DTF St. Louis, Humpday, and the sloppy art of straight dudes getting intimate

In this week’s finale of the HBO miniseries DTF St. Louis, which A.V. Club staffers just broke down, two straight, middle-aged men (Jason Bateman’s Clark Forrest and David Harbour’s Floyd Smernitch, co-workers at a local news station who quickly became BFFs) strip down to just their underwear and get into it. “It’s been a really confusing summer,” Clark says gently as the two of them groove to Barry White’s “I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little More Babe” (a needle-drop that was previously used to great effect in High Fidelity, when Rob envisioned his ex having the best sex of her life with their neighbor). Floyd has just shown his pal a nude pic of himself in Playgirl from back in the day, marveling at how cut he used to be. They’re in the locker room of a pool during the off season in the extremely early hours of the morning—a perfect setting for a tryst and a hackneyed one for a porn. It’s absurd. It’s funny. It’s weird. It’s kinda dumb. It’s also pretty sweet and even a little bit emotionally resonant.

All of those adjectives can be used to describe the setup and execution of Humpday, a very funny 2009 indie from writer-director Lynn Shelton that also ends with two straight men embracing each other in only their underwear—only this time in a hotel with the express intent of making an actual porn together. This is essentially the whole premise and joke of the film: Can two straight best friends who love each other platonically (Mark Duplass’ Ben and Joshua Leonard’s Andrew) have sex and film it for the sake of “art” and reinvigorating their lives? That the answer to that question from anyone besides Ben and Andrew is a very obvious “No, they can’t” isn’t really the point. Somehow, Humpday doesn’t overstay its welcome in getting to that inevitable place or keeping that one joke going for 94 minutes. Instead, it veers in amusing directions as these two dudes dumbly rationalize and talk themselves in and out of doing the act, with macho posturings forcing them both into believing that’s what they have to. And along the way, it has meaningful things to say about marriage, friendship, aging, the disconnect between how you see yourself today versus how everyone else probably does, and how a blast from your past can put all of that in focus.

Ben and Andrew were best friends in college, the kind of guys who unironically called themselves Sal and Dean and had a detailed plan to go “Kerouac on everyone’s ass,” to quote Step Brothers, that fell apart. In the middle of the night, Andrew shows up on Ben’s doorstep all smiles, wired like an Energizer Bunny, having just flown into Seattle from Mexico City on a whim with stories of putting together some very vague sounding art project in Chiapas and meeting a princess in Morocco. Andrew, meanwhile, has a normal job and a wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore), and the two of them are trying to start a family. The next evening, the guys end up at a hipster party (hosted by Shelton’s Monica, who has an open relationship with her girlfriend and is hitting it off with Andrew), get drunk and stoned, and hear about HUMP!, the film festival hosted by alt newspaper The Stranger in which locals debut—and then destroy, post-screening—short homemade porn films they’ve made. “You and me. Two straight dudes. Straight balling,” Ben says, pitching his short film to the confusion and delight of those around them. “It’s beyond gay.”

It’s the sort of bit that kills at a party at 3:00 a.m. but you laugh off in the cold sober light of day. But after playing basketball while hungover (and getting in a funny physical fight in front of more put-together literal children), they both nudge the other into doubling down:

Andrew: You could have sex with me on film for this project tomorrow night? 

Ben: I could absolutely do this. 

Andrew: You could or you would? 

Ben: I would do it. 

Andrew: You would? 

Ben: Yeah. 

Andrew: ‘Cause I would. 

Ben: Really? 

Andrew: Totally.

Ben: But I don’t think we should do this because, like, neither one of us wants to back down. Like, this shouldn’t be about us challenging each other. This should be about us…if we want to make a piece of art, we should make a piece of art together.

Andrew: I think the idea is fucking weird, but I think it’s great. 

Ben: It’s weird but it’s amazing. It pushes boundaries. And that’s what good pieces of art should do.

In a piece for The A.V. Club around the release of Shelton’s follow-up, Your Sister’s Sister (also starring Duplass, as well as Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt), Mike D’Angelo wrote, “I could listen to her characters talk forever. They sound like everyone I know, to the point of making other ostensibly naturalistic but talk-heavy American movies feel slightly bogus. And if you can get your actors to put across a premise as preposterous as Humpday‘s, there’s nowhere you can’t go.” I saw the film during its run at Angelika Film Center in New York in the summer of 2009 and had the same reaction: The way these guys talk had rhythms that were eerily similar to those of my friend group. That I’d be leaving those friends for NYC in the coming months made Humpday and its dudey verisimilitude hit that much harder.

The discourse about toxic masculinity won’t be dimming anytime soon, not just because of everything happening on our screens in the real world but those reflecting them in fictional ones too. Projects like Richard Gadd’s Half Man, which hits HBO later this month, will surely spark plenty more discussions about and insight into the darker side of men. Humpday isn’t one of those works. And neither, really, is DTF St. Louis, even if fragile masculinity proves fatal in Steven Conrad‘s funny and tough-to-label series. Rather, both are tapping into something sweeter and far less world-destroying, but no less true—a longing for that special someone to, to quote Ben, “do something stupid” with, even if it invariably leads to the same conclusion: “Something just hit me. I think…we might be morons.” 

Tim Lowery is The A.V. Club‘s TV editor.