The 40 Year-Old Virgin (aka The Forty Year-Old Virgin) (2005, Universal, dir. Judd Apatow, written by Judd Apatow and Steve Carell) is supposed to be the 'par excellence' 50s-derivative situation comedy about a late bloomer. Yes, Steve Carell himself (42 as of the time of the film's premiere in August 2005) plays a 40-year-old home electronics salesman who has never had sexual intercourse, so, by definition, never had SIBM (that was what we called the forbidden 'sexual intercourse before marriage (SIBM)' in Army barracks in the Vietnam-era days). As Carell said himself in an NBC Today show interview, there's noting weird about the character; somehow it just never happened. So we get to set up 'la grande comedie.'
Now the media (including Universal itself by the way, the bombastic corporate trademark was used, making me expect 'The 4400') makes a lot of the depilation scene (almost as if it were the Immolation Scene from Gottedamerung), in previews and various newspaper and transit ads, where Carell's chest is a 'man-o-lantern.' It seems that he went into the scene as hairy as Robin Williams. An oriental girl applies the wax strips several times (including once over the right teat), and then pulls, and it hurts. They talked about this on Today where Carell said that it was humiliating, and then told the interviewer to 'back off.' Yes, they really put him through this tribunal, and it took two months to grow back. In fact, it does so just in time for his nuptials and consummation (he never does have SIBM). Now this has happened a few times before in the movies: as in What Women Want, (the legs, then), or to Troy McClain (the legs again) on The Apprentice (for 'the Team,' a self-sacrifice that made Donald Trump's book, How to Get Rich. There are comic opportunities missed here; for later on he strips himself to the man-o-lantern look, when it would have been better to let the female trick undress him (she actually proposed mutual shaving, in the spirit of The Dreamers). Bazhe would mention this a bit when he goes into drag in his book Damages.
Now he has sidekicks at the store: David (Paul Rudd), Cal (Seth Rogen), and Jay (Romany Malco). Jay, an African-American, makes the suggestion that he get waxed, when noticing the fur over his collar (only managers wear ties, it seems). I think most women would probably disagree with the advice, actually. Apart from all of this, the movie tends to lapse into a sequence of gags. One date vomits shellfish sandwiches on him. David tries to take a picture of his own butt in the store with a camcorder (no Jim Carry needed here). There are lots of vulgar jokes, and one sequence where David and Cal find reasons to call the other gay. Yet, the rather large audience was laughing most of the time.
Capital One has a commercial that embraces the Man-O-Lantern device: comedian David Spade opens up a poor victims shirt, tapes a mike on, and then strips it off. Filmmakers beware!
The man-o-lantern appearance might happen medically, as after a stress electrocardiograph or Holter monitor heart monitor test, where good contact with the leads is required. It might happen to astronauts, too (like a scene in "Apollo 13").
The devious mind of Ashton Kutcher will punk us again with Beauty and the Geek 2 and specifically one of the geeks will become a man-o-lantern, according to the previews. Well, from the latest previews for the Feb. 2 2006 show, all five of the remain geeks will become man-o-lanterns. That is, undergo humiliation. The two that were already eliminated (Tyson and Brandon) are the lucky ones. The five contestants will have to carry on nevertheless. Men aren't supposed to look like men anymore. As history would have it, two of the men 'got it' and they will have to be revealed at strip poker on Feb. 9.
Purveyors of this movie will note with glee that tennis star Andre Agassi waxes or shaves everything -- not just his scalp (that may be natural), but his chest, legs, even his forearms. Welcome to Saturday Night Live!
The title of this film has a certain irony, when one considers the Hollywood practice of having grown men in their 20s play teenagers who seem too mature for their ages to be believed (because they are!). There is probably more than just one waxed chest in Tinseltown for this purpose.
This film seems to have motivated a Snickers candy bar ad. Two men are chewing on the same candy bar, about to kiss, when they withdraw, open their shirts and each do a "manly" thing by pulling out chest hair. GLAAD protested this ad.
USA Network, in its "characters welcome" ads, promotes the rerun of the movie by saying that Steve Carrell loses both his virginity and his chest hair.
On Saturday, May 12, 2007, Neely Tucker wrote a story "Not Wild About Hairy: Nowadays Guys Are Getting Something off Their Chest, and Back," here. The article contains a shot of the chest waxing scene on Carell in this movie. She mentions the idea that during the 50s, for Caucasian men, body hair was considered a sign of virility that should not be removed. (Blacks, Orientals, and Native Americans usually have much less-- the World Book Encyclopedia in 1950 used the terms "profuse" and "sparse".) In ancient Greece, the smooth body with a full head of hair was the idea, which is sometimes mimicked in the gay community or among straight "metrosexuals" (and on daytime soap operas, especially "Passions"). Of course, with competitive swimmers and cyclists depliation has long been accepted and expected, as in other sports like football where tape is used. (And remember John Travolta as a "ballerina" in "Staying Alive" (1985); nobody wanted to talk about it. More recently, at least two of the geeks in "Beauty and the Geek" got it in a makeover (and an African American beauty told one of the geeks that he should always keep his chest shaved, right there on TheWB), as did one of the candidates in "The Apprentice".) Sometimes military or college hazing involves forced shavings. The Nazis shaved all the body hair of concentration camp prisoners in order to humiliate them and remove their sense of individuality. And balding legs sometimes means serious circulatory problems, associated, for example, with cigarette smoking or with diabetes. See also the discussion of David Skinner "Notes on the Hairless Man" in The Weekly Standard (1999), here. Men without chests? "We are rapidly becoming a nation of men without chest hair," at least in the movies, he says. And for about eight years now, salons have been offering (and advertising on morning news shows) laser treatments to make it a "permanent", though the bill can get into the thousands.
The Aug. 27, 2007 issue of Newsweek has, on p 13, a Periscope sidebar "Looks: A Manly Comeback" about men wanting to reverse metrosexuality by transplanting hair from their heads back to their chests.
On April 17, 2008 ABC "Good Morning America" female hosts discussed male "cleavage" and one of the gals said that men who wax their chests make better husbands because they know what women go through. She really said that! Honest!
On April 24, 2008, Harrison Ford (now 65) got his chest waxed on camera on NBC's "Access Hollywood" in order to make a political argument about deforestation of areas around the world, especially the Amazon, in relation to global warming. (See the story on this spectacle here.) He never seemed to have any chest hair in the early Star Wars movies, so this is recent. Is this an inspiration for a series of disco-related fund raisers?
On March 27, 2009 Ashton Kutcher got his chest waxed on Access Hollywood (he didn't have that much to lose), in order to match his stunt double. Oh yes, on camera.
Was Carell's character an "incel"? Also, just note, I recall from a screenwriting group in Minneapolis, there is a script called "I Hate Speeddating" floating around somewhere.