is not a positive female fantasy nearly so
much as she is a negative male fantasy. She’s the ex-girlfriend
from hell who doesn’t boil bunnies in a sneakily female sort of way
but instead hurls giant, man-eating sharks through your bedroom
window. In other words, she is not really a superhero but a super
anti-hero, not the power-fantasy of the fearful but the ultimate
fear itself, not a dream of safety but a nightmare of helplessness
in the arms of a capricious killer with the world’s worst case of
PMS.
The film is a comedy, so it’s pretty clear that our Matt isn’t
going to be devoured by the shark. He’s bound to be all right and
make, we trust, the smooth transition from psycho-girl to the
unthreatening work-pal, Hannah (Anna Faris), who we see from the
beginning is his destiny. But Mr. Reitman’s film, written by Don
Payne, has a final surprise in store for us. I hope it won’t be
considered a spoiler if I give away this much: the fear of the
super ex-girlfriend is not neatly disposed of like a super-villain
dropped into a volcano — or even stranded on a desert island like
Kevin Spacey’s Lex Luthor in the recent Superman Returns.
She’s still around and still scary, though in a different way —
domesticated, as we might say, just as the film’s own
super-villain, played by Eddie Izzard, is.
The casting says it all. Mr. Izzard’s “Professor Bedlam” —
who’s afraid of a professor, even if he’s not played by a
guy who’s known for dressing like a woman? — is obviously one of
the feeblest super-villains on record. But he does do well at
standing for the sexual ambiguity from which Matt finds no
miraculous rescue in the end. At one point, when things are still
pretty good between him and Jenny, and just after he learns her
secret identity, she takes him up for what he describes as “a whole
new take on the Mile High Club.” He says to her on this occasion,
“I’m feeling just a little bit emasculated with you carrying me
around like a toy poodle — but don’t let go.” That, high in the
night-time sky above Manhattan, is also where the film comes down.
G-girl, both Girl and Goddess, is not going to allay our fears of
emasculation anytime soon, so we’d better get used to living with
her — and her capacity for capricious destruction — hanging
around.
