I’ve been working like a dog this spring and haven’t gotten out to see any of the films I wanted to, but I did sneak away yesterday and catch The Hangover.  And enjoyed it, though I didn’t find it as gut-bustingly funny as a lot of people did.  If you don’t mind all the grotesquerie and grossness – and as much as I’d like to mind them, I just don’t – it’s very likeable, with a good, funny cast and some pretty strong laughs at times.  Best of all is the plot: four guys go to Vegas for a bachelor party; when they wake up the groom is missing, and the others can’t remember a thing.  Not bad.  Plotting funny is probably one of the hardest things to do in any kind of fiction – PG Wodehouse excelled at it and that’s about the end of my list – but this film carries it off start to finish, which I much appreciated.

Now, I know I’m not the first person to notice the squirrelly roles of men and women in these sorts of comedies, but they did get me to thinking.  The guys are all children whose manhood consists exclusively in hell-raising.  The women are either fun-loving party girls or grim, death-of-pleasure wife/mommies who seem ever ready to take their little menchildren by the ears and force them to wash the dishes while they stand by wagging their fingers.  These dames remind me of  a wonderful line in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night about “the American woman, aroused”  whose “clean-sweeping irrational temper… had broken the moral back of a race and made a nursery out of a continent.”

A lot of critics get all huffy about this depiction of the sexes – read the silly little fellow who wrote the review in the New York Times ^[1]by way of example.  The standard line seems to be to blame it all on childish filmmakers pandering to adolescent audiences.  But you know what?  I suspect a lot of it is simple realism.  More and more often I meet young guys just like this:  overgrown kids who are their grim wives’ poodles.  They sheepishly talk about getting a “pink pass,” or a “kitchen pass,” before they can leave the house.  They can’t do this or that because their wives don’t like it.  They “share” household and child-rearing tasks equally – which isn’t really equal at all because they don’t care about a clean house or a well-reared child anywhere near as much as their wives do.  In short, each one seems set to spend his life taking orders from a perpetually dissatisfied Mrs. who sounds to me – forgive me but just speaking in all honesty – like a bloody shrike.  Who can blame these poor shnooks if they go out and get drunk or laid or just plain divorced?

I’m the old-fashioned King of the Castle type:  my wife knew it when she married me, she knows it now, and she knows where the door is if she gets sick of it.  And you can curse me or consign me to Feminist Hell or whatever you want to do.  But when you’re done, answer me this:  why would a man get married under any other circumstances?  I’m serious.  What’s in it for him?  I mean, marriage is a large sacrifice for a man.  He gives up his right to sleep with a variety of partners, which is as basic an urge in men as having children is in women.  He takes on responsibilities which will probably curtail both his work and his social life.  If he doesn’t also acquire authority, gravitas, respect and, yes, mastery over his own home, what does he get?  Companionship?  Hey, stay single, dude, you’ll have a lot more money, and then you can buy companionship.

All right, I know, I’m a mean old man.  But I’ve also been blissfully married for 30 years to a woman who wakes up singing.  I think some of these young guys have been sold a bill of goods, I really do.  I think they’ve been told what they’re supposed to be like and have sacrificed what they are like.  Maybe their marriages are more “fair” than mine but just looking at them, I think they’re miserable.  And I suspect, deep down, their wives are probably miserable too.

If you ask me, they’d be better off staying in Vegas.

UPDATE: Lest anyone misinterpret this post to mean I bully, mistreat or otherwise disrespect my much beloved wife – behavior I would likewise consider low and unmanly – please read what I wrote about her on my old blog here ^[2]. It was meant to be a Valentine’s Day op-ed but no newspaper editor would touch it.