Trainwreck

Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck is a romantic comedy that stakes out a new position in the feminist reworking of American film.

Most obviously, Schumer’s comedy has a candour and profanity traditionally reserved for men. Like her TV show and standup, her riffs are transgressive bawdry. Her candour about cunnilingus, tampons and erections are tabu-turning cases in point.

The three women of Snuff magazine establish the spectrum. Boss Dianna (Tilda Swinton) is the woman executive taught that success requires her to be like a man. Amy seems feminine in comparison, soft, recessive, but still stronger than Nikki, whose nerves — outside the women’s toilet stalls — reduces her to a girlish titter. Nikki apologetically backs into the editorial promotion when Amy is fired for supposedly molesting an underage masochistic male intern. On  this spectrum Amy struggles to find her integral balance of male and female. The two male writers reflect the same contrast between macho and effeminate. 

Naming a men’s magazine Snuff clearly plays with the idea manliness kills. Hence Amy’s line to the super endowed man: “Have you f... before? Where is she buried?” Amy is limited by her masculine traits. She was brainwashed by her father’s conviction that “Monogamy is unnatural.” Where her sister outgrew that mantra to become a fulfilled wife and mother, Amy stuck at promiscuity and insecurity. She has the conventional male fear of commitment, urge to leave after sex, need to control the relationship. 

She reduces her men’s sexuality to her immediate needs. The super-endowed pickup is thwarted when she falls asleep after her brisk orgasm. When her “ice sculpture” boyfriend gets into a quarrel at the cinema she feeds him lines that make him seem gay. 

Amy is saved from her insularity by her interview assignment with sports doctor Aaron (Bill Hader). He’s idealized by his work for Doctors Without Borders and his fame as a major sports surgeon. Here the man plays the nurturing healer role, domesticating the uncontrolled sexuality of — completing the reversal — the woman. Hader’s lunch scene with Lebron James is a male parody of he Women’s Lunch, from their discussion of relationships and emotions to their careful parsing of the check. 

When Dr Aaron is served with an intervention he faces a range of sexual license. The soft, caring Lebron is joined by the very sensitive Matthew Broderick (married to the star of the seminal feminist Sex and the City), the lesbian Chris Evert and — to provide the play-by-play — by the erstwhile cross-dresser Marv Albert. Amy’s intervention is an arranged scene with her step-nephew, who educes her affection for her lost Aaron. 

     Amy wins Aaron back by performing a number with the Knicks’ cheerleaders. She proves her new discipline and her desire to make their relationship work by performing the athletic ritual she initially disdained. She now accepts sports on Aaron’s terms, as an agent of community.  She also performs the persona of female sexuality, the antithesis to her Snuff work. The muscular hunk climaxed when he admitted that from behind she looked “like a dude.” That went with her male life-choice of promiscuity and flight from emotion. To recover her relationship with Aaron she embraces the female role as cheerleader and her new pool of emotions and commitment. Once an emotional trainwreck, she goes on track and pulls into a station.