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Dana, I saw Observe and Report this weekend and I must say, I found the rape scene—in which Seth Rogen's sad-sack security guard has sex with Anna Faris's makeup counter floozy while she's passed out—to be just another stomach-turning plot point in a movie consisting of several similarly revolting scenes. If you are to take the film and its characters seriously, which perhaps is beside the point, Rogen's cop not only sexually assaults Faris but basically stalks her, and the movie ends with him publicly slut-shaming her.
Maybe I'll buy that the movie is failed satire, and certainly director Jody Hill's interview with the Onion's AV Club (via Majikthise) shows that he has a totally muddled vision of the rape scene and its context:
AVC: In the Times piece, they describe the scene you’re talking about as Seth Rogen’s character forcing himself on Anna Faris. Is that how you perceived that scene?
JH: [Pause.] I dunno. I’ve always kind of liked scenes that you talk about how fucked-up they are. I would have been happy without any dialogue in that scene. I wanted to show them just having sex and her passed out, and I thought that would have been funnier. But I think I have a darker sense of humor than most people. So at the end, [Faris’character] is okay with it. [Laughs.] And that was like, “I’ll shoot it both ways.” So I actually shot it both ways. I just kept the camera rolling. There’s like a line that’s “We’re okay laughing, and you’re pushing the envelope.” But you’re not really pushing the envelope until you cross that line where a lot of people don’t go along with you. I tried to do it in a few scenes in this movie, where a lot of people aren’t going to go along with the film or with what we’re trying to do.Hopefully that means we’re actually pushing the envelope. [Laughs.] You know what I mean by that? I think if you’re really pushing the envelope, you have to not include everybody, if that makes sense. Or else it’s not really pushing the envelope.
As blogger Majikthise points out, "[Hill's] reply seems to confirm my theory that Faris' 'motherfucker' line is a cop out—a ploy contrived to keep the scene 'funny' instead of taking it to an even darker place." And that's the crux of the problem with this movie: It tried to hedge its bets between dark comedy and just dark, and managed to accomplish neither. It's as if Will Ferrell tried to make a Todd Solondz movie—Hill went for cheap laughs rather than depth or coherence of vision.