Forgetting Virtue

There has been a lot of talk surrounding the release of the latest Judd Apatow film, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Apatow’s characters are lovable for their clueless but well-intentioned attitude toward life. Even in their obsessions with sexual fulfillment, they are still somewhat childlike. In this, however, they are worlds away from the movie-goers who revel in them. They retain an innocence and an ignorance to which we cannot aspire. We know too much. The Apatow hero ends up being merely charming.

On the other hand, the makers of the raunchy Harold and Kumar movies seem to have captured a much more recognizable character-type. The brainy stoner, the overachieving slacker, is now quite familiar on college campuses. This image of the intelligent math geek or arts major massively overindulging in the pleasures of the senses calls to mind Walker Percy’s critique of the Cartesian mind-body split which he found so prevalent in modern man. In Love in the Ruins, Percy presents deliciously ironic characters whose abstract intellectualism, divorced from their present bodily situation, eventually gives way to a complete loss of restraint of their sexual desires.

Desires, left unregulated, eventually compel the mind to follow them. Today, the justification given by our sexual hedonists for avoiding deviant sexuality (orgies, even bestiality) is mainly aesthetic. Tastes are subject to change, however, and in our increasingly remissive culture (to use Philip Rieff’s term), it is certainly conceivable that these deviancies will eventually undergo widespread legitimation. In the shorter term, however, one wonders: to what extent can young people, having finished with their extended college revelry, settle down and adapt to a relatively normal life?