American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile (2006)

American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile arrives in December 2006 as the second direct-to-video entry in a franchise that had already begun feeding on its own tail. The plot concerns a high school senior named Erik Stifler, his virginity, a hall pass granted by his girlfriend, and a naked footrace at the University of Michigan. The opening sequence ends with a grandmother dead of a heart attack. This is the film's comic foundation, and it establishes the register early: shock, nudity, and repetition, in roughly that order. The critics were unmoved. Rotten Tomatoes recorded a zero percent approval rating across five reviews, which requires a kind of grim consistency.

An inventory of the film's cultural sensibilities takes very little time. The cast is white, the humor is white, and the subject is conquest. Women exist as prizes or as obstacles, and the nude sorority girls who finally compel the male leads to strip are deployed as titillation, not as any argument about self-acceptance. The one group outside the prevailing norm, a rival fraternity composed largely of men with dwarfism, is treated as a running joke, which is to say the film's lone gesture toward difference is a punchline. Race goes unmentioned. Class goes unmentioned. The environment goes unmentioned. There is no lecture here, no sermon, no lesson at all, which at least spares us the hypocrisy of a moral attached to a wet T-shirt.

What remains is commerce. The film sold over three million DVDs and roughly thirty million dollars in domestic revenue, so the market spoke and the market was satisfied. As an object of cultural analysis it is nearly weightless, a vacuum of intent. We can report, with no pleasure, that nothing in it advances anything at all.