Maybe it’s a sign that healthcare issues have become a prominent part of the general American consciousness: I went to see two quite different Hollywood comedies and each featured a character who was a pharma rep. In Little Fockers (the most recent instalment in the Stiller and De Niro comedy series which began with Meet the Parents), Jessica Alba plays Andi Garcia, a sexy young drug rep: she drives a red sports car with plates reading ‘Rx Grrrl’, and is introduced as a threat to Greg Focker’s marriage. In Love and Other Drugs is a dramatic comedy about a romance that develops between Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal), a pharma rep, and Maggie (Anne Hathaway), a young woman with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. Fired from his job as a stereo equipment salesman, Jamie decides to work as a salesman for Pfizer because it is the only entry-level job in the US offering a yearly salary of $100,000. This is not to say, of course, that being a legal drug dealer is an easy job. A drug company’s sales rep has to be good-looking, charming, persuasive, and resilient enough to deal with being rebuffed by busy doctors. Because even if drug companies have a lot of money and power, most doctors are idealists who can only be won over once frustration, disillusionment and exhaustion have worn them down. Until then, many resist the slick incursion of pharma reps, who only gradually gain a welcome, less as a result of their charm than for what they can offer: treats, holidays and extra cash for doctors who agree to promote their company’s drugs. Both films highlight all of these aspects of the job: the salesmanship, the rejection and the bribes.
While the pharma rep character is relatively new in Hollywood comedy, the products they offer are not. Predictably enough, erectile dysfunction medication has been a target for comedy from the moment it first appeared on the market. Little Fockers and Love and Other Drugs also focus primarily on this type of medication. The latter film gives its reference a documentary flavour, as it is set in the 90s when Pfizer first introduced Viagra. Little Fockers substitutes an invented but equally evocative and just as (un)believable name for the same type of product: Sustengo. And both films, of course, include a gag about adverse reactions to the drug.
Little Fockers and Love and Other Drugs also show what is wrong with pharma reps themselves. Although the drug reps in both films are outwardly attractive and charming, both have hidden problems. In Little Fockers, Andi Garcia is a trained nurse with a funny, warm and laid-back personality: however, she also takes advantage of Greg’s disagreement with his wife to spend an intimate evening with him. When Greg retreats to the house that is being renovated for his family, Andi turns up with Chinese food and a bottle of wine. Later, she pops a few Sustengo and goes wild, throwing herself at Greg. She ends up pushing him into the unfinished pool in the garden and jumping on top of him. Unfortunately, this type of misogynistic caricature is not unfamiliar in Hollywood comedy. Another Ben Stiller film, The Heartbreak Kid (2007), featured a similar monster, a woman who is physically attractive but psychologically abnormal. It is possible to interpret such characters as symbolic punishment to male characters for focusing on outward characteristics at the expense of inner ones: rather than bringing the expected physical pleasure, the woman horrifies or attacks the man physically. At the same time, the fact that these female characters are so exaggerated serves to assert the old-fashioned notion of the normalcy and reasonability of the male against the irrationality of the female. Ignoring the fact that it is usually men who harass women, Little Fockers shows Greg to be an absolutely innocent, all-round good guy, who risks having his conventional family life destroyed by an over-sexualised, independent career woman.
Jamie, the pharma rep in Love and Other Drugs, has problems too, but his are much more nuanced and seem not to be his fault. Having been brought up in a rather cold, competitive family environment, he is unable to love himself or anyone else. His good looks and choice of career encourage superficiality in all his relationships, from making the sale to his customers to meaningless sex with the many women he attracts. This pattern ends when he meets Maggie: he falls in love with her, and craves a long-term relationship with her in spite of her poor health. Maggie, in turn, helps him to recognise his problems. She asks him why he feels the need to impress his parents, and points out his good qualities (something he himself is unable to do). This film ends with the most unromantic expression of devotion since Mr. Darcy’s in Pride and Prejudice: Jamie tells Maggie that he ‘unfortunately’ can’t live without her, and praises her because she helped him to learn to love himself. The difference is that Mr. Darcy’s reluctant love was haughtily rejected, whereas Jamie’s is gratefully accepted. Like Little Fockers, Love and Other Drugs is highly conventional in its attitude to gender: as The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw pointed out, it was necessarily the female character who suffered from a disease, and the male character who loved her in spite of it, as it is woman’s role to be vulnerable and the man’s role to protect her (for a notable exception to this, though, see David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)). Love and Other Drugs appears to make Maggie Jamie’s equal, as she too is initially seeking meaningless sex. However, the film makes it clear that the reason for this seemingly modern and empowered stance is Maggie’s illness. She only rejects long-term relationships because she believes that no man would want her long-term: it is her illness that forces her to take this approach to relationships, but ultimately she and Jamie help each other to conform to the norm of long-term commitment.
While Little Fockers and Love and Other Drugs both explore the character of pharma reps more or less superficially, neither seriously questions the pharmaceutical industry itself. Both films highlight doctors’ unease with any relationship with the industry: Greg Focker only agrees to make a speech for Sustengo because it offers a chance for better control over his family’s finances, while the unsavoury doctor character in Love and Other Drugs confesses to Jamie that he used to be an idealist. Both films also show that it is difficult to be a drug rep, and that the job encourages superficiality at best and, at worst, underhandedness and drug abuse. In his Guardian review, Peter Bradshaw also observed that Pfizer would not have allowed its name to be used in Love and Other Drugs if the film had reflected poorly on the company. Neither film suggests that the pharmaceutical industry encourages the unnecessary use of drugs. Love and Other Drugs only briefly brings up the question of harmful side effects and the industry’s dismissal of them. It refers coyly to refusal of health insurance (Maggie’s wry presentation of a wad of cash when the doctor asks about her coverage) and to the fact that drugs cost less in Canada (the cross-border bus trips Maggie organises for senior citizens).
As comedies, both of these films were enjoyable: Little Fockers was not as inventive as the previous installments in the series, recycling a lot of old jokes, but it was still very funny. Love and Other Drugs was engaging and even had an inventive script. The best example of the two films’ ultimate conformism, however, is the fact that these two unrelated comedies both featured a remarkably similar scene, which is becoming too standard a shorthand in Hollywood: in both films, the pharma rep character turns up at the door with Chinese take-out, which is shared with the prospective romantic partner, the food being eaten directly from the boxes, creating a scene of casual intimacy. Seeing this scene in two films in a row reminded me of how clichéd an image this is in Hollywood cinema. It was clearly too much to expect that either of these films, as conventional in their imagery as in their ideology, would aim any powerful satirical punches at the pharmaceutical industry.
