I’ll be the first to say that I was deeply wrong about No Hard Feelings, the new Jennifer Lawrence-led sex comedy film that just wrapped up its opening weekend. What I thought was going to be a pretty brutal and ultimately failed attempt at raunchy comedy turned out to be one of the sweetest, even important, movies that I’ve seen all year. I struggle to recall a time where I was happier to have been proven wrong.
I am cutting past-me a lot of slack, of course. The premise of the film — in which Lawrence portrays the 32-year-old Maddie who agrees to date a wealthy couple’s introverted, awkward 19-year-old son, Percy, in exchange for a car — is a grossly uncomfortable one. What makes No Hard Feelings work, however, is that no one agrees with that statement more than the film itself.
Without getting too deep into the ins and outs of the film, Maddie and the dating/relationship culture she represents are constantly put under the microscope, and the result is a gloriously refreshing commentary that suggests there’s nothing wrong with Percy’s preferred method of socializing or the fact that sex isn’t at the top of his mind; rather, it’s the rest of the world that seems to be a bit off-kilter, as it were.
Nevertheless, No Hard Feelings has been subject to quite a bit of detraction, chiefly being accused of promoting sexual grooming and harassment, and generally making light of the uncomfortable nuances that the film’s premise creates.
Now, I’m of the belief that, for the most part, these accusations are unfair. At no point does No Hard Feelings ever portray the situation in an acceptable light, and the overall ideas explored by the film, particularly the world’s bastardized conceptions of dating and relationships, greatly overshadow any of the film’s more dicey scenes.
But that’s not to say that there’s absolutely no weight behind the film’s controversy; as fantastic of a movie as No Hard Feelings is, there’s a very particular, extremely disheartening tone-deafness to the timing with which it was released, and the fact that the aforementioned controversy exists at all is a discouraging illustration of that.
As a filmmaker, writer, or any creative in general, your audience’s media literacy is something that, rightly or wrongly, must be kept in mind, especially when your audience is, potentially, all of the general public. With respect to that, it is not the responsibility of writer-director Gene Stupnitsky, co-writer John Phillips, or any of the other creatives involved with No Hard Feelings to craft a film that takes no chances with bashing the concept of grooming so as to make its message palpable to those who, otherwise, may not have seen the film as the deconstruction that it was.
But, by making a film that, as evidenced by the controversy, could be reliably read as one that makes light of grooming, the team behind No Hard Feelings put itself at risk of contributing to such conversations in a negative way. Again, it’s not the fault of any of the creatives that the film was read that way, but it’s damage that does get caused regardless, and it’s this particular damage that leaves me feeling quite uneasy given the timing of the film’s release.
Part of the reason for that is that poor media literacy can manifest in a number of different ways; for every person that inaccurately criticizes it for promoting grooming, there’s almost certainly another viewer that laughs at it because they themselves make light of male sexual harassment, even if the film tries not to. All that to say, it seems as though subtlety very much got in the way of healthy media interpretation in No Hard Feelings, and it’s no stretch to assume that the damage didn’t stop at unfair criticism, so to speak.
And even if, again, poor media literacy isn’t the fault of the creatives, it is something that, one way or another, they contribute to a chemical reaction with. And it’s for this reason that I’m grossly disappointed with the fact that No Hard Feelings was released during a time where queer and trans lives are being held at legislative gunpoint due to a disgustingly false rhetoric that shares a similar playground with the premise of the film.
I think No Hard Feelings is a fantastic movie, but there’s a time and a place to toy with such a premise in a comedic fashion; the current political climate, in which many queer rights, livelihoods, and, tragically, lives are in danger due to unfounded prejudice and malicious disinformation that paints queer and trans people as groomers, is not one of them.
It wasn’t Jim Uhls or David Fincher’s fault that so many young men misread Fight Club‘s Tyler Durden to a disturbing degree. Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux, and Etan Cohen were not culpable for the fact that Tropic Thunder normalized the stigmatization of mentally handicapped people for some audiences. And it’s unfair to blame Paul Verhoeven and Ed Neumeier for the many folks that read Starship Troopers as fascist propaganda upon its release. Indeed, all of these great movies, like No Hard Feelings, represent the risk that one takes when penning such deconstructions, and it’s a risk that one ultimately has to accept, especially when and if the ramifications come rolling in. And, in the grand scheme of things, the risk usually pays off.
But to so boldly toy with media literacy the way No Hard Feelings does during a time where such rampant abuse of not-unrelated hot air is ravaging the lives of so many queer people, shows an incredibly unnerving ignorance toward such a plight. No, maybe we’re not meant to laugh at Jennifer Lawrence trying to seduce a 19-year-old, but some people will laugh at it anyway, and if it’s not apparent to some audiences that those scenes are meant to be uncomfortable, then it’s probably also not apparent that the harmful rhetoric being pedaled about queer folk shouldn’t be accepted at face value as reality. One might be surprised how big of a role such people, who exercise either instance of information absorption, play in gouging queer-friendly societies.
Again, I love you, No Hard Feelings, but right now, I’m just not terribly pleased that humor is being used to try and deconstruct grooming with wishy-washy success during the same time that fictitious blanket accusations of grooming culture are being used to systemically erase people like me. It’s not your fault that we live in such heinous times; it’s simply unfortunate that you happened to roll up during them.