The first few Marx Brothers movies showed Harpo as a would-be rapist. Each showed the “joke” of a pretty young woman running away with Harpo in persuit.
They stopped doing it after a while. Perhaps it occurred to them that it’s not funny.
I am higly concerned about this. Think of how many kids today get their morals from the “Revenge of the Nerds” movies, or their knowledge of the law from “Police Academy.” I once found myself quite taken with the idea of breaking and entering after watching “The Burbs.”
Ya’ll really need to lighten up.
It wasn’t Leslie Nielsen who asked Billy if he’d ever seen a grown man naked. It was Peter Graves.
Well, there IS this one scene in Pedro Almodovar’s Kika…
Though of course, the joke is not the rape itself, it’s people’s (including the victim’s) absurd reactions. Then again this IS Almodovar…
Lobot is right about the Graves/Billy sequence in Airplane! – it’s about the absurdity of the scenario. However I do agree with Case Sensitive that it would not be greenlighted today, for fear of causing offense.
I agree with this for the most part, but the difference that I’m seeing between Bill Cosby on the one side and A Clockwork Orange on the other is that part of Bill’s humor comes from the fact that the audience can make the assumption that he’s not really going to take out one of this kids, while in ACO, the rape is happening while you watch. I’m sort of amazed, to be honest, that ACO came up as an example in this thread, because it’s never occurred to me that the scene was being played straight for laughs – the humor that the characters find in the situation is supposed to contrast (IMHO) with the reaction of the audience. I think the film’s goal is to use this contrast to create discomfort, not knee-slapping guffaws. Obviously that’s open to interpretation. Revenge of the Nerds is aiming for the knee-slapping guffaws.
More recently, I saw a movie about a guy who takes a vow of celibacy for 40 days. I think that might be what it’s called, now that I think about it, 40 Days. It’s not a very good movie, it did have a few somewhat funny moments. Right up until the part where
Wait, first the set up. The guy’s friends have started taking bets as to when he will break his vow, the premise being that he’ll never last forty days. The celibate guy, as the end of the forty days is approaching, is hand-cuffed to a bed by his roommate, and his ex-girlfriend comes into the room, and despite his repeated, verbal, blunt refusals to have sex with her throughout the film, mounts herself on him. The scene starts showing the guy having an erotic dream (the other running joke being that the celibacy is pretty near about to kill him), but he wakes to realize that the dream is in fact happening. The roommate and the ex-girlfriend have conspired to win the large pot of money by controling the time when he breaks the vow.
I found this jaw-droppingly oogy.
Spoilers=Kel Varnsen - Latex Division
your parents had a costume party and some guy with the same costume as your dad and had sex with with your mom because she thought it was her husband.
Why am I reminded of the Batman / Superman challange? Godzilla/Bambi?
Would you call that rape?
I’d call it downright stupid on mom’s part. I’d be hoping that there was an accidental switch at the hospital and I got the wrong set of parents. Mom wanted to have sex with the gorilla suit. She should really check to make sure that dad was the only one at the party in the suit.
Would you say she consented to have sex with the guy?
Yep And I think the lawmakers in lisacurl’s state watch too much television and bad movies.
My two cents: That scene in The Revenge of the Nerds was in bad taste. Movies today that strive for the same kind of audiance and humor do the same thing.
Bad taste (Jimmy, Do you ever watch gladiator movies?) is cheap but it always has produced a chuckle for people who don’t have high expectations and are capable of telling that they are not experiencing a reality.
Is there any kind of expiration on spoiler requirements? Revenge of the Nerds has to be around 20 years old.
I’m reminded of the Onion article where the guy imitates many of the behaviors found in your run-of-the-mill romantic comedy. Whereas in the films his persistent professions of love and overblown romantic gestures would eventually win her heart, the guy ends up getting slapped with a restraining order.
I can’t say I found RotN all that funny – heck, the bit where they sell pornographic “pies” disturbed me even at the time – but worrying about the legal implications of the real life application of the situation was not a particular concern.
Sound like a moronic movie, but if you’re fifteen, had a few beers and a bit of weed with your buddies I recon it could be fun – but perhaps you are of the opinion that rape is a fate worse that death, because I don’t see your knickers in a twist over all those many movies making fun of killing, and you wouldn’t even need to hark back twenty years. If it’s fun to watch a guy get killed, I suppose it can be fun to watch a girl being raped – even keeping in mind that there are rapes and then there are rapes, this certainly sound like the former. What about Trading Places with Eddie Murphy, some guy gets raped by a gorilla. Awful stuff?
Pffft, that’s nothing. There’s an episode of The Simpsons where
Homer gets raped by a panda. A male panda!
Oh the humanity!
:eek:
Of course, that was like Necrophelia in a way, too.
He sort of got raped in a Dirty Harry movie, where he was all tied up.
Deception isn’t enough for it to be rape, I would think. I would think she would have to object ex-post as well. In the movie, she clearly didn’t, so no rape.
Wait–the scene in RotN is in bad taste. That scene in “Airplane” is in astonishingly bad taste and was even worse 25 years ago when child abuse wasn’t spoken about. That is why RotN is maybe mildly amusing and “Airplane” is hilarious: the makers were willing to make something so over the top and unexpected that a laugh is dragged out of you even as you cringe.
Then there is
Agreed. The droogs are so sociopathic they think it the height of fun to rape and kill, even though their assaults are totally brutal and nasty. It’s not making fun of rape or playing it for laughs.
Calling that rape is abusing the word. You’re probably right that Harpo was less girl-crazy in the later movies, but I’d point to Thalberg and MGM as the reason.
Can those who object to this scene please tell me an example of humor that meets their “enlightened” standards? All humor involves something objectionable to somebody.
“Tragedy is when I skin my knee; Comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die.” - to paraphrase Mel Brooks
My problem with RotN is the pie sale…because a picture of a topless WhatsHerName is at the bottom of the pie pan, then covered with whipped cream.
To me, that’s just as bad as the You’re Not Having Sex With Who You Think You Are scene, because it’s harassment, exploitation, what have you. That picture was taken without her knowledge, and now it’s being used to sell pies.
That said, the music scene at the fair was fantastic.
“We live in a society of laws. Why do you think I took you to all those Police Academy movies? For fun? Well, I didn’t hear anybody laughing, did you?”
–sorry couldn’t resist—
No; she isn’t aware it’s Louis until after the act is complete.
I think some of you are overlooking the “point” of the scene, which is to contrast the sensitive Louis with Betty’s asshole jock boyfriend Stan. She tells Louis, thinking he’s Stan, that “You did things to me you’ve never done before.” Obviously Stan is a preening, narcissist jerkoff who is only concerned with his own pleasure; he probably makes Betty sleep on the wet spot, or perform oral sex on him without returning the favor (it’s fairly obvious that’s one of the “things” Betty was talking about); he probably comes really quickly and then rolls over and passes out. This is a man, remember, who would rather pump iron than get it on with his girlfriend; Stan really longs to make love only to himself, and thus the pleasure he gives Betty is necessarily limited and crude.
Now, does that make it “all right”? In the real world, no. But melodrama has always been full of what they used to call “ravishing,” borderline-violent sexual encounters in which (usually) a man overcomes a woman’s resistance physically, only to be accepted by her in the end. The idea was that even while the woman knew she ought to refuse, because she was engaged to someone else or had taken a vow of chastity or whatever, she really deep down didn’t want to. This is the essence of the so-called “rape fantasy” that so many men persist in misunderstanding: the “fantasy” is being able to submit to a sexual encounter the woman knows to be wrong for one reason or another, but craves anyway. By forcing himself upon her, he in effect relieves the woman of responsibility for it, ergo, sex without guilt. (I seem to recall a rash of soap operas using this device in the 80s and critics getting upset over it.)
How does this relate to RotN? Well, it could be argued that Betty was with Stan mostly for reasons of social status and that he was, in reality, a jerk who was no good for her; she was in the market for someone better, but she didn’t know it yet. Louis’ subterfuge, while despicable in one respect, does allow her to break free from Stan and find True Love—and what’s melodrama (or bad 80s comedy) without True Love?
You could argue that this is a disgustingly retrograde attitude about sex, and I wouldn’t disagree, but that’s human nature. There’s a reason clichés of this type are so popular—they speak to real people’s needs and fears.
Let me conclude by saying that I’m totally stoked to have written all this high-falutin shit about Revenge of the Nerds. My graduate degree pays off again! Perhaps I should think about presenting at a conference …
I find the use of spoiler boxes in a thread about Revenge of the Nerds amusing.
Silly Latex Division…