Three teenage boys sit on a public bus. They’re bored, dead-eyed, and awkward in stature. In a couple of weeks, high school graduation will unfurl the summer before college begins: liminal dog days spotted by dorm room shopping and parties they’re never invited to. Seth (Jonah Hill) wears an ill-fitting blue Western shirt that hangs, untucked, over a pair of plaid slacks, pieces on loan from the father of his best friend Evan (Michael Cera), whose style is remarkable for the sheer number of risks it avoids taking: a brown hoodie protectively zipped halfway over a faded polo, layered atop a tee. Their tertiary pal Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) slumps over his lap, having just been roasted by the group for a now-discarded anachronistic waistcoat. “Are You Man Enough?” by the Four Tops plays.
Are you man enough? Big and bad enough?
Big and bad enough to pull off a heist: getting a bunch of booze for a rager hosted by popular girl Jules (Emma Stone), who has a supposedly flirty rapport with Seth. Like many in its subgenre of American teen party comedies, Superbad (2007) uses a near-Arthurian quest narrative that unfolds over a bizarre night during which unpopular soon-to-be high school graduates seek to lose their virginities. In this film, they’re operating on the belief that, while drunk, the girls they have crushes on will lower their standards enough to sleep with them—misogynistic logic reflective of a youth culture in which getting wasted was a social and sexual expectation.
While raunchy commercial precedents such as Old School (2003) and the American Pie series (1999-2005) paved the way, Superbad is as much a time capsule of the way teenage boys talked in 2007 (about each other and women) as it is reflective of a style of popular American comedy reaching its peak. Directors like Adam McKay and Judd Apatow (a producer on Superbad) had developed reputations for films with improvised dialogue and a rotating coterie of actors. McKay tended to lampoon rich and powerful Americans (Anchorman, Talladega Nights), while Apatow focused more on the middle class (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up). Co-written by Apatow fan favorite Seth Rogen, who appears in the film as a supporting player, Superbad also shared other qualities with its predecessors: it was crude, vulgar, sexist, and focused on straight white men learning to function in mature human relationships. Yet while previous films tended to glorify their chauvinistic stoner bros, Superbad’s focus on high school rather than adult protagonists presented heterosexual masculinity as inherently cringeworthy and insecure. That the film employed director Greg Mottola—who hadn’t helmed a feature film since his indie Slamdance success The Daytrippers (1996)—further separated Superbad from the pack, aligning it with some of the artistic and intellectual ‘seriousness’ not enjoyed by its cinematic bedfellows.
Superbad bases its humor and its meaning on dissonant images designed to remind audiences that teenage expectations are often out of sync with reality. The title is a nod to a James Brown song—a reference drawn out by Lyle Workman’s score, which reunited the rhythm section of Brown’s old band, the J.B.’s. The film’s largely 1970s soul, funk, and hip-hop soundtrack suggests a suave atmosphere and incongruous world to the one inhabited by its white, middle class Californian teenagers who couldn’t be farther away from being “super bad.” Seth speaks with outsized sexual bravado that is often confusing on the sentence level: “She wants to fuck me! She wants my dick in or around her mouth!” “You don’t want girls to think you suck dick at fucking pussy.” Meanwhile, Evan boasts about a socially robust weekend to crush Becca (Martha MacIsaac) while a montage reveals the gang getting shitfaced and watching porn in the basement of his parent’s home. Fogell’s fake ID reads that he’s a 25-year-old organ donor named McLovin rather than a nerdy 18-year-old who spends his downtime with friends who barely tolerate him. When picked up by police officers Slater (Bill Hader) and Michaels (Rogen), Fogell is given the opportunity to inhabit McLovin’s mysterious faux persona.
Onscreen costuming is often discussed in terms of how fashionable a film is, or the innovative style of its characters. Superbad doesn’t lean into the poppy day-glo coordination of similar films about girlhood such as Clueless (1995), Ghost World (2001), or Mean Girls (2004), nor does it showcase the nostalgic threads donned by teens in coming-of-age period pieces like Dazed and Confused (1993) or Almost Famous (2000). Superbad might, conversely, be considered an anti-fashion film more in line with Napoleon Dynamite (2004) or the later Eighth Grade (2018), which seek to depict teenagers with warts-and-all discomfiture rather than as sexy adults playing a part.
From one of its earliest scenes, Superbad highlights the importance of clothing to its gestalt in which costumes—along with every other aesthetic device in play—draw attention to the undeveloped, sensitive, and altogether immature subjectivities of its characters. In an establishing scene, Seth and Evan prowl through a convenience store on their way to school and consider a rack of Maxim magazines. “I flip my boner up into my waistband! It hides it and it feels awesome,” Seth advises, though picturing him doing so while wearing his camouflage cargo shorts (mismatched to a Richard Pryor tee and baby blue plaid overshirt) is pretty void of sensuality. Later in class, Fogell waxes about a profound experience: peeping classmate Nicola (Aviva Baumann) wearing a black g-string visible through her white pants. The scene shown in flashback, a nearly silent hallway devoid of any music cues or slow-motion pacing that might accentuate the male gaze, instead highlights the unsexiness of both the outfit and scenario. While it avoids certain camera gimmicks normally used to present women as enticing objects, Superbad often turns these tricks onto its trio, asking viewers to linger on their mediocre ensembles and ungraceful maneuvers. It’s all in the details: an untucked shirt that shouldn’t be so, or a ridiculous suede vest. Few films are as attuned to the way backpack straps operate as a social shield by giving someone something to do with their hands. As eager as they are to redefine themselves elsewhere, the characters in Superbad grip their backpacks as if trying to stay anchored to the high school world that they know.
Seth’s perpetually mismatched wardrobe presents a person chaotically unsure of their identity. Despite his clashing outfits, Seth is clearly concerned about what he wears. “I can’t let Jules see me in what I wore to school. It’s completely unbecoming! Nobody’s gotten a handjob in cargo shorts since ’Nam,” he complains to Evan after school, while cycling through options of clothing to borrow. Struggling with a tiny polo shirt that highlights his chest and stomach underneath, Seth becomes agitated: “Do you have any bigger clothes or do you only shop at babyGap?”
While Superbad is slightly avoidant and not unproblematic in depicting Seth’s reality as a fat teenager, it is nuanced. He’s frequently shown in outfits that are too tight, which subtly reinforce his character’s broader teenage discomfort. Though fatness is an omnipresent and often unspoken dimension of his character’s personhood, the film also refuses to make Seth’s weight or size the butt of any running gags. While he is awkward and obnoxious, the film reveals that he is the most sexually experienced of his crew (his ex-girlfriend gave him “two dozen handjobs … and three quarters of a blow job, but who’s counting?”) and his viability as a romantic partner for Jules is only thwarted by his own pornographic delusions and juvenile conjectures about women. Still, Hill embodies his costumes and works within them in a way that subtly emphasizes Seth’s painful and frustrated experience of high school as one shaped by a fatphobic culture.
One of the film’s most symbolically layered uses of clothing occurs at its climax, a cocaine-fueled party of adult hipsters that Evan and Seth attend as a last ditch effort to acquire booze. A sultry dance floor on which couples grind to The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Big Poppa” reveals a solo swaying babe (Carla Gallo) who pulls Seth into her orbit. Later, two men point out a large red stain on his upper thigh. As Seth slowly deduces the source to be his dance partner’s period blood, he grimaces in repulsion, gagging loudly before running to the bathroom. When he finally arrives at Jules’, Seth is shown bragging to his peers about the stain as if flaunting a battle scar from his wild night. To see a character who has spent the entire runtime viscerally discussing women’s bodies be so thrown by confronting a few drops of blood highlights Seth’s puerile assumptions that lead to him eventually blowing it with a girl he actually cares about.
The phrase ‘a bad look’ often describes the way we behave. Superbad has less profound things to say about the way young men interact with women but look to each other for validation. The arc of the night over which it takes place brings the long-simmering conflict between Seth and Evan to a boil, tearing them apart (as, too, will college). They “don’t miss each other,” they scoff at Evan’s mother at the beginning of the film. Of course, they come back together. When the cops bust up the party, Seth carries a passed out Evan home. As they face one another in sleeping bags, hammered and exhausted, they confess their love to one another, as well as their fears of separation at the conclusion of the summer. When they wake up, sheepish and hungover, the place they decide to head to is the mall.
“Chicks can kind of see the borders and outline of my dick a little,” appraises Seth while modeling a pair of too-tight jeans for Evan outside the dressing room. They ditch the pants and the store, only to run into Becca and Jules, with whom things went poorly the previous evening.
In their sobriety, and armed with the lessons of the night behind them, the boys are able to conjure humility and social grace. They pair off with the girls and part ways, looking longingly over their shoulders as an escalator drags them farther and farther away from each other. Curtis Mayfield’s “P.S. I Love You” plays. There’s an air of optimistic possibility and melancholic ending. Wearing his “unbecoming” cargo shorts, Seth has glimpsed who and how he might want to become.