celebrity gossip, academic style

The shitstorm continues. Heigl’s The Ugly Truth opened relatively strong with $27 million domestic (although not strong enough to beat current summer rom-com champ, The Proposal).

And this weekend, it goes up against the Rogen/Apatow/Sandler collaboration Funny People. Rogen and Apatow have been doing the press rounds for the film, and have obviously heard wind of Heigl’s comments — both concerning her “torturous” schedule at Grey’s Anatomy and her previous complaints about her own collaboration with Apatow and Rogen, Knocked Up. (For the record, Heigl told Vanity Fair that Knocked Up “paints the women as shrews,” while the men look “lovable.” She added, “It was hard for me to love the movie.”)

On Howard’s Stern’s XM Radio show, Rogen and Apatow offered the following (via US Weekly):

“That [movie] looks like it really puts women on a pedestal in a beautiful way,” he quipped on Howard Stern‘s SIRIUS XM radio show on Thursday.

Added Apatow, “I hear there’s a scene where she’s wearing … Underwear …
with a vibrator in it, so I’d have to see if that was uplifting for women.”

Apatow figured Heigl was “probably was doing six hours of interviews and kissing everyone’s a**, and then just got tired and slipped a little bit” when she made the remarks to Vanity Fair.

Regardless, Rogen said, “I didn’t slip and I was doing f****** interviews all day too … I didn’t say s***!”

Even more baffling, said Apatow, “We never had a ‘fight’” with Heigl while filming. “Seth always says, it doesn’t make any sense [because] she improvised half her s***,” Apatow said, adding that she “could not have been cooler.”

Apatow said he hasn’t spoken to Heigl since her remarks. He doesn’t know if he’d make a big deal about it, either.

“It all depends on how much coffee I have had that day,” he said. “If I was fighting … with someone else about something I may handle it wrong, and if I’m in like total Buddha mood, I’d be like ‘I feel sad that she hasn’t learned the lesson of her journey yet,’” he said.

After the remark, “[You think] at some point I’ll get a call saying ‘Sorry, I was tired…’ and then the call never comes,’” he said.

Rogen said he doesn’t feel bad since Heigl seems to run her mouth and most people, including Grey’s Anatomy staff.

“I gotta say it’s not like we’re the only people she said some bat **** crazy things about,” he said. “That’s kind of her bag now.”

Now, this has been framed as Rogen and Apatow attempting to divert attention away from her movie and onto theirs, but I think the choice of forum — Howard Stern, who tends to encourage more, well, frank discussion — helps to at least frame their discourse as the expression of their ‘authentic’ feelings about Heigl.

Ultimately, Rogen and Apatow undermine any and all discourse that asserts that Heigl has become a scapegoat, or that her words are taken out of context (see the Newsweek article). If even the people she WORKS WITH say she’s this sort of person, she must be.

Again, I want to emphasize that it doesn’t really matter whether or not she really is a shrew — what matters is that all aspects of her image (and the media) seem to be collaborating to portray her as such. It also doesn’t help that she was the executive producer of The Ugly Truth — further highlighting what has been constructed as ‘movie-role’ hypocracy: criticizing her character in one film and playing one that seems to embody the selfsame traits in another.

That’s about all I have to say — other than the fact that everywhere, even The Onion A.V. Club, seems to be circulating this line of discourse. Heigl’s got to turn this around quick — either by mocking herself (a Funny or Die video or SNL skit might do, but I don’t know how funny she really is) or by doing something significant enough to drape over this now acutely felt component of her star image.