There has been a certain proliferation of films in the past few years that seem dangerously close to subversive cinema. By proliferation I mean, of course, Road Trip, which somehow negotiated multiple sexual taboos, and You’re Out, Pffft, He’s Just Ducky, which is a movie I made up last week in my stats class last week and involves me, the cast of Survivor II, and various isolated sexual liberations. I gave it three stars, and you don’t get any stars, traitor.

The tension which made Road Trip, at least to me and my hungry friends in Australia (I miss you, Kel), such a successful movie was the tension involved in the simultaneous parody and backdoor endorsement of non-traditional sexual practices and iconographies. The hunky jock enthusiastically discovers his prostrate (eureka, it tickles!), an adventurous woman orchestrates a sexually marginalized practice like videotaping and isn’t embarrassed or killed in the end of the film, and the skinny white boy’s coupling with a larger black girl, while visually still an undeniably comic juxtaposition, is generally embraced. Is this subversive film making, or is subverting typical Hollywood gender, sexual, and racial orderings merely a stock comic device? And does this matter? Sex is funny anyway. Hump hump hump. Hump. Hmph.

Saving Silverman confidently combines various aspects of homoeroticism, misogyny, explicit violence to women, explicit violence to men, and Three Stooges-esque fart jokes. This combination leads to the eventual abduction, degradation, sexual assault and attempted murder of a strong, successful, intelligent, and beautiful woman. This act is not only understandable within the narrative of the movie, but it is curiously celebrated as an act of true love. Or maybe this movie is just real fucked up. Or maybe you’re just real fucked up. Libations for the readers. Give me a shot, make it a double, cause when I get home I’m in such big trouble.

Am I confusing subversion with a general reduction of multiple, critical social issues to a cinematic lexicon that speaks only in farts, boobs, and maybe French? Seems subversive to me. Subversion is overrated anyway, like the French, but unlike both farts and boobs which until the advent of Technicolor were silenced and peripherialized in our culture. Now is the time of their most deserved embrace, and I believe the champions of this heroic ascension are Jack Black and Steve Zahn, whose embarrassingly overqualified comic presence facilitated everything good about this movie (farts, boobs , fart-boobs).

Who cares about the first four paragraphs of this article? I don’t. Not anymore. What I care about is attempting to describe how awesome Jack Black and Steve Zahn are. Unable to distinguish between reckless self-parody and an almost stupid dedication to low-brow humor, this is a good movie because they are in it. They are far better than this movie, or this article, or you. Go see it. Subvert this, mooncricket.