Awkwardness: An Essay by Kotsko Adam

Author:Kotsko, Adam [KOTSKO, ADAM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-84694-391-1
Publisher: O-Books

Chapter 3

Cultural awkwardness—Judd Apatow

The previous chapter carried us through everyday awkwardness to cultural awkwardness, showing that the vaguely white-collar workplace that has become the norm for middle-class workers does not provide nearly a strong enough social order to stave off awkwardness and in fact directly generates certain forms of it. This chapter will deal with a setting that makes the workplace seem like a model of clarity, the Kafkaesque realm of contemporary marriage and coming of age. Every way we turn, it seems we’re doing something wrong: putting off marriage too long, settling for the wrong person, getting married just for the sake of getting married, etc. Marriage itself seems to be in serious decline as an institution, with divorce an ever-present possibility and a kind of deadening routine threatening even the best marriages. In short, marriage has fallen into a state of cultural awkwardness.

This chapter will look at a series of films associated with the name of Judd Apatow, which fully admit to the cultural awkwardness surrounding marriage but nevertheless regard it as the only game in town. Focused on so-called overgrown adolescents who are, to varying degrees and for various reasons, putting off marriage indefinitely, these films despair of the possibility of developing any viable alternative to the shattered institution of marriage, proposing instead that we prop up the system by allowing reluctant men to indulge in the habits associated with the awkward status of overgrown adolescents as a kind of “release valve.” I will be laying out the contradictions inherent in this solution, with particular emphasis on the question of how indulging in awkwardness can be a kind of reward for going along with the system when we normally regard awkwardness as precisely what the system exists to prevent.

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