The Haunting Wordsworth: Romantic Poets and Monkeys With Typewriters

(x-posted to The Valve)

(UPDATED: I recommend the full text of Ray Davis’s post on the matter, available here.)

You might go on extending the list of explanations indefinitely, but you would find, we think, that all the explanations fall into two categories. You will either be ascribing these marks to some being capable of intentions (the living sea, the haunting Wordsworth, etc.), or you will count them as nonintentional effects of mechanical processes (erosion, percolation, etc.). But in the second case—where the marks now seem to be accidents—will they still seem to be words? Clearly not. They will merely seem to resemble words.
-Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory” (JSTOR link)

Suppose you confront a fallen pudding, or a toaster that would toast, but for that frayed power cord. It would be absurd to say, ‘I have no notion whatsoever what this…thing…is for.’ The fact that you call it a fallen pudding registers your awareness of what it was supposed to be for: eating.
-John Holbo, “Form, Function & Intention: Drafty Thoughts” (announcement and link here)

In their infamous article “Against Theory,” Knapp and Benn Michaels argued that if you happened across a reproduction of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” and you decided that no purposive being was responsible, the illusion of meaning would vanish. In its place, you would merely have the curious presence of shapes resembling words.

In Holbo’s wonderfully provocative series of responses, continued with “Now God Help Thee, Poor Monkey!”, he drafted the outlines of an argument about replacing intention with function. For Holbo, the best way to understand language is by understanding what it does within a community: between people, rather than merely in the purposive mind of the author (which is nonetheless quite real). Holbo’s argument about normative function hasn’t assumed its final form, but I suspect it will have elective affinities with the account given by Ray Davis, who writes:

Most art is intentionally produced, and, depending on the skill and cultural distance of the artists, many of its effects may be intended. And yes, many people intentionally seek entertainment, instruction, or stimulation. But as with any human endeavor, that doesn’t cover the territory…Happy accident is key to the persistence of art across time, space, and community, and, recontextualized, any tool can become an object of delight or horror.

I generally agree with both Davis and Holbo: language is a functional melange of intention and accident. I would add that it is a functional result of intentions both conscious and unconscious. Bearing this in mind, let’s probe a little deeper into the specific examples that arise in these conversations.

The first example, provided by Knapp and Benn Michaels, is that of a Wordsworth poem appearing on a beach; the authors suggest a number of possible agents, including the “living sea” and “the haunting Wordsworth.” The play on “haunting” is instructive; as much as this is a fable about human speech, it is also the record of an anxiety about the meaning of natural landscapes and events. To the Romantics, Nature was meaningful and capable of expression; to Knapp and Benn Michaels, Nature is a series of meaningless “mechanical processes.” The beach is supposed to represent a blank slate upon which words either are or aren’t written. Really, however, it is a symbolic maneuver in a bizarre anti-Romantic fantasy. I imagine we have all had the experience of writing words in the wet sand of a beach, and then looking on as the surf gradually erases them. This is the world as the Romantics knew it:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

In Shelley’s poem, Nature (particularly the natural process of decay) has an effect on the meaning of the inscription. It elevates it to the level of the sublime, in the full philosophical sense of the word. However, in “Against Theory,” the surf actually inscribes words, rather than washing them away. The result, that which “seems to resemble words,” brings us back to Immanuel Kant:

But what does even the most complete teleology prove in the end? Does it prove anything like that such an intelligent being exists? No; it proves nothing more than that because of the constitution of our cognitive faculties, and thus in the combination of experience with the supreme principles of reason, we cannot form any concept at all of the possibility of such a world except by conceiving of such an intentionally acting supreme cause. (Critique of the Power of Judgement, 5: 399)

Things in Nature seem to resemble words: they seem to have purposiveness. Kant’s fundamental insight was that order is purposive, but that the aesthetic is produced when you have the appearance of purposiveness without the knowledge of an end.

Thus, Kant is actually much more thorough and skeptical than Knapp and Benn Michaels. As several commenters on Holbo’s posts have noted, the argument in “Against Theory” isn’t very good, not least because it assumes that you can have knowledge of whether other beings are acting in an intentional manner in some direct, non-interpretive way. This amounts to completely dodging the so-called “problem of other minds.” Since you have to base your claims about intentionality on the fact that certain patterns appear to be intentional, which is circular, Knapp and Benn Michaels would have to conclude that an intentionally acting, supreme intelligent being does exist if similar-looking patterns appear in Nature (they do). Kant gets out of this problem by locating the circularity of this logic within the human mind, and calling the teleological assumption an inevitable result of the “constitution of our cognitive faculties.”

Holbo confronts the problem more directly. He cites Joseph Plunkett and William Paley on, respectively, the mystical and probabilistic arguments for a supreme cause, but rejects both of them. For Holbo, the liminal space between intentionality and mechanism becomes the realm of accident:

Suppose we find a screwdriver in the sand. Merely by seeing it as such, we register its function: driving screws. Also, if asked, we are prepared to presume it had a maker…We will not, certainly need not, assume anyone left this screwdriver as a message.

In short, he uses Paley’s argument from probability (it is very improbable that a universe ordered like ours could happen by accident) against Plunkett, and then uses the conjunction of intentionality (which is human) and accident (which manifests an absence of order) in order to refute Paley.

This brings us right back to Plunkett; you can’t use Paley to refute him if your next move is to refute Paley. Certainly, when it comes to small implements, the phenomenon of accident does not inspire a feeling of sublimity. In “Ozymandias,” however, the screwdriver in the sand does become something sublime. The tension between what is knowable and unknowable is the alternating presence and absence in things of an analogy with ourselves. We see ourselves in landscapes, animals, other people; then, just as quickly, they turn an alien face towards us, terrifying us with the prospect of destitution and oblivion.

I only have time to gesture at where this goes. People have a quite sophisticated grasp of the beautiful and the sublime; they write with sticks on the beach, watching in fascination as the surf rubs out each word, while simultaneously feeling in harmony with the larger pattern of the restless tide; they quote poetry to one another, unsure whether their own intentionality comes through when they repeat something originally written by Pablo Neruda or Bright Eyes. Meanwhile, scientists do all their work right at that line where the edifice of knowledge crumbles into guesswork.

Furthermore, we feel the acid of the sublime within our own selves, gnawing and disfiguring our words, threatening nonsense and madness. The reason that the image of the monkeys writing Shakespeare is so arresting is that we have typewriters (or laptops or what-have-you), and we don’t make particularly good use of them. Anybody who has ever tried to write a research paper or a dissertation can certainly identify with both of these paragraphs:

Moving from calculation to experiment, The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, in existence since 2003 with a hundred monkeys typing at a vastly accelerated speed, has produced just nineteen letters from The Two Gentlemen of Verona after 42,162,500,000 billion monkey years: “Valentine. Cease to 1dor:eFLPoFRjWK78aXz …”

An enterprising experiment that involved real monkeys produced even more confounding results, not least because “they get bored and they shit on the keyboard rather than type …”

In the film Alien, human beings have to save themselves from the hideous alliance of computer (Ian Holm’s corporate android) and animal (the alien), notwithstanding the fact that they themselves are this hybrid. The problem with the monkey example is that the monkeys never pay attention to what they’re writing. They never develop any sort of organic, aesthetic relationship to it; if they did, it would compromise the randomness necessary for the experiment. However, if those monkeys were human beings, then the moment Shakespeare happened it would drag the whole bunch of monkeys along with it, away from the junkheap of “1dor:eFLPoFRjWK78aXz” and towards normativity. If that sounds like Harold Bloom, don’t blame me: I didn’t make Shakespeare the gold standard for monkey type. This is less Bloom than it is Douglas Hofstadter: in Godel Escher Bach, Hofstadter argues that a set of determinate formal parameters (in this case, the fact that the typewriter has a given number of keys, and is being typed on by monkeys) can eventually produce a self-referential system with the capacity for meaning. This meaning, however, is always haunted by its own incompleteness, amounting finally to Hofstadter’s own Godelian sublime.

In other words, we should not think of monkeys-with-typewriters as a story about the presence or absence of intentionality in the non-human world; it is really a story about the aleatory genesis of meaning by and for human beings.

Of course, it is possible to argue that we should not distort the meaning of the example of monkeys with typewriters: the fact that such monkeys might remind us of human beings is not germane to the point of the thought-experiment. Similarly, the fact that a beach is where shore meets ocean is not germane to the point in “Against Theory,” and the fact that the toaster is broken is not germane to the nature of a toaster.

Two responses:

1. Easy distinctions between “accidental” and “necessary” states or causes frequently break down themselves. I might assume that the function of a broken toaster is still to make toast, and that the malfunction is an accident. If, instead of a toaster, you have an iPod, that assumption is totally unwarranted. The batteries always run out, and the mechanism itself usually dies as a result of planned obsolescence.

2. The insistence on throwing away the ladder that delivers us to a logical equation is partly a result of our modern situation. In a comment, Holbo writes:

A magic elf has five dollars but gives three to John. How much money does the elf have now?

Bob has five dollars but gives three to John. How much money does Bob have now?

Swampman, a creature generated by thermodynamic miracle, has five dollars but gives three to John. How much money does Swampman have now?

It seems to me the answer, in each case, is 2 dollars.

In each case the answer is 2 dollars, because in each case the point of the statement is purely algebraic. If function y equals x – 3, and x = 5, then y(x) = 2. It doesn’t matter if you call y “magic elf” or “Bob.” This is the logic of capital — it doesn’t matter who buys a pair of shoes, the store still makes a net profit of $2 per customer. It is also the logic of the cellphone or instant messaging conversation. If cellphone interference produces a garbled sentence, I still assume that the person on the other end of the line meant to speak clearly, and I reconstruct their sentence to the best of my ability. Hofstadter mentions that most people can be fooled into thinking that a chat session with a computer is a conversation with a living human being: in the context of Internet chat, passing the Turing test becomes an achievable benchmark. So every time we do converse via computer with a human being, we have to do a lot of imaginative work making them live in all their glorious intentionality and complexity. There is always a strain involved, and hopefully it is clear that in many cases this continual digital remastering of the world is something of a comforting lie. Certainly, modern pop and punk music has benefited enormously by bringing finally to consciousness the wealth of distorted and atonal sounds we are normally supposed to ignore.

Speaking of aleatory things, I will end by pointing out that intentionality can enter into a relation with the sublime, something already suggested by the image of someone writing in anticipation of the surf. The Aeolian harp did not die out with Coleridge; John Cage created aleatory music by having multiple radios playing simultaneously on stage (as Hofstadter notes). To a greater or lesser extent, the aleatoric artist sets the parameters for the work, and these more blatantly open constructions take the place of the more conventional standards for achieved communication. We can use the Lilliputian, almost kindly language of accident to describe this aleatoric movement, or we can use the High Romantic vocabulary of wreckage and death. Regardless, we should not fail to see that Knapp and Benn Michaels have put Wordsworth on the beach in order to erase Wordsworth, and to erase Einstein on the beach, and finally to exorcise the sand and waves themselves: the haunting poet, the living sea.

Cormac McCarthy: “God Is A Little Boy, And Also Trout”

(x-posted to The Valve)

I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which set everyone’s hair on fire.

As an example of style, it works; the book is criss-crossed by references to ash and the aftermath of fire, and despite the single-mindedness of the landscape, and the microscopic focus on the father and the son, the minimalism is a triumph. Literally, there is less to do in the postapocalyptic world than there was in the world of cowboys, and this is a help to McCarthy, who otherwise tends to spend a long time on the insignificant everydayness of craft. For example, he will describe how a horse is saddled, or how a cowboy will secure a gate.

The Road is a Christian parable; that is its most important quality, and its downfall. Another Christian parable is a waste of time; it would be more worthwhile just to re-read the Bible. If anything, the patent religiosity of the text made me realize for the first time that the “larder” scene in novels of scarcity (a more profane example being The Ginger Man) is actually a scene of communion, and sometimes also a scene of baptism, if there is an abundance of clean water.

Earlier this month, I watched Eastern Promises, which had a terrific baptism in it. I won’t be hungry for another baptism for at least six months.

Anyhow, the father and the son nearly starve to death. The moment they began to starve, I began to wait for the scene where they would find a tearjerking superabundance of food. It’s on page 123: the dinner of canned pears.

Over the course of the novel, the father struggles to keep himself and his son alive. Increasingly, the son becomes distant, because he rejects his father’s creed of kinship. The son tries to give food away, first to a little boy, then to an embittered old man, and finally to a thief who attempts murder. Angrily, the father says you’re not the one who has to worry about everything, and the son says, I am the one. I think he did not add “I am the alpha and the omega” because the apocalypse destroyed most of the good courses in ancient Greek.

The wasteland is actually described as “secular.” In the final scene, when the boy is adopted by good people, the woman begins to speak to him about God. The Son, however, is too busy conversing with the Spirit of his departed Father. The woman reasons with him that the breath of God passes between people who converse thus.

The final paragraph of the book is about trout, who mazily puzzle the hours in deep, remembering, mysterious waters. It is not clear who is speaking, since the father is dead. To McCarthy, the deep pools are rumors of God. His editor should be reprimanded, or at least subjected to small practical jokes. McCarthy’s editor, I mean. Not God’s.

I don’t think I could have Cormac McCarthy over for dinner. It would get awkward. Nervously, I would talk too much, and he would spoon the candied yams without even looking at them.

I recommend watching the trailer for The Golden Compass. In my dreams, that polar bear fights Aslan. I’m mixed in among the crowd, my fist around a wad of bills, yelling Faster, pussycat! Kill, kill!

The University and the Specter of Horowitz

(x-posted to The Valve)

They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J. H. Blair
-Florence Reese (lyrics), “Which Side Are You On?”

In an ongoing series of posts at Acephalous, Scott Kaufman has been linking to and collating instances of the ongoing war against progressive thought in the academy. First, as some of you probably know, Scott took up the subject of Until Proven Innocent, a book co-written by KC Johnson, who teaches at Brooklyn College and CUNY. Until Proven Innocent attempts to pin the scandal surrounding the Duke lacrosse rape case on the politically correct culture of liberal academia. While Scott was napping, Smurov linked to a piece by Mark Bauerlein, who is an English professor at Emory and who titled his essay “Indoctrination in the Classroom.” Finally, Scott and Smurov both linked to this reaction, via the National Review’s blog Phi Beta Cons, against those professors whose reading assignments make students feel “spoiled or privileged.”

I use the phrase “ongoing war” advisedly: this is a war, albeit one being conducted discursively through periodicals, campus organizations, and websites and blogs. At some point, the leader of the anti-intellectual, anti-academic crusade was David Horowitz, founder of Students for Academic Freedom, a “student” organization created with the express goal of sabotaging university teaching by mounting pressure campaigns against left-wing professors. The most affable representative of mainstream academic opposition to Horowitz was Michael Bérubé; with incredible patience and argumentative cunning, Bérubé defended academia and tore hole after hole in Horowitz’s shoddy research. He debated Horowitz live, and wrote a book (What’s Liberal About The Liberal Arts?) that was the subject of several vibrant conversations at the Valve (book event archive). Although Bérubé was incredibly successful at mimizing Horowitz’s efficacy, the movement against the liberal arts has taken on a life of its own, falling back on the same rhetorical tactics that the American right-wing employed against welfare and in support of the Iraq war.

It is time that we examined where the logic of these attacks on the academy leads, and how the right-wing doublespeak of “academic freedom” is structured.

The Agenda

Here is what right-wing critics of the academy would like to see implemented:

1. Pay cuts for all scholars in the humanities, including reduced funding for research and travel.
2. Elimination of tenure.
3. Public access to all courses, particularly lecture courses.
4. Public hearings for faculty hires and dismissals.
5. Public or student-led selection of assigned texts.
6. Guidelines for hiring based on candidates’ political beliefs; establishing a quota for conservative academics in all disciplines within the humanities. (Yes, this would be quota-based hiring for registered Republicans.)
7. Replacing content-based courses with skills-based courses; in particular, replacing instruction in English with formalistic instruction in writing.

The underlying assumptions are as follows:

1. There is no difference between a lay person and a tenured professor when it comes to evaluating the quality of a text.
2. In the humanities, there is no difference between knowledge and belief, and all beliefs are equal. There is therefore no justification for challenging students to re-examine inherited beliefs.
3. Skill is independent of belief; in expressive practice, this means that form (ability to write) is independent of content (statement of belief).
4. Public interference in the process of education is justified by democratic and consumerist principles in a way that public interference in the private sector is not. For example, students are justified in suing professors, but consumers are not justified in suing corporations.
5. The market value of writing skills should largely determine the salary of a humanities professor.

The rhetoric goes like this:

1. Professors are out-of-touch with American values.
2. Professors are hypocrites who criticize luxury while living in its lap.
3. Professors are lazy.

Living in a Rhetorical World

Our thoughts are our own; our language is not. Whatever we say or write enters public discourse in the context of the assumptions and debates of its time, and, in the reader’s mind, it does not necessarily link up with our entire worldview or with our own private struggles and motives. I’m reminded of the moment in Philip Roth’s The Counterlife when Nathan Zuckerman tries to convince his brother to abandon an Israeli settlement in the occupied territories. Zuckerman tries to make his brother admit to Freudian motives, and the brother responds that his motives really aren’t important any longer, because he is now part of a movement, the historical meaning of which is greater than the sum of its parts. It is essential for us to see the rhetorical context of contemporary debates about the academy, and neither to exempt our own speech from its likely misuses, nor to treat disputants as rhetorically naive.

You can already see, in Bérubé’s account of working with a student named John (cf. the book event), that it’s not merely a question of having the right to speak, or earning a sufficiently high grade, which are personal concerns — John feels a political concern for himself and the other students in the face of possible “indoctrination.” His personal concerns are understandable and admit discussion; his political concern does not, since it is necessarily based on a series of judgments about the relationship between politics and pedagogy that John isn’t qualified to make and which exceed his right to fair treatment.

Similarly, in the comment threads that followed Scott’s posts on KC Johnson, there were a series of individuals (particularly an anonymous commenter named “Professor Ethan”) who tried to inundate Acephalous with canned rhetoric about the failings of academia. Trying, as several commenters did, to get a personal account from Ethan of how he suffered in the classroom, and how such mistakes might be avoided in the future, is a mistake: Ethan is trying to create change, not come to terms. When Ethan quoted NPR, in the comment here, the point wasn’t just that he attributed to NPR something actually excerpted from Until Proven Innocent. He was quoting NPR in the first place because it’s “liberal media,” and he figured Scott’s readers would feel bound to respect it. This is all made possible by National Public Radio, which has been under siege from the Bush Administration for years, and so runs a piece on Until Proven Innocent as an easy way to seem balanced and not indefensibly liberal.

That’s how the feedback loop works when an issue gets pushed to the right: progressive intellectuals and media outlets are shamed into re-defining objectivity and balance as more centrist or rightist, and then skimmed for whatever admission can add fuel to the fire, without ever beating the charge of bias. Right now, any English professor who lends the credibility of a position and a doctorate to the conservative anti-academic agenda is guaranteed a lot of attention and readers.

Even the most well-meaning pieces can end up making odd syntheses, not out of impure motives, but simply because the rightist agenda is circulating everywhere. This is what happened, I think, with Tim Burke’s piece on academic freedom in the Minnesota Review. Burke is a great blogger and a thoughtful respondent (including on Acephalous with regard to Johnson’s book), and I think his article (mentioned by John Holbo here) was motivated by sincere concern for continued innovation in the humanities. Burke’s solution to over-cautiousness and paralysis in the humanities is, potentially, eliminating tenure, though he does not make an explicit demand.

From the standpoint of academic freedom, though, the demand doesn’t make any sense: expanding the population of professors without real job security is guaranteed to produce more cautiousness, not less. Whether or not the professors on a hiring committee have tenure, they will still want intellectual diversity, they will still desire to be fair, and they will still walk in to meetings and interviews with a set of firmly grounded attitudes and ideological allegiances. The real questions are whether the candidate can expect to get a tenure-track position or a year-to-year lectureship; whether that position will come as soon as graduate school is over, or after years of tutoring high school students preparing for the SAT; whether or not funding is available for summer research, and for dissertation research in lieu of teaching. That will determine how much capacity for innovation will be manifest in new generations of scholars. There is an analogy here to the situation with elementary and secondary public schools: first you starve them for funding, then you blame the teachers and the curriculum when students do poorly.

The Three Basic Criticisms of Academics

Professors are out-of-touch with American values.

I respect those authors, including Richard Rorty and Walter Benn Michaels, who have tried to define what “achieving our country” or “our America” might mean in progressive terms. That said, I believe that American scholars in the humanities might as well stand up for the truly international community that constitutes their field, as American scientists and businessmen have done. Nationalism has left a lot of scars, here and elsewhere, in the past few decades; the principles that found institutions of learning are universal. Otherwise, one sits in an IKEA chair, working on a computer made in China, trying to achieve our country.

Professors are hypocrites who criticize luxury while living in its lap.

This is really just a customized version of the argument about liberal hypocrisy: if you’re so idealistic, why aren’t you poor? It is pathetically literal to criticize professors for teaching about inequality. One may as well ask how able-bodied Congressmen could vote the ADA into existence. It is not necessary to believe that selfishness is the premise of all action.

Professors are lazy.

This is a groundless claim without a shred of hard evidence besides the existence of summer “vacation.” It is like calling apple growers lazy because the fruit appears in September. At UC Irvine, the summer is divided into Summer Session I and Summer Session II.

***

The fact that scholars like Johnson and Bauerlein are doing what they can to harm the reputation of the humanities does not make us unfree, and neither does the existence of an organized attack on the humanities. We remain free in the only meaningful sense of the word: free to determine our relationship to the humanistic traditions of scholarship and pedagogy, and free to determine our politics accordingly.

I Can’t Believe I Just Watched Knocked Up

There are, I feel, many unanswered questions about how I could write that whole endless post about, among other things, Superbad, and then go into radio silence for several weeks as the quarter started and I began using a Costco card, finally leading to my having five unopened cans of shaving cream and at least one more wire-mesh wastebasket than I can possibly use.

There were threads about Hegel that went unanswered. For that I am sorry. I am particularly sorry that, in the limited time I have before I go to answer questions about Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Francis Bacon’s Something By Francis Bacon, I am going to pick right up where Superbad left off and write a quick reaction to Knocked Up, also by Judd Apatow. Think of it as the dialectic of Heigl.

It seems like it was just the other day that I meandered, via AOL, to a blog post written by Dinesh D’Souza about (of course) Rosie O’Donnell’s new memoir, and how it epitomizes the borderline insanity of the American “cultural left.” D’Souza writes, “If Elisabeth Hasselbeck is a wholesome symbol of modern American conservatism, Rosie is an appropriate poster child for today’s cultural left. If these two were running in ’08, I think I know which way America would go.”

The fact that pundits like D’Souza have completely lost sight of the difference between The View and American presidential elections deserves further investigation. I had to Google Hasselbeck, and found out that she made her way to The View after being a contestant on Survivor. Like Hasselbeck, Knocked Up‘s Catherine Heigl is a skinny blonde working in the entertainment industry. She is also like Hasselbeck in that her character, and Apatow’s movie, are symbols of American conservatism.

D’Souza is not a particularly important public figure now that the affirmative action debates have fallen off the front page. Knocked Up, however, was a box-office hit and a critical success. David Denby, at The New Yorker, recently argued that Apatow’s great subject is the necessity of growing up, and the losses maturity entails. He only laments that Apatow’s women aren’t as interesting as the men.

It’s not that the women aren’t interesting. It’s that they are pathetically unequal to the men. Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd are laid-back nice guys; the women are fitful, irrational harpies. Allison throws Ben out of her car, and he has to walk to her gynecologist’s office, which he does because he’s so nice. Allison and her sister Debbie, during the film’s adagio section, get all chirped up on Red Bulls, try to go to the club, and get told by the doorman that they are too old and pregnant to go dancing. The doorman gets to give them a lecture on what constitutes good parenting. Meanwhile, Ben and [Paul Rudd] have to suffer through the horrible experience of driving to Vegas, seeing Cirque de Soleil, taking mushrooms, getting lap dances, and then driving home.

Allison’s only real contribution is her belly, which enables the E! network to promote motherhood and celebrity motherhood. Within the world of the film, she is cast in the (actually very realistic) role of the ordinary, personable woman who shows up to improve the otherwise depraved world of celebrity, a la Hasselbeck. Abortion is not something Allison decides is wrong for her; abortion is a clinical procedure with a heart of ice. The word “abortion” is never mentioned in the film; some characters tell Allison to “take care of [the embryo],” and others mince around the word because even the stoners in the film are pro-baby.

It is starting to feel, thinking back on Superbad, that Apatow’s only real subversive insight is that you can drink while underage, or smoke marijuana, yet still be clear-headed enough to eventually have a job and a baby post-hangover. I guess his point is that there’s always room for prodigal sons, a point he tries to make profounder than it is by tolerantly showing dozens of homemade bongs in Act 1.

There are real prodigal sons, and films that give us more reality; a hippie smokes a homemade cigarette in Into the Wild, and we don’t know if he’s smoking tobacco or marijuana. I can’t imagine Apatow watching this scene without demanding to know which it is — what could be more important than that?