Shrinking the big screen
Are the movies being taken over by TV?
There's a point in Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up" when the movie's two childish men, played by Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd, visit a pool hall and bemoan their respective romantic relationships. Rudd's character, Pete, sums up marriage with an allusion. It's "like 'Everybody Loves Raymond,' except nobody laughs." Well, we do -- at his marriage. We laugh because it's almost as advertised. Pete is Ray Barone and his exasperated, hypersensitive wife, Debbie (Leslie Mann), is Ray's exasperated, hypersensitive wife, Debra. It's been observed that "Knocked Up" represents some unknown new frontier for the romantic comedy. But that frontier is actually pretty familiar: the sitcom.
This is a summer in which TV comes naturally to the movies. "The Simpsons" arrived at megaplexes virtually indistinguishable from its formidable prime-time self. "Hairspray" is a musical about a bunch of teenagers desperate to integrate a television dance show. What is "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" if not a "Bosom Buddies" overhaul? And "Superbad," which opened Friday, was produced by Apatow -- it could have been one of his canceled shows.
Each of these pictures is a hit. Either we wanted more familiar movies or we miss new network television.
After decades of demonizing television as a threat to everything from the sanctity of the American family to the sanity of the national psyche, Hollywood movies have finally and perhaps fully fallen under the influence of TV, which has been expanding its cultural grip since its arrival in American homes more than six decades ago. For years, the movies tended to treat television like a younger sibling, striking out against it defensively and enviously. Then it became more toxic. In Douglas Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows" (1955), the TV set is Jane Wyman's terrifying consolation for having lost her strapping younger boyfriend -- it's a gift from her kids and her unhappy face reflected in the screen is one of the saddest images in the history of the movies. Two years later, Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd" gave us TV as a star-making medium that could turn a simpleton into a megalomaniacal monster. By 1976, we were getting the pitch-black farce of "Network," a violent allergic reaction to television's infantilization of its audience.
In 1982, little Heather O'Rourke was sucked into the television set in "Poltergeist," a movie whose final shot of Craig T. Nelson pushing a little set out of the family's motel room is its punch line. In Barry Levinson's "Avalon" (1990), television is subtly blamed for the demise of one large American family and by extension all of them -- there it is lurking in the background of some early shots but growing more cancerously prominent as the film goes on.
The movies could act with great moral and artistic superiority toward television, and going to the movies was still an event. The line between the mediums was distinct. Initially, this made business sense. The corporations that owned the movie studios were competing with the corporations that owned the TV stations and the networks. A raft of mergers took the edge off that rivalry. And the wild success of 1992's "Wayne's World," taken from a "Saturday Night Live" sketch about two suburban kids and their public-access TV show, marked a sea change. Television was coming to the movies, and it was staying. "SNL" sketches ("Coneheads," "It's Pat," "A Night at the Roxbury," "Superstar," "The Ladies Man") and old shows ("The Beverly Hillbillies," "The Addams Family," "The Brady Bunch," "Car 54, Where Are You?" "Charlie's Angels," "The Mod Squad," "Starsky and Hutch") were being expanded into movies.
As O'Rourke might have put it, her hands pressed against that snowy glass screen like a psychic with her crystal ball: They're here.
The multiplex was being repurposed as a repository for kitsch. Maybe it was good for mocking the good old days. Maybe it was a synergistic way to generate interest in future box-set DVDs of the old shows. Whatever the explanation, the line between the two mediums had become porous. While the movies started looking more like television, TV started looking more like the movies. One premium cable channel even had a catchy diagnosis for the upgrade: It wasn't TV; it was HBO. It's been noted that several seasons of HBO's "The Sopranos" were better than any Hollywood movie made during the years the show was on the air.
Other earlier crime dramas, like "Miami Vice" and "The Equalizer," were clearly inspired by the movies, but the ones that hung around played by the old rules of television. Even more than "Twin Peaks," another deeply cinematic reworking of a genre idea, "The Sopranos" made a cogent case for elevating television's standards. "The Sopranos" had a Hollywood polish, a great movie's depth, and almost European art-house ideas of closure. In the mob doings, there was Kurosawa and Scorsese. In Tony and Carmela's marriage, there was Bergman and Rohmer. In the show's dreaminess, there was Fellini. This was an amalgam that had gotten away from the movies, where even the great Scorsese isn't really completely himself anymore. Kids, do try this at home.
In a less grand sense, television started doing another movie staple better than the movies, too: the screwball romantic comedy. As the New Yorker film critic David Denby observed recently, the genre hasn't been as magnificent since Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" (1977) and "Manhattan" (1979). "Sex and the City," on HBO, restored the glamour and zaniness and the candor that had gone missing at the movies. And when it was at its best, "Will & Grace," on NBC, concocted the kind of slyly subversive, lightning-fast comedy that the movies' two greatest romantic comedy directors of the screwball era, Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch, might have made.
Of course, the tipping point in the transfer of the classical Hollywood screwball comedy from big screen to small came in 1982 with a film about a struggling actor who disguises himself as a woman and becomes a surprise TV star. Sydney Pollack's "Tootsie" was a true screwball comedy, but it knowingly killed the fantasy of the romantic comedy. The play between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, or even Doris Day and Rock Hudson was no longer possible. "Tootsie" was a romantic comedy about sexual politics, and it changed how we expect men and women to talk to each other.
Never mind that the woman doing most of the talking was really a man. The genre received a slow, increasingly depressing cultural makeover. The visual sparkle vanished. The wit dissolved. And a defensive, cynical, post-feminist sensibility materialized. The successful woman needed a new fluff. The fantasy of the screwball comedy became the lie of the chick flick. In the chick flick, women searched and searched and searched for Mr. Right, meaning Mr. Mature, Mr. Sane, Mr. Responsible. Realism had ruined romance. That ruin is secretly what "Knocked Up" is about. Its being expressed in the idiom of the television sitcom means the classical Hollywood romantic comedy as we've known it is gone.
On the other hand, the sitcom might be dead on television -- increasingly replaced by reality television and cable dramas (starring great Oscar-winning women) and network serials, like "24," "Lost," and "Heroes," that look and feel a lot like films. But it's alive at the movies, where Apatow is making a mark. Apatow is a veteran writer and producer in both mediums who's tried and failed to keep a number of very good TV series on the air. Now he just appears to be turning them into movies. That they happen to be more sensitive, more humanely insightful, and more entertaining than most other American movies today is both a testament to the resonance and generosity of his vision and a sign that, with all respect to whoever brought us "Transformers," too many writers, directors, and studio heads are robots.
Apatow proudly puts a lot of television in his movies. For one thing, "Knocked Up" is visually basic at best. Part of what gives the movie such a plain network television feel is that it often looks like a show. Apatow's previous movie, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," had a more surrealist gusto in both premise and style. But he's not a natural-born filmmaker. For no particular reason, the camera, in one shot, peeks out from behind a case of restaurant wine shelves. Elsewhere, the margins of "Knocked Up" are studded with current "SNL" cast members; Joanna Kerns, the "Growing Pains" matriarch, plays Katherine Heigl's mom; and Rogen's housemates have appeared on other Apatow shows. The very idea that Pete thinks marriage most approximates "Everybody Loves Raymond" and not, say, "The War of the Roses," works as a criticism of American movies' stunted ideas of marriage. Lately, TV has done it more truly and deeply.
The movie also merges at least three classic sitcom paradigms -- newly married couple, dudes in a house, and baby on the way. Even the ancient trope of schlubby guy-sexy woman is applied here. But Apatow invests them all with degrees of feeling that only lasting TV comedies ever do.
At this point, seeing a difference between the mediums might be fruitless. Maybe in an age of
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/movie nation. 
