Let My People F*ck: The Sad, Stilted Sexuality Of The Duplass Brothers Universe

The Overnight has recently appeared on Netflix, bringing with it the most neurotic examination of the sex lives of wealthy white Californians recorded on film in quite some time. I’d expected something more freewheeling until I saw that the Duplass Brothers had produced the movie. The Duplass label, like the Apatow one, implies a certain level of wit and reliable acting, but also a weird 1950s Pillow Talk-style morality when it comes to sex. And since there’s a lot of Duplass material in our stream, this problem needs to be addressed.

Essentially, The Overnight is a four-character play, kind of like Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, except the children are real and the couples oddly passionless, talking to each other in monotones usually reserved for the checkout clerk at Trader Joe’s. After a meet-cute at the playground, a couple of swinging L.A. types, played by a hammy Jason Schwartzman and the interesting French actress Judith Godreche, invite insecure wallflowers Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling, new to town, over to their house for a night of drugs and hanky-panky and feelings-sharing. There are a number of funny gags, a couple excellent ones, and a genuinely weird, compelling, and erotic scene in a massage parlor. Schwartzman plays his usual smarmy note, but the other three performances are believably subtle. So the movie offers a compelling time until the very end, when it gets saddled with a moral so off-kilter and conservative that it almost offends. After 75 minutes of tension and kink, we end up with a bland ride into the sunset.

The end itself isn’t the essential problem, nor is it a new conclusion. In 1969, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice ended similarly, with the protagonists, curiosity sated and even a little disgusted, walking away with their original partners. But the movie that preceded that decision involved a visit to Esalen and two hours of freewheeling experimental affairs. These people messed around. They knew what it was like.

In The Overnight, Scott and Schilling’s couple has little sexual experience. In fact, it’s revealed that Schilling’s character has never had sex with anyone other than her husband, who she met in college. Now, this is hard enough to believe coming out of the mouth of the actress who can be seen elsewhere on Netflix reverse-cowgirling a bespectacled Laura Prepon, but it doesn’t even suit the character. They are from Seattle. They went to college. They have one child and Schilling has a job. This isn’t a couple that met on Christian Mingle. They are hipsters. Even if it was bad sex after an L7 concert, they would have had sex at some point in their lives.

Schwartzman and Godreche’s characters have a more interestingly stunted sexuality. She’s French. He has repressed gay desires. They’re professional pornographers. So it’s potential comic gold that they pick up repressed Gen-Xers Scott and Schilling at the playground. But the kicker is that, despite the craziness of the night that follows, this predation hasn’t happened before, and apparently will never happen again. These aren’t swinging adults. They all have the sexual experience and maturity of 17-year-olds.

Despite the unprecedented raunch of modern Hollywood comedy, heteronormative monogamous relationships still reign supreme. Amy Schumer fucks around in Trainwreck until she meets the right guy. Her father, who preached nonmonogamy, dies of cancer, the most egregious Hollywood sex-victim since Forrest Gump’s girlfriend died from AIDS because she protested the Vietnam War. And if characters are married at the start of a movie or TV show, forget it. Sex doesn’t even exist.

This is very much on display in Togetherness, Mark Duplass’ wet-blanket HBO dramedy set in the exciting land of Eagle Rock, California, which consists of eight episodes of air-drumming to Rush about a withering creative-couple marriage. The plot basically revolves around Duplass’ wife, played by Melanie Lynskey, and whether or not she will kiss the guy on whom she has a crush. It’s a Gen-X kitchen-sink version of a Lifetime movie, except that the characters in those movies often act upon their desires. These adult children don’t have the guts to get it on and deal with the consequences.

You see the same weird morality play in the endlessly streaming The One I Love, also starring Duplass, another Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice scenario, except with Duplass and Elizabeth Moss having affairs with weird sci-fi clones of each other. For all the cool scenarios that movie brings up—much like in The Overnight—the ending hangs there, limp and fishy and gutless. You got the feeling that neither protagonist had ever been even vaguely sexual before.

Infidelity and aberrant married desire doesn’t have to be portrayed in a positive moral light. No one would argue that Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel end up in a good place in Carnal Knowledge. That affair in Little Children hardly fulfilled the movie’s protagonists. But at least it happened.

Now that our most lauded comic filmmakers refuse to acknowledge that sex barely exists outside of narrowly conceived scenarios, we’re left with stilted chamber music about shooting blanks. Few people on earth have more free time or a more conducive laboratory for experimentation than attractive young parents on the east side of Los Angeles. Enough pretending that these are sophomores going to their first homecoming. You want drama and comedy? Let my people fuck.

Neal Pollack (@nealpollack) is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.