The alphas, the betas, and the women: lessons from “Funny People”

Over the weekend I saw Funny People, the latest movie to fall out of the Judd Apatow money-printing machine. There’s not much to say about the movie itself – it’s a moderately funny film, not as good as previous Apatow creations such as Knocked Up, and it has a weird “melancholy clown” mood that doesn’t mesh well with the movie’s comedic intentions. While it doesn’t concentrate on sex as much as its predecessors, Funny People hits upon some serious notes for students of the coming collapse of Western civilization. This post contains spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie but want to, read no further.

The film concerns alpha male actor and comedian George Simmons (Adam Sandler) who hires aspiring stand-up Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) to write jokes for him. The first half of the film concerns Simmons’ struggle with a variant of leukemia and his impending death. At the midpoint of the film, Simmons’ doctors inform him that the experimental drugs he is taking are curing him, which encourages him to restart a relationship with his onetime girlfriend Laura (Leslie Mann). The problem is that in the time since they broke up, Laura has married a beta businessman, Clarke (Eric Bana), and the two have had children. Several points came to me while I was watching the film:

• Women are amoral, and in the absence of checks on their behavior, they will pursue their own interests to the detriment of everyone around them. When Simmons rekindles his interest in Laura, she eagerly tosses aside her family to be with him. When Clarke discovers her infidelity, she shows zero remorse for her actions and prepares to divorce him. Because she will likely get the children (acknowledged in the film’s dialogue), she has nothing to lose and everything to gain from taking her beta hubby to the cleaners. In a similar move earlier in the film, Simmons bangs a groupie who had refused Ira on the basis that she had a boyfriend. When Ira asks Simmons about this later, he says, “She told me she had a boyfriend too…while she was sucking my cock.”
• There is little incentive to be moral in a world ruled by what women want. Ira stops making advances on the groupie in the first part of the movie when she tells him she has a boyfriend, allowing the morally suspect Simmons to take her instead. Ira also takes issue with Simmons’ affair with Laura, stating that his boss’ actions will destroy Laura’s family, but his concerns are slapped down. Ira then attempts to intervene to keep Laura and Clarke from divorcing, and is fired by Simmons, forcing him to restart his career from the bottom. Simmons, on the other hand, pursues his desire to be with Laura not caring what his actions will do to her family, and after Laura chooses to return to Clarke, he escapes largely unscathed.
• Men and women pursue adulterous relationships for different reasons. It is implied that Clarke had once cheated on Laura while on a business trip. However, Clarke’s alleged infidelities were supplemental in nature, not intended to replace his relationship with Laura. In contrast, she had replaced him in her heart in her affair with Simmons.
• There is a difference between what men perceive as alpha and what women perceive as alpha. Clarke is a wealthy businessman (rich enough to afford a suburban house in the expensive Marin County, California) as well as a devoted father and husband, but he lacks the social dominance necessary to keep his wife in love with him. Simmons is a man of poor character who abuses his underlings (including Ira) and refuses contact with his family, but his fame and social dominance makes Laura’s “gina tingle.”
• A beta can beat down and kill an alpha male easily. When Laura confirms to Clarke that she was having an affair with Simmons, Clarke proceeds to find Simmons and physically assault him. Simmons is a man of average strength and is easily smacked down by the muscled Clarke – Laura and Ira’s intervention is the only thing that keeps Simmons from dying at Clarke’s hands.
• Alpha males make poor relationship prospects. Laura finally becomes cognizant of Simmons’ true nature when he laughs at her daughter’s performance of the song “Memory” from Cats, which was intended to be heartfelt and moving. Her realization of Simmons’ narcissism and callousness drives her to rekindle her marriage with Clarke. (As an aside, this twist came off to me as somewhat forced, a necessary nod to public morality, akin to how Alfred Hitchcock reassured the audience that the criminal had been brought to justice at the end of each episode of his TV show.)

Despite the mainstream media’s efforts to paint over reality with a coat of lies, the truth keeps seeping out, like water out of a leaky pipe.