Opinion ‘No Hard Feelings’, Jennifer Lawrence’s latest: A blow to cancel culture

It’s an icky premise: When the trailer dropped in March, Twitter went nuclear. Reactions varied between lusting after Lawrence, mocking her acting calibre, accusing her of being a palatable face for grooming and consigning the movie to this century’s cultural garbage heap. The trailer advertised the movie fairly accurately for what it turned out to be. It is a sex comedy about an older woman trying to seduce a younger boy for money, going overboard with the flirtation quite often, and the boy reacting in the only sane way possible — with discomfort, annoyance, rejection, and even retaliation, once attacking her with pepper spray when she tried to whisk him away on a date in a dingy van. That nuance, however, was insufficient for some Twitterati, as well as longer-form critics who responded similarly, considering the film a tone-deaf love letter to a bygone time when such quirky (read, disturbing) screenplays were more forgivable.

But let’s zero in on that laughter. Why is the idea of a 30-something woman making aggressive sexual advances on a barely legal man funny? It’s because domination, aggression and sexual promiscuity are the domains of men in films, television and books — when a woman steps into that role, in order to tame her power, she is made the punchline of a joke. Even today, women in fiction often oscillate between a whimpering damsel-in-distress and a hardcore careerist who needs no man in her life. There are no shades of grey. When a fictional woman does display anger, she does so petulantly, harmlessly, immaturely. Think Preeti (Kiara Advani) slapping Kabir Singh (Shahid Kapoor) before instantly showering him with kisses because she’s overwhelmed by his destructive vow to protect her from predators. Think Inspector Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) in Kahaani saying, “No one suspects a pregnant woman” when he forces Vidya Bagchi (Vidya Balan) to go on a dangerous sting operation. Men love weak women.

But there’s an underlying notion about art here that is discomforting: The unwillingness to deploy humour when talking about sexual violence, or similar disturbing subjects like “death, disease, deformity, handicap or warfare” — dark humour, as defined by a 2017 study published in Cognitive Journal. Building on decades of research into the relationship between intellect and humour, the study popularly concluded that because dark humour tends to exaggerate “characters and situations… far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony”, appreciating a joke of its kind requires better education, language skills, and emotional stability — in short, what we usually call intelligence. To the medical journal Patient UK, psychologist Claire Brummel said in 2021 that dark humour helps in coping with loss and trauma, allowing us to “try” behaviours which help us heal or temporarily cushion the pain. Or, as put simply by comedian Daniel Sloss in a 2018 show, when done right, “dark humour is not about belittling a victim or making fun of a tragedy, but rather bringing a level of humanity to a moment that seems to lack it.”

Is there privilege inherent to that position? Absolutely. If you have a trauma response to watching Lawrence make unwanted sexual advances on a much younger boy, it deserves to be respected by those without your experience. But keep in mind that most of the criticism this film received didn’t cite any jokes which pointed at Percy and made fun of him. Based on a few trailer clips and the generally light-hearted tone of the film, a reductive calculus was chosen instead: Older woman + younger boy + deceitful sex = problematic. Flippant and vitriolic jokes about Lawrence and her agreement to star in the film were everywhere. People seemed to have ignored who was made fun of in the film. As noted by critic Jonathan McIntosh in a 2019 video essay, a joke about disturbing subjects which respects the trauma of victims isn’t impossible; it just needs to make the right person the punchline.

When joking about sexual violence, for example, rather than cracking the joke at the expense of the victim, (a police officer warning a male prisoner to not “drop the soap” in public showers, a man wondering aloud why his male friend is complaining about a woman drugging and having sex with him, a young boy celebrated for being forced into a sexual act by an older attractive woman) you can joke about why the violence takes place at all. As countless studies say, sexual violence is about exerting power, not fulfilling sexual needs. So why not joke about the perpetrator who’s trying to exert power over their victim? What are they trying to compensate for? What circumstances led to this violence? It will lead to a joke at the expense of the perpetrator without trivialising the trauma suffered by their victim — a tactic repeatedly executed by No Hard Feelings.

The film narrates Maddie and Percy’s lives with equal empathy: It will play funny music when Maddie is making aggressive sexual advances (because she, the aggressor, is acting silly and failing to seduce Percy, becoming nothing more than a punchline), and suddenly go silent and zoom in on Percy’s face when he expresses discomfort, making her back off. The tone changes, the perspective shifts, and suddenly, what was awkward for Maddie is horrifying for Percy. There are many moments like that in the film, when you go on laughing until you suddenly feel guilty.

It bears repeating: Sexual violence is no joke, whether the victim is male, female or trans, and No Hard Feelings is far from perfect. It plays into the “hooker with a heart of gold” trope one too many times, with Maddie portrayed as a kind woman forced to turn to the “demeaning” trade of sex because she needs money, and can leave the job behind after one job, when it’s rarely as simple, as argued by former sex worker Laura LeMoon in a recent Business Insider article. LeMoon adds that Maddie’s arc resembles the regressive trope of a prostitute “softened — feminised — by love” for her client. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian argues that the deceitful sex subjected to Percy is nowhere critiqued, nor is there any “emotional reckoning” for Maddie who agreed to the arrangement. Still, the movie is a step forward, if an icky one, against the overwhelming tide of sexist comedy in contemporary media that makes victims of sexual violence the butt of the joke.

udbhav.seth@expressindia.com