This. That. No Other.

or… “I’m Waiting To Hear From Rebecca Eckler’s Lawyer”

So, if you live in Canada, you’ve heard of Rebecca Eckler. Not necessarily because you’re acquainted with her banal, unfunny and unoriginal writing, nor because you wasted a few precious seconds of your life poring over her poorly-spelled, ridiculously trite and self-absorbed weblog, but because this week she’s the subject of a national, carpet-bomb/media blitz concerning her lawsuit against Judd Apatow and Universal Studios, claiming their very funny movie Knocked Up plagiarizes her book Knocked Up: Confessions of a Modern Mother-to-be.

Rebecca Eckler, Pretty in Pink
(but not the John Hughes movie Pretty in Pink
or the Psychedelic Furs song “Pretty in Pink”
because that would be copying)

You know how we all depend on our friends to steer us away from getting rainbow-flag-festooned, teddy-bear tattoos on our asses, or from having our hair fauxhawked? Where the fuck were Rebecca Eckler’s friends when she announced she was going to sue Apatow and Universal? Before this kerfuffle, she was merely lame and undertalented. Now? Laughing stock.

Check out the unanimously eviscerating comments on the story at both Defamer and The Globe and Mail (her employer!) for a true barometer of public sympathy to her plight. But for Our Feature Presentation, so to speak, you really need to go to the source, to Canada’s 6th-rate version of Newsweek, Maclean’s, in which she’s written a 3-page… well, I think it’s intended as a call for support, but, if so, is it really wise for the writer to portray herself as a ginormous, witless — but alluringly slim! — douchebag? It’s quite possibly the funniest thing she’s ever written:

The movie Knocked Up features a woman named Alison who becomes pregnant after getting drunk. While she gets drunk going out celebrating a promotion at work, I got drunk, and knocked up, celebrating at my engagement party. Both my book and the movie feature one night of passion and the nine months that follow. Fine. Whatever. But what got me was the fact that “Alison” was an up-and-coming television reporter; in my book I was an up-and-coming newspaper reporter.

I’ve searched all I can, and can’t quite reconcile how “up-and-coming newspaper reporter” equals Eckler. “Fluff columnist” does not equal “reporter”. “Peaked” — if we can consider her tedium as having peaked — does not equal “up-and-coming”. Also? You were let go from your gig at The National Post, hon.

There were other similarities that hit close to home. In my book, I have a best-friend- with-screaming-children named Ronnie, who I go to often for advice. In the movie version, Alison has a sister, named Debbie, with screaming children, who is her sounding board. Both “Alison” and I did numerous pregnancy tests.

“Best friend” does not equal “sister”, “screaming children” does not equal “adorably precocious moppets”. “Numerous” pregnancy tests does not equal “hundreds (comically)” of pregnancy tests.

What also got my back up was that Ben, the man who gets Alison knocked up, is not only Jewish, but from Canada, like my man. (I still can’t figure out why the fact that someone was Canadian would add value to any movie.)

Imagine! A Hollywood film with a Jewish character! A Canadian Jew, just like your man? But… you’re not American, like Alison, are you, Rebecca? And… your impregnator is not a stoned, unemployed slacker you met a few hours prior to the porking, is he? More to the point, dorkus, Ben was made Canadian because the actor for whom the role was written (Seth Rogen) is Canadian — and Jewish! and a slacker-stoner! — and simply couldn’t shake that damned accent.

And then there’s this one scene in the screenplay and movie, where Alison and Ben are having sex. Ben stops. Ben, in the screenplay, says, “My dick is like, four inches away from its head. What if it kicked on purpose ’cause it didn’t like it?” I actually wrote in my book about a joke I once heard, “A man and his pregnant wife had regular sex throughout her pregnancy. When their son was born, the father held him in his arms. The baby looked up at his new father and, without warning, punched him. ‘See?’ said the baby. ‘Now you know what it feels like to be bonked in the face.’ “

Gee, a man commenting humourously on the proximity of his knob to his protochild’s noggin during sex. First time in history, that. And… who stole the joke from whom? By your own admission, lady, it’s not your joke.

There are lines in the movie that aren’t in the screenplay, which makes things even more confusing, including one joke about “jumping on a trampoline,” which wasn’t in the screenplay, but was definitely one of the things I mention in my book, under a heading, “Things I have not done wrong while pregnant.”

There are lines in the movie that aren’t in the screenplay, but that shouldn’t confuse you, Rebecca, because if you had even the slightest passing acquaintance with the work of Apatow and Company, you’d know that shit is improvised like crazy. Like, for hours they roll the cameras while the talented and funny performers riff. Which is probably alien to you, being all short-changed in the talented and funny departments and stuff.

The most telling difference between the movie and Eckler’s writing is that the movie is more about Ben’s transformation (read: growing up) than it is about Alison’s transformation (read: pregnancy). Eckler’s material is, for the most part, a catalogue of “modern mommy” self-obsession.

Of course, all of this would just be another embarrassing moment for a Canadian possessed of more chutzpah than good sense if it weren’t for the suspicious, coincidental timing of the media blitz and, wouldn’t you know it, the recent publication of Eckler’s latest navel-gazing masterpiece, Wiped!: Life With a Pint-Sized Dictator, with which Canada’s own literary journal, Quill & Quire, begins and concludes their review:

Columnist Rebecca Eckler, seemingly the first woman in Canada to both carry and birth a child, has naturally deemed it appropriate to document every stultifying moment of her experience in book form.
[...]
What’s missing here is any intelligent self-analysis that might convince the reader that the book’s title is anything other than a declaration of how its pages might best have been used.

Y’know, I see Eckler started her blog 4 days before I started mine. And we’re both from Calgary! And we’ve both been fucked (while drunk) by 40something, Jewish-Canadian lawyers!!! (Although, to be fair, I made mine wear a condom, and to be accurate, I haven’t written about that… until now!)

So sue me, lady.

Addenda:

Eckler on CBC, providing fact-checkers with ample assertions to challenge; the rest of us are left scratching our heads as to how someone so inarticulate could land a book deal, let alone a regular gig at two of Canada’s national newspapers. “Go for it, girl, you know!”

Readers interested in laughing at — and not with — Rebecca Eckler might want to check out the cheery parody of her dumbass blog and lametacular prose at NineGramBrain*, which just gets funnier every day.

More fun from Quill & Quire, in which book cover and press release blurbs are researched for fuller, more telling review content.

And let’s not forget the marvelous anti-mommy-blogger folks at Reject the Kool-Aid.

*Ninegrambrain is, sadly, no more. Gone. Kaput. Finis. Y’all can read the latest on Mommie Blogger Warz here.