Death & Resurrection #4

A Rom-Com Memoir of the 2000s

[The fourth installment in the serialization of a work-in-progress essay.]

We see them, these movies, and we know we're not supposed to believe in them, but we want to believe in them.  It creates a kind of spiritual schizophrenia, for impressionable optimists like me - born of two parents who got mutually thunderbolted when they set eyes on each other across a crowded room at a party one night, and continued to love each other for over sixty years. Growing up with many of my friends' parents divorced or miserable, I was living in an anomalous cocoon.  Watching Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not on TV with my folks only further warped me.  It was a wartime melodrama that was in fact a rom-com documentary, in that it depicted movie stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall actually falling in love.

You can see it happening, in the deliciously salacious way that 'Slim' tells 'Steve' he can always fetch her by whistling ("You know how to whistle, don't you?  You just put your lips together, and... blow"), in how he looks at her as she sashays away from him after saying it.  Real people didn't talk to each other like this, yet the real erotic tension between Bogart and Bacall made their dated, double entendre-loaded encounters feel timelessly hot.  My parents laughed knowingly at the couple's shenanigans with an appreciation that the pre-adolescent me could sense was illicit.  I had little idea of what was going on here, but I knew it had to do with what made the adult world go round.

By the time I was an adult, old enough to comprehend that the myth of Mom and Dad's perfect marriage had complexity behind it, with some real pain lacing through the merriment, the damage had been done.  I'd spent a great part of my romantic life searching for a perfection that had never existed in the first place, and the romantic comedy had played me right along.

For the form of the romantic comedy is a cheat.  Just as the hero almost alway prevails over villainy in an action picture, nearly all romantic comedies end in coupling, and the real lie at their core is that this is where the story ends.  The tale of a wish fulfillment fantasy of near-mythic dimension like Sleepless in Seattle is wholly dependent on the movie ending within five minutes of its lovers meeting in person for the first time.  

I've often fantasized what Meg Ryan's Annie might say to Tom Hanks's Sam as they descend in that Empire State Building elevator that could deal-break their romance (e.g. "God, I just hope you're not one of those asshole liberals"), but nothing so dramatic would be necessary in the real life version of this kismet fantasy. Over time, Sam and Annie might merely wear each other down with their interlocking, ever-conflicting neuroses and end up divorced, like so many couples whose union was founded on little more than fate.

We are only able to buy into the movie dream of the perfect, endless romance because most romantic comedies end precisely where most real life relationships begin.  With its tyranny of eternal courtship, the romantic comedy avoids the traps of reality by generally pretending that consummation of desire is the climax of a story.  Whereas those of us living in life, not fiction, know full well that such consummation is only a start.  And that what happens after that is rarely happily forever.

After all, Claudia wasn't my first wife.  I'd been married once before - but it always amazes me, the way we say this, those of us who have had that experience.  The sentence always sounds so flip, like you're saying, "I had a cheeseburger here once and it was over-done," when what you're referring to so glancingly can be years of, well, everything: passion, rage, molten sex or the aching lack of it, boredom, loneliness, seconds of nirvana, even the creation of newborn live human beings and the corruption of their innocence, over time.  Yet somehow all of it, every air molecule of the millions shared over that time is gone, replaced, as if with a placard, by that phrase: I was married once before.

So who is this person, this witness whose history has been summarily reduced to such a nub of near non-meaning?  There should be a badge, a scar, some symbol to be borne that could identify us survivors, so that we could recognize one another without judgment, and without trivializing what no longer exists.  We lived a life with someone, this talisman would signify, though the shape and color and intensity of such an object seems impossible to imagine.

And where is the romantic comedy that would speak to the dimensions of what was gained from within that life, and what was irretrievably lost?

[To be continued]

Comments

[Judith Duncan]

Hey Billy,I've just read all the Death & Resurrection posts. What a joy. I have shared your sense of loss and confusion with a genre that picked me up as a child and held on tight. I had a lot of time off school as a child and by the time I was nine I had seen most of the classics. I remember knowing that something powerful between Bogart and Bacall meant they belonged together.I will alwys remember the line of Bacall's when she walks in on Bogart holding a collapsed woman in his arms,"What are you trying to do,güess her weight?"
One of my favorite Woody Allen films,The Purple Rose of Cairo ,deals so wonderfully with that disappointing gap between the real and the fantasy. I read something recently that said,"story doesn't give us meaning,it's about our search for it."
Searching for the meaning of love in our stories...I could think of worse things to be doing ;)

[Scott]

It doesn't particularly matter who we shared our life with before because there's only this moment...?

I don't mean to sound cold, but much from the past can sure stop us from living now.

[mernitman]

Judith: Thanks for the reading and the insight. The search continues!...

Scott: I always enjoy your comments, but you've stumped me with this. Explain? (I hope you're not mis-reading the post, to think that it's posing your question, especially since - to me - it's all about the opposite.)

[Scott]

I guess I was addressing the final portion where you beseeched rom-coms to recognize and honor the hard-won scars of past relationships (along with the badges of honor). I think true romance is all about creating love anew, and being in the moment, and the past can frequently (if not always) bog that down. That is the challenge of a long term relationship - keeping the love and romance fresh - and of a new romance where it's not the first rodeo for one or both of the romancers. This is illustrated well in any scene where a sexual climax occurs and Veronica's name comes out of his mouth instead of Betty's, the woman he's actually with. :)

[Scott]

Or I could've just said, "The secret to a happy marriage (or relationship) is a short memory."

This applies to forgiving and forgetting slights (and worse), and romancing said partner.

[mernitman]

Scott: Aaaaaaaah, now I sort of get you. No, I really do. Although you're touching on a number of interesting things here, not the least of them being the whole relationship between memory and... well, relationships, which is essay-worthy in and of itself.

Meanwhile, in the Dept. of What I Meant: I'm musing (on and off the cyber-page) about how rom-coms deal with the larger span of "romantic realities," and certainly the issue of how to keep the love and romance fresh is a big one. Generally, rom-coms tend to fixate on GETTING the love, and any blossoming romance (the habitual rom-com focus) that needs freshening is prob'ly one not destined to reach full bloom.

[Scott]

That's one reason I'm looking forward to Hope Springs with Tommy Lee Jones married to Meryl Streep seeking counseling from therapist Steve Carell.

But yes, I did take things a might off topic - sorry!

[mernitman]

Scott, at Living the RomCom there IS no off-topic! Please keep up the conversation however it feels right - I thrive on this stuff.

[Lynn]

I'm a little late to the conversation on this post (and haven't read the full series on the topic yet), but I wanted to echo Scott's comment re: anticipation of Hope Springs and also the upcoming Love Punch, with Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson.

I'm fascinated by the classic rom-coms of remarriage -- Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, even Adam's Rib -- because they do explore the realm of romantic disappointment and then the remembrance and renewal of romantic fantasy.

I'm very curious about how these two new films will take up that aspect of the rom-com conversation.

[mernitman]

Lynn: Me, too. I've read "Hope Springs" and kind of liked it - casting will certainly help, and Ms. Thompson can do no wrong in my book...

[JillARasmussen]

Wondering if you've seen the British RomCom "Born Romantic"? This post made me think of that film and how it explored much more than just the beginnings of a relationship.

[mernitman]

Hey Jill: No, I'm not familiar with it, and now you've got me curious - romance with Craig Ferguson...?! Didn't get much of a run over here. I'll add it to my queue.