A2 Coursework Research
Taken from: http://jezebel.com/5884946/the-crappy-lessons-of-romantic-comedies
"I
hope the irony isn't lost on you," my sister said to me one day last
February, "that this would make for an excellent start to a romantic
comedy." I threw a pillow at her and went back to sobbing.
It was not
lost on me. On the morning of January 3rd, I had started my doctoral
research, a feminist analysis of romantic comedies, skipping off to the
New York Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center brimming with
excitement and pride. And barely six weeks later, on the night of
February 13th, the man I was madly in love with, a great guy with –- it
must be said –- a less than perfect sense of timing, broke up with me.
I was a
wreck. More than that, I was a wreck whose job it was to watch a minimum
of half a dozen rom coms a week. I spent my days at the library,
reading about the genre and taking regular weeping breaks that attracted
pitying glances from the circulation desk clerks. I spent my nights in
bed with my laptop, watching as Kate and Katherine and Meg and Julia and
Drew all found true love, taking notes and nursing my very broken
heart.
My life had
very quickly started to resemble the very genre I was studying. A
feminist rom com scholar is dumped by her wonderful boyfriend on the
night before Valentine's Day and has to spend the next year (or three)
studying movies in which love always –- always -– conquers all? My
sister was right: it was a perfect set up for a romantic comedy.
Of course,
in many ways, my life looked nothing like a romantic comedy. For one
thing, in a romantic comedy, I would weigh about thirty pounds less than
I currently do. I would be clumsy, in an endearing, humanizing sort of
way. My apartment would be impeccably decorated, not to mention
unrealistically large for someone living on a grad student's meager
stipend. Perhaps I would have a wise Black doorman, and a hilarious gay
roommate -– or, to check all the token boxes at once, a sage and sassy
gay Black roommate who has no job or love life of his own and no purpose
on earth except to comfort and advise me. My wardrobe would be full of
flattering dresses and snug designer jeans that, in real life, I could
only afford if I eschewed buying groceries and paying my ConEd bill.
If this
were a romantic comedy, in the aftermath of the breakup, my life would
have become a montage lived to the music of Ingrid Michaelson or Sara
Bareilles. I would have walked sadly down the streets of New York, in
slow motion, watching happy couples canoodling as I walked alone in a
chunky knit scarf. I'd have gone to dinner with my friends and faked
laughter, or gone to dance or yoga class and gazed miserably at myself
in the mirror (this would have been a great chance to demonstrate that,
though I was heartbroken, I still looked really good in spandex).
Sad montage
over, I would get back to work on my dissertation. I would read books
about romantic comedies, go to screenings and take copious notes, all
the while rolling my eyes at the endless stream of happily-ever-after
resolutions, the grand take-me-back gestures, the running through
airports to catch The One before he/she gets away. Comparing my own love
life to Drew Barrymore's and Reese Witherspoon's, I would become bitter
and cynical.
And then,
one day, as the weather was becoming visibly more spring-like, I would
meet a man. Based on my now quite extensive knowledge of contemporary
rom coms, I'm pretty sure he would be a boorish, misogynistic film
critic –- played, to quote Tina Fey, by "Gerard Butler or a coat rack
with a leather jacket on it." We would keep showing up at all the same
screenings, and he would be even more cynical about the genre than I
was. He would scoff at how "chicks" are "so lame" and about how romance
is for suckers. I would hate him instantly.
We all know
what would happen next. Misogynist McGee and I would be continually
thrown together, and over time I would melt his cold, hard, asshole
exterior –- because in romantic comedies, men who appear to be
misogynistic pigs are simply waiting for the right woman to prove to
them that women deserve to be treated like human beings. We would fall
for each other. My ex would realize the error of his ways, and ask me
for another chance. Torn between the two men, I would decide to escape
to insert-fantastic-international-destination-here to focus on my
dissertation. And then, just as I was about to leave New York… Airport
chase, key kiss, etcetera. This thing writes itself.
None of
this actually happened, of course. Well, I did listen to a lot of Ingrid
Michaelson, and I did, with some difficulty, carry on with my research
and writing about romantic comedies. And, I do look pretty great in
spandex. None of the predictable rom com stuff happened, though, because
my life is not a romantic comedy, and neither is yours.
But in the
aftermath of the breakup, as I carried on with my research, some small
part of me allowed for the possibility of meeting, say, a charmingly
awkward floppy-haired Englishman, between the shelves of the reference
section. I didn't really expect it to happen, of course, but I didn't
rule it out completely. And the more rom coms I watched, the more
appealing it seemed to become. Despite my cynicism about the genre,
despite the fact that I was writing a critical analysis of the romantic
comedy, on some level I was expecting my love life to play out like one.
It's easy
to dismiss romantic comedies as fluffy, mindless cinematic dreck, and
some of them are just that. In every genre there are some well-made
movies, and many more middling and awful ones. But there is such a thing
as a good romantic comedy, even the most ardent chick flick-hater will
agree. In fact, some of the most-loved movies of all time are romantic
comedies: It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally...
It is true that in the last few years, the awful rom coms seem to
outnumber the good ones, but that's not why people love to hate romantic
comedies. They love to hate them because they're "chick flicks," made
for and about women.
That's not
why I dislike romantic comedies. Romantic comedies are made almost
exclusively for and about women –- in fact, they're the only genre that
is. I dislike them because regardless of any fluffiness or mindlessness,
they are powerful pieces of popular culture. Rom coms furnish us with
ideas and expectations about some of the most important things in life:
love, work, friendship, sex, gender roles. And some of those ideas are
worryingly sexist and regressive.
To say that
the romantic comedies of the last decade have been noticeably sexist
and regressive is an understatement. Movies like The Ugly Truth and The Proposal
upped the ante on the well-worn trope of the highly strung and socially
incapable single career woman. It is nothing new to suggest that a
humbling at the hands of a modern-day Petruchio is the only cure for
this particular disease. But in recent years, the shrews have become
higher strung, the Petruchios more chauvinistic, and the humbling more
humiliating than ever before. Remember how in The Ugly Truth,
Gerard Butler's character reduces Katherine Heigl's character, a
competent, professional and authoritative adult woman, to curling up in
the fetal position in the closet of her office? And how she then she
falls in love with him? Tamed, indeed.
More
recently, romantic comedies have given us a great deal of graphic male
nudity. Male nudity is a growing trend in the genre: in the last two
years, we've seen the barely-clad bodies of Justin Long (Going the Distance), Jake Gyllenhaal (Love and Other Drugs), Ashton Kutcher (No Strings Attached) and Justin Timberlake (Friends With Benefits). In What's Your Number,
Chris Evans' naked butt got more screen time than most of the
supporting cast put together. This taste of a future in which we
objectify men as we have for so long objectified women is not the kind
of gender equality we were hoping for. Furthermore, from the neck down,
these men all look remarkably similar –- white, very lean and extremely
muscular –- and it would not be unreasonable to wonder what repeated
exposure to these kinds of images is doing to women's ideas about the
ideal male body, and to their expectations of the real men in their
lives.
Last year's double feature of movies about casual sex -– No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits
-– is perhaps the best example of how romantic comedies tap into larger
cultural conversations about gender politics. In the last five years, a
vast amount of ink both, real and digital, has been spilled in arguing
about whether sexual activity outside of a committed monogamous romantic
relationship is bad for young women (no one seems to care that much
about the effect on young men). In both these movies, casual sex doesn't
work: people develop feelings, people get hurt, and in both instances,
people conclude that the best sex happens within a committed, monogamous
romantic relationship. Sex and love, they decide, are inseparable, and
bad things happen when you try to have sex without love. It is no
coincidence that these movies came out when they did, and it is
certainly no coincidence that they ended the way they did.
You might
think you're above the influence of these movies, that you're too savvy
and cynical for your expectations and ideas to be shaped by them. I
certainly thought I was, and maybe you are - but you're probably not.
Romantic comedies shape the beliefs and expectations of even the most
cynical and media-savvy among us, especially when they catch us at our
most vulnerable.
This
wouldn't be a problem, of course, if romantic comedies depicted women
and men, and sex and love, in a positive and realistic way. But they
don't. Romantic comedies teach us that a woman's life is empty and
meaningless without a man, and that any woman who believes she is happy
being single is simply lying to herself. They teach us that love is only
for straight white people –- skinny, beautiful straight white people,
at that. They teach us that men are sex-crazed, commitment-phobic
animals who have to be manipulated into romantic relationships, and that
when a man really loves a woman, he'll demonstrate his feelings with
grand gestures that barely skirt the line between love and stalking.
It took my
life very nearly turning into a romantic comedy to realize just how
powerful this genre is, no matter how much we dismiss and belittle it. I
understand now why so many women (and so many more men than will own to
it) love this genre, and feel that it speaks to them, even if they know
it's shamelessly manipulative or politically problematic. As
emotionally grueling as it was, the time between this Valentine's Day
and the last has made me a better scholar of the genre.
And, as brutal as the irony was, it could have been much worse. I could have been studying slasher flicks.
