Love Happens.
A struggle with the romantic comedy.
“Being afflicted with a penis, I harbour the same hatred for romantic comedies as the majority of my hairy, unwashed ilk. Inside this pigeon chest beats the heart of a hard hitting, hard drinking, hard farting Scotsman; who proudly roars ‘Chic flicks are shit!’ while hurling his claymore at Hugh Grant’s foppish smirk. The only thing that prevents me from embracing these log tossing instincts of mine, is the fact that I’m a writer; and consequently crippled by introspective self-doubt. Recently I’ve begun to suspect that chic flicks aren’t as artistically bankrupt as I’ve always assumed them to be – and that my intuitive loathing of them is just some bullshit cultural-hangover from the days when a boy would be bludgeoned to death just for knowing what the word ‘moisturiser’ meant. I mean, a whole cinematic genre cannot be utterly worthless. Surely, there must be something of value buried within this saccarine haze of Valentines kitsch. Right guys? So for the sake of this sorry, tortured art called journalism, I’ve decided to set aside my penis size issues, get out a stack of Meg Ryan rentals and try my darndest to enjoy the fuckers.
The first hurdle I had to clear in my quest to embrace the romantic comedy (rom-com) was a gripe I had with the very foundation of the genre. The blending of romance and comedy seemed entirely perverse to me. What kind of cynical shit laughs at other people’s love lives? The last thing you want to happen when you’re revealing your passions to someone is for them to laugh at you – they would be mocking the stuff that gave your life its meaning. Yet somehow, the rom-com manages to bypass the callous cynicism that would be required to laugh at love. In fact, they’re utterly anathematic to cynicism – these ‘feel good’ films cradle and nurture our amorous clichés rather than flout them. How was this possible? I’d have to find out the hard way. Swathed in a doona, accompanied by an arsenal of chocolates, I curled up to the vaseline’d glow of Bridget Jones’s Diary, When Harry Met Sally, The Wedding Planner…
The battle with my culturally conditioned hatred was fierce. I was constantly beset by the urge to mimic puking every time the pretty people busted out the ‘L’ word. Eventually, it dawned upon me that there was no one around to be impressed by my masculinising display of contempt – I did not have to constantly affirm my manliness and was quite at liberty to enjoy these films without fear of persecution. Finally, somewhere near the end of Pretty Woman, I began to feel a cosy glow in the chest area. I was now comfortably canoodling with the rom-com, and as she wrapped her arms around me, I seized the opportunity to feel her up a bit.
First, I groped her archetypes. We are not supposed to laugh at romance in romantic comedies (romance is serious shit) - our chuckles are marshalled instead towards the ‘hopeless case’ characters to whom love comes miraculously a-knocking: The klutz/neurotic (Bridget Jones’s Diary); the hard nosed careerist (The Wedding Planner); the outcast/contextual misfit (Pretty Woman, She’s All That); the player/tease/commitment-o-
Having copped a feel of the rom-com, I began to wonder where she came from, and why I, like so many others, derived so much pleasure from her. Now while romance and comedy have been sharing the same bed since A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the ‘classics’ that established the rom-com as a film genre really didn’t arise till the 1980’s. Ironically, the rise of the romantic comedy coincided with the death of the love generation (can anyone imagine a late 60’s/70’s rom-com?). In a decade marked by ferocious materialism there arose a genre that acted as a salve for those who were disaffected by the instrumental relationships necessitated by consumer culture. People still wanted to see interactions that defied personal utility – watch people risk their reputations/fortunes/emotional health for the sake of someone else. The zeitgeist of the 80’s told you to wear Armani, drive a Porsche, befriend powerful and interesting people – the rom-com tells you it doesn’t matter what you wear, what you drive or who you know; you are capable of being loved.
A noble sentiment, but is love not acting a bit like snake oil here? No matter how damaged, degraded or instrumentalised you are in the rom-com, love comes along and sorts your shit out. But how did this love arise, and from where? Hot girl sees hot boy. Love happens. That’s it. Now as attractive as that equation might appear, for me at least, it rings a little hollow. I’m not going to say anything as outrageously unpopular as ‘there’s no such thing as love at first sight’, but surely there’s got to be more to love than some arbitrary, scopophilic hormonal surge. There must be some sort of poetic gravitas to your ‘love-at-first-sight’ that allows them to explode onto the narrative of your life and drag it into a passionate singularity. Shouldn’t there be some sort of reason for you having fallen in love with a particular person? It may be a reason you can barely articulate, a reason that has you trying to express something too subtle and too outrageous to be ensnared in words, but it’s a reason you feel is there.
Some rom-coms, what I will hesitate to call ‘good’ romantic comedies, do provide us with an insight into why two characters might have fallen in love. When Harry Met Sally cultivates a convincing yin-yang style relationship between a melancholic philanderer and dismissively optimistic monogamist ~ the poetic element to their relationship might not be frenzied or profound, but at least you can see why the two fall in love. For the most part, however, the love in rom-com’s is an artificial plot device. Consequently, far from defying the structured, rationalised and contractual relationships that characterise interactions in a consumer culture, the romance in many rom-coms begins to reflect them.
The romance in the rom-com has begun to operate on its own rational of contractual exchange: grand gestures of selfless surrender are traded in order to receive a pre-defined product (a relationship that bares all the signs of a fulfilling, hetero-normative romance). Mark forsakes his career in New York to stay in London with Bridget Jones in tern, for sakes her dignity and health by dashing after him in the snow, dressed in only a sweater and zebra striped panties. The gestures are exchanged, the two are now granted their meaningful relationship. Even a good romantic comedy, like When Harry Met Sally, falls short of defying this rationalised exchange. Here the entwining of complimentary opposites, where the two party’s strengths compensate for each others flaws, can be easily interpreted as a mutually beneficial agreement rather than surrender to ardor. While not promoting the rationalised signs of romantic transaction as overtly as other rom-com’s, When Harry Met Sally fails to cultivate poetic modes of meaning that lie outside the quid pro quo logic of exchange.
And this is what I feel is largely missing from the romantic comedy, they’ve never represented to me the peculiar, poetic and mysterious language that lovers cultivate between each other - that feverish and enthralling discourse, dancing at the intersection of agony and bliss, that radically alters the way you evaluate your world. A true love is meant to be ‘the one’, utterly unique, but precious few rom-coms provide us with relationships that operate on a thrillingly singular dynamism. There are a couple of films haunting the fringes of the genre that come damn close, such as the nurturing sado-masochism displayed of The Secretary, or the excentric (and mildly autistic) romance of Punch Drunk Love – but still these films, while awesome in their own right, still don’t speak to me of the wild poetry I recognize as love.
Perhaps I am simply asking too much of film. I might very well claim that it is impossible to translate that sort of maddening love onto screen had I not seen Hiroshima Mon Amour – that illustrates a relationship so brilliant it becomes the poetic lens through which the lovers make sense of their entire lives while they are entwined. For a brief moment, in this film, the city of Hiroshima and it’s brutal past becomes a song to the roar of this couple’s love. The language of these lovers is completely alien to the conventional understandings of ‘self interest’ – it even goes so far as to make a joke of the very idea of a ‘self’. Whether such a seething romance could co-exist with a comedy is a moot point, but damn it, if it’s possible, I’d love to see it happen.
Hense, for those of us who crave relationships that rise above the tepid world of contractual, rationalised exchange, the romantic comedy satisfies briefly, but ultimately operates like a bandaid over a bullet wound. They indicate that there may be these ‘self interest’ defying relationships out there, they teach us surprisingly little about how they arise or how they can transcend the banal logic of consumer culture in any meaningful way. In terms of how love, in it’s most profound sense, works it has very little to teach us. It’s a damn shame that the rom-com, as the dominant representative of romance in cinema, has only provided us with a pale shadow of love – weightless to those of us who’ve ever fallen hard for someone.
So having frolicked with the rom-com for a good couple of months, I can say for certain that she is a sexy chic, fun to be around, but, alas, not the best conversationalist. I’ll be keeping her number for the odd booty call, but I’m afraid a serious relationship just isn’t in the cards.
www.expressmedia.org.au/voiceworks.php
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