Screen Machine

Review: She’s Out of My League

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She’s Out of My League: a perfectly simple setup, a title that establishes not only the situation (a romantic gulf to be breached between an ‘average guy’ and a ‘beautiful girl’) but the very terms in which that gulf is to be understood and ultimately overcome. In this film, romance and sex are a matter of leagues, divisions, statistics and ratings, and finding true love requires a great deal of empirical research and statistical analysis.

As his friends see it, Kirk (Jay Baruchel, a longtime Judd Apatow associate now approaching some degree of ‘stardom’) is “a five,” while the girl of his dreams, Molly (the English actress Alice Eve) is “a hard ten.” Despite what seems to be a genuine attraction between these two human numerals, Kirk’s friends remain convinced that he’s headed for heartbreak, since “no one can jump more than two points,” and it is only a matter of time before the universe realigns itself and Molly-the-Ten dumps the poor loser.

The film’s ostensible lesson will be, of course, that it is the unquantifiable, inexplicable mysteries of love that really matter, and that romance will always triumph over the precepts of small-minded statisticians. But this is a hollow lesson given to a cynical audience; behind it lies a more sinister picture of love in today’s climate, as the tabulation of romantic and sexual points, leagues and ratings shifts from the exclusive domain of the nerdy, pathetic, lonely male towards broader acceptance. In a previous generation it took the genius of a Fassbinder to reveal, in all its banal horror, the role of love as an instrument of capital; but for us today it seems to have required a couple of fools like writers Sean Anders and John Morris to demonstrate that, at our stage in late capitalism, love even as a function of state power (love’s role in the cinema of the twentieth century) has become dangerous and insufficiently controllable, and must be ruthlessly regimented in such a way that its auratic value (previously so important to love’s cultural functioning) is thoroughly ground down.

It is in this context that the filmmakers’ seemingly arbitrary decision to have Kirk and his friends work as airport security officers must be understood. The systematic, instrumental control and oversight of the post-9/11 airport security apparatus provides a precise model for the new mode of love that She’s Out of My League is gesturing towards, with its repetitive, entirely predictable procedures, its inflexible protocol and its instruments of analysis.

Yet, because it is a transitional work, She’s Out of My League is unable to show us this brave new world of modern love and work; instead, doubling back, the film attempts to pacify its own ineluctable logic by presenting us with the most unrealistic airport security terminal imaginable. I’ve been to Pittsburgh International, and I definitely don’t remember being greeted at security by a bunch of guys in their twenties chatting idly about their love lives and dropping all protocol whenever they caught sight of a hot chick walking into the terminal.

This presentation of the workplace as a place for lounging with your buddies, making plans for the next date, the next attack upon the love-object – so common in American romance films – is another half-hearted, uneasy appeasement of older generic conventions, like the requisite happy ending (which itself takes place at an airport terminal). The film has to give us this in order to belie the truth that its basic setup has already established, and to allow us to regard it as a conventional (even “too conventional,” as most reviewers have claimed) romantic comedy. In so doing, we avert our eyes from what this film truly harbingers – the romantic comedy of the future, which will get rid of people entirely and replace them with numbers circulating in repetitive, predictable sequences. Then we will have a true love story for our time.