Living the Romantic Comedy

Archetypes: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Famously identified by film critic Nathan Rabin in his A.V. Club pan of Elizabethtown in 2007, this particular brand of cinematic male wish fulfillment fantasy has been around for ages.  The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a bubbly, sunshiney creature who, in Rabin's words:

... exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.

The MPDG is invariably beautiful, while often in a slightly left-of-center way, quirky as hell, girly, and giving; key to her personality in the romantic comedies and other pics that feature her is a level of compassion for the male hero that's awesomely selfless: she exists, at core, to succor and service the movie's man-in-need.

One could make a case for certain silent era heroines as forerunners, and certainly Chaplin's "Girl" - see Paulette Godard in Modern Times, et al - is a progenitor.  The grandmom of MPDGs is the screwball heroine variant played most memorably by Katherine Hepburn and Carole Lombard.  More recently, the MPDG quintessence was delivered by Natalie Portman in Garden State.

Breathes there a red-blooded American male with soul so dead that he could quickly reject the looks (let alone the likes) of her?  Two words might be used as a shield to deflect such a meltingly potent gaze (they would be Black Swan), but let's be honest: looks great, has great taste in music, is smart, funny, available, and for no immediately discernible reason, seems already way into you?  Tough proposition to turn down.

There's a catch, of course (in Garden State, Portman's character is revealed to be a pathological liar), and some MPDG movies do go so far as to expose the darker sides of this archetype (in a sense Jonathan Demme's Something Wild is a black comedic object lesson in "be careful what Dream Girl you wish for," as its hapless hero is nearly killed by MPDG Melanie Griffith's psychotic ex-boyfriend).

But what I find truly amusing about this fantastical construct is how profoundly counter-intuitive it is, in terms of the kind of Manic Pixies one encounters in non-movie reality.  Reader, I have dated a few (some friends might say I even married the European version of one, once), and here's the thing: such prototypically fun salvos of idiosyncratic femininity actually tend to be fundamentally narcisisstic.  The Manic Pixies one meets in real life, generally speaking, are Damsels in Distress who are trolling for Princes, or to be more accurate, Caretakers.

It's because of this truism that personally, I'm more fond of the rom-com heroines who are Manic Pixie Dream Girl-like... but turn out to be their own, healthily autonomous people in the end.  One such classic variant was immortalized by Diane Keaton in the movie that bears her character's name:

 

Annie starts out MPDG, but once Pygmalion-ed by Alvy Singer, is revealed to be a deeply three-D human with needs that transcend his.  Which seems to be more a real-life phenomenon, if you ask me (an uncharacteristically realistic workout of the "She seems like my Manic Pixie Dream Girl but isn't" notion was enacted by Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer.)

On screen, at any rate, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl continues to delight many men's fantasies (and alienate even more women).  I recently spotted two in Midnight in Paris.  Got any favorites, or love-to-hates, of your own?

Romantic Comedy Classics #7:

Top 5 Favorite Clips From High Fidelity

1) The movie begins with a fourth wall-breaking monologue from Rob Gordon (John Cusack) that speaks to an essential issue at the heart of rock music-worship, posing questions that could, come to think of it, be addressed to lovers of romantic comedy as well.  He (and co-screenwriters D.V. DeVicentus, Steve Pink and Scott Rosenberg) is channeling Nick Hornby, author of the source material novel, and you know within the first minute that they - guided by director Stephen Frears - are going to do this right:

 

2) For romantic comedy, the first decade of the 2000s was Revenge of the Guys, with such pics as Hitch, Wedding Crashers, and Apatow's 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up trying to kick the chick out of chick flicks.  But High Fidelity was the real kick-off, in 2000, where the male point of view on relationships gets an intimate, honest expression - as does the peculiarly male obsession with what makes up the ultimate know-it-all's record collection: the "I am what I listen to" syndrome (and what does it mean that I bought the Beta Band EPs after seeing this movie?).

 

3) A penchant for wish-fulfillment fantasy is certainly not the sole provence of the male imagination, but rarely has a movie gotten its inner workings quite this hilariously right, as Rob faces his romantic rival (the uber-obnoxious Tim Robbins, brilliantly cast) in person for the first time, and male id unleashed high jinks ensue:

 

4) True to its school even at its most poignant moments, High Fidelity features one of the greatest marriage proposal scenes in the history of the genre, its genius lying in precisely how stupid-guy perfect its seeming anti-romanticism is:

 

5) It's the movie that made Jack Black a star, and arguably still contains his best work.  This last clip loses a bit in translation, since it's predicated on having convinced you that Black's character (a lovable jerk with hipster-ad absurdum musical taste) is the last person in the world to deliver the performance he delivers here; we're expecting something closer to the Dead Kennedys, which will end in bloody eardrums and party buzzkill - and yet...

  

High Fidelity seems to me to be a high watermark in rom-commery due to its unflinching against-the-grain-ness.  Never has a romantic comedy emphasized such resistance to the very ethos of its genre - its hero is dragged, kicking and screaming into what he perceives as the horror of commitment - and yet in part for that very reason, when the movie finally submits to the transformative power of love as a positive force, we believe that it's only right and inevitable. Women are the means by which we men come to know beauty, after all.  And where would pop music - or movies - be without them?

Weepers of the World Unite (Redux)

Some years ago I wrote a post here on the phenomenon of men crying at movies - not an activity most of us will admit to - and I started with a wince-worthy reminiscence:

West Side Story was the first movie I ever went to without adult supervision, a Saturday matinee elementary school date with Judy Gale, and by its end (Tony dead and Maria wailing “Come and get me Chico!”) the whole theater was knee-deep in wet Kleenex.  Judy was crying and so was I, but this was long before I had any idea that a guy weeping might be okay, so my big challenge was to be super-quiet and sneaky about it. 

The object was to surreptitiously wipe my face totally clean and look cool when the lights came up.  Somehow I succeeded in pulling this off, and though shaky in the knees, I awaited earning points for my faux-stoic maturity.  Judy, meanwhile, was completely soggy and still going at it as we made our way up the aisle.  And she turned on me suddenly.  “I can’t believe it!”  She was weepily enraged.  “I can’t believe you didn’t cry!”

I’ve never forgotten Judy bawling me out for my faked insensitivity.  And I thought of her again when I read an article in a British GQ magazine (unfortunately unavailable on-line) called The Crying Game: 50 Films That Make Men Cry.  A compilation of quotes from fifty “men of the world” (i.e. contemporary Brits admired by GQ’s James Mullinger and John Naughton), it makes a case that:

Perhaps because we bottle it up so much on a daily basis and perhaps because no one is looking (we hope) and perhaps because, occasionally, movies can be moving without manipulating, the cinema is where the majority of masculine tears are shed.

They also note “bad news for those who fear the weeper would seem to be that advancing years make us ever more likely to cry.”  Oh, thanks for that, chums: more wussiness to look forward to.  The film selections are wildly diverse, from The Wild Bunch (see: stoicism in the face of death, taking bullets for your buddy, etc.) to Jaws (“I was very sad when they blew up that poor fish,” says Boris Johnson, an MP. “Why did they kill such a beautiful creature?  It was only trying to eat people.”).

A mere two out of this group of former stiff upper-lippers cited romantic comedies (the obvious choices), but as a whole, the Sniveling 50 resists any defining pattern, save one: the sole film to get three nods is Spartacus, a Real Men's movie if ever I saw one (It's the every man yelling “I am Spartacus!” scene that gets ‘em).

My original post went on to ask of my own male readers, What’s the one movie that makes you blubber?  The answers were surprising, ranging from understandable (Brief Encounter, Lost in Translation, and of course, The Shawshank Redemption), with an emphasis on underdog men-in-sports pics (Rocky, The Karate Kid), to the merely inexplicable (the John Goodman comedy King Ralph).  Kudos to all the commenters for their honesty (rare is the man who'll admit in print that he saw The Sound of Music, let alone wept at it).

What I'm musing on in the present day is the specifics, i.e. What, exactly, brings on these tears?  I ask this because I've become aware that when I cry at a romantic comedy in particular (Judy Gale taught me that I can talk about this as a badge of honor), more often than not, it isn't because there's something sad going on.  In fact, sometimes the on-screen trigger is some movie couple's joyful reconciliation.

These aren't tears of joyful relief.  So am I weeping to see an idealized fantasy of movie-perfect romantic consummation, which life has taught me is unobtainable?  Do I cry because I know I've been had, yet still want to be?  Or - wussiest of all - because there isn't enough True Love in the world?

It's all pretty embarrassing, but because humiliation loves company, I address this question to both genders: What exactly, specifically, brings you to tears when you watch a movie, and love stories in particular?  It's not so much which movies make you cry that I'm curious about, as why.  Living the RomCom wants to know.

Us

Now and then people ask me, "What is the biggest mistake writers make when they're writing a romantic comedy?"

My answer is: They put too much emphasis on the obstacles—the things that keep their protagonists apart.  Because actually what's more important, and in my view, the primary job of a rom-com writer, is to convince the audience that these two people must become a couple.  What's going to make us root for the leads in a romantic comedy, what's going to make us care about whether or not they hook up in the end, is a keen sense that they really do belong together.

Which brings us to an age-old query:  Why do two people fall for each other?  What makes a relationship work?  What is this thing we call love?

Curiosity about this subject has impelled John Bowe (editor, journalist, and co-screenwriter of Basquiat) to publish Us: Americans Talk About Love.  This treasure trove of a book, a follow up to Bowe's Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, offers up a myriad of takes on the  What We Talk About When We Talk About Love issue.  Relevant auteur Judd Apatow has graced its jacket with a That's what I was thinking! quote:  "Every story is a small movie I wish someone would make."

Right.  Because another mistake that aspiring rom-com writers make is that they try to write Movie Love, as opposed to love as it's found in real life.  The real-life stories told here easily trump half the cinematic love hooey I've seen in recent years.

The key to Bowe's success is diversity.  In his preface to this collection of "oral reports from across the United States," Bowe acknowledges the effort he and his collaborators made to find a representative sampling of this country's panoply of people - young, old, black, white, et al (a Salon interview with Bowe elaborates on their methodology).  One of the big kicks in reading it comes from the jaw-dropping contrast between one person's experience of love and another's.

For example, here's a moment from the tale of Colorado's Jeremy Vanhaitsma, age 30, who staged an elaborate proposal for his beloved that included bringing her into a small rural church, where he'd prepared a basin of water and a towel:

I asked her if I could wash her feet.  It's just a symbol, an example of the love the Lord gave to show the full extent of His love.  This was completely new.  She had never had anybody wash her feet.  I shared my heart about why I wanted to do it: so that our relationship would be sealed, so we could serve one another, and so that we could go out and do that to others.

Jeremy's story is directly followed by that of Dominic Sclafani, age 30, from Arizona, which begins:

I like people who play.  People who are fun and who punch me at random moments and who do weird shit.  The first time I met Chyna, we were at a rave.  She bit me.  I was totally into it.  I'm like, "Fucking bite me harder!"  And she got all excited and I got all excited, because I like being bitten and scratched up.  That was orgasmic.

Diversity, dude.  It's typical of this shrewdly organized collection, which moves from stories told by people who've been in love a relatively short time to people who've loved for a lifetime.  And some of this stuff is harrowing - brutal, scary, painful material, smarting with truths that are worlds apart from your typical rose-colored gift card homilies.

There's something about people telling their stories out loud - people who aren't writers - that pierces the fabric between storyteller and audient in a uniquely compelling way.  Like Celia Menendez, 17, of San Antonio, who starts with: "This is the first time I've ever been in love and I'm still feeling miserable."  Later on, she unloads an observation topped with a casual throwaway line that would turn any novelist or screenwriter I know green with envy:

I would never have stayed up on the phone until one in the morning, just talking about nothing, with anyone else - even my best, best friends.  But him, even if I couldn't physically be with him, I could sit on the phone with him for hours.  I think it's part of the reason I failed calculus.

These oral reports are like short stories, like movies, only more incredible, in that they really happened.  Ultimately, that's a big part of what you're left with: the wonder.  There are reasons upon reasons here for "why I fell in love" and "what love means to me" - if you're writing a romantic comedy, dramedy, or tragedy, I can't think of a better contemporary source book for such thoughts - yet in the end, the fundamental mystery remains.  As one Shawn Whitworth of New York, New York concludes:

I would like to choose to believe that I have loved or that I can and am capable of love.  I'm almost sure that it exists.  But if it slapped me in the face, I couldn't tell you what it was.

Us can be as bracing as a kick in the head, and it tells us a lot about what love is.

[Photos from: lovescape.org, 101lovetips.com, timpaphotography.files.wordpress.com, piratesandfireflies.wordpress.com]

Revenge of the Romantic

I had a theory.  Things tend to be cyclical in our culture of arts and entertainment, and having just seen the romantic comedy genre dominated for a decade by male point-of-view raunch-coms (the Apatow era, from 40 Year-Old Virgin to last year's bromantic I Love You, Man), I figured it's about time for the meter to swing the other way.

Now that all things scatological and even gynecological (see Knocked Up) have been mined for comedy, I reasoned we're due for the return of romance - meaning softer, less sexually-centric stories that mine what's left of the genuinely romantic in our increasingly anti-sentimental culture.  Seems to me that there's only so many gags about gagging a genre can take, and soon enough we'll start seeing movies that put a more classical sense of romanticism back in rom-com.

My Uh-Oh Moment came roughly at the midpoint of my 4-day "Writing the Romantic Comedy" course at UCLA Extension. We were talking -  a dozen students and myself - about the vagaries of dating.  This was in relation to one writer's project, and where in the trajectory of her imaginary couple's relationship things might get physical.  The youngest member of the group, a 22 year-old writer named Sarah, raised her hand.

"But nobody dates," she said.  The room - predominately 30- and 40- somethings - quieted.  "I mean, if you're interested in someone, you hook up," she explained.  "And then, if that, like, works out... maybe then you might end up going out for dinner or something.  But nobody's like... dating."

The room filled with the silent sound of many older people feeling older, as they tried to wrap their minds around this information.

The discussion resumed and the course went on, but I couldn't help feeling as though the collective romantic psyche of the group had just been dealt a body-blow.  So much for my theory.  How could a new  generation of moviegoers have any interest in traditional rom-com romance, if their own romantic lives begin with casual sexual hook-ups and flare or fade from there?

Au contraire.  The tip-off, had we been alert enough to take it in, came at the end of that day's class when young Sarah mentioned the penance her boyfriend was performing that evening.  "We had this fight that was his fault?" she told us. "And so he has to take me to see Dear John tonight.  He'd love to get out of it, but like, no way."

Apparently she and her boyfriend were not alone.  Dear John raked in a hefty $32.4 mil in its opening weekend, knocking the billion-dollar titan Avatar off its seven week-long perch as America's number one movie.  Yes, all the guys were home watching the Bowl, so there was a natural bump for the movie's target demographic, but despite bemused-to-dismal reviews, this latest four-hankie entry in the Nicholas Sparks canon is like, a monster.

Meanwhile, the industry is a thick-headed beast which, even after the phenomenal success of pictures like Sex and the City, still appears shocked and stunned to discover that women actually do go to movie theaters.  It's past time for the biz to get the message.  

Here's the rewrite of my theory re: romance's return.  Why are the nation's tweens, teens and young 20-somethings flocking to the Twilight franchise, and giving the Nicholas Sparks brand a major hit in John?  Because romance is what's lacking in their love lives. 

Maybe when hooking up is the norm, and the slow, deliciously torturous build-up toward physical consummation has been relegated to the passe past, what's passionately romantic - as opposed to raunchily sexual - is the new wish fulfillment fantasy: The crude, lewd Aughts are giving way to the chastely passionate Teens.  After all, the Twilight series is all about sublimation, while Dear John - if it's anything like other Sparks pics such as The Notebook - is more about what's unrequited - it's retro-romantic angst.

But add some tart laughs to counter all the syrup, and you could have the Old School Romantic, Nouveau Romantic Comedy I've been theorizing about as the genre's next direction.  At least, that's Living the Rom-Com's take.  What say you?

Love Speaks

In many films, people never discuss ideas, be they moral or political. And when those kinds of discussions are introduced, it often sounds false. What I've tried to do—and this is what I'm happiest with in my films—[is to] show people discussing morality, whatever that might mean, in a completely natural way.  -- Eric Rohmer

Just this morning, a friend of mine was decrying what's become the obligatory Female Friends Talking Trash Round the Table scene in today's comedies and romantic comedies.  "We don't talk like that!" she protested.  "No group of women I've ever been in or seen in real life does." 

This women-sitting-around-cracking-wise scene has become so codified, I suggested, because screenwriters now think they need to satisfy the audience's expectations for such a chick flick staple, post-Sex and the City.  "There's your writers to blame," a writer in the room noted.  "The characters in those scenes were really gay men."

Wouldn't it be cool if someone would make a movie where not just women, but women and men sat around and talked the way people do in real life?  Taking their time, in the awkward and unpolished rhythms of reality's tensions and relaxations?

Well, somebody did - dozens of such films, actually - and he's only recently left the building.  Homages to Eric Rohmer have been quietly accruing in the days since his death last week at the age of 89.  And a through-line in the bulk of them was an awed and tacitly nostalgic appreciation of someone who had an ear for conversation.

I’m not sure any filmmaker has ever made more movies anatomizing love. Certainly no one filled them with so much talk. His characters yak and yak and then yak some more. They theorize, rationalize, pitch woo, lament their romantic woes, ponder Pascal’s wager, and often talk themselves into falling for the wrong person. Yet it was part of Rohmer’s genius to show how, beneath all those ping-pong-match dialogues and tireless self-explanations, his men and women are driven by impulses they don’t understand. Their language is a thicket covering what’s really going on. While it may seem easy to show the gap between language and behavior, it’s actually hard to do this without sinking into broad comedy. Rohmer never did.

Instead, this hugely intelligent man became one of cinema’s great masters at capturing fleeting, sometimes trivial moments, be it sunlight through a window (he liked available light) or a middle-aged diplomat developing an unexpected obsession with touching a young girl’s knee.

This tribute by John Powers goes on to say much of what I'd have wanted to say about this indelibly auteur-ist artist, a kind of Gallic Woody Allen in the workmanlike, churn-them-out stream of variations he wove on his basic themes (the difficulty of being moral, for one) in over 40 films over some five decades.  The NY Times obit last week acknowledged 1969's My Night at Maud's as the Rohmer masterpiece by critical consensus, but the filmmaker was still working in 2007 and only recently announced his retirement. 

In each of his "Six Moral Tales," a man who is married or committed to a woman finds himself tempted to stray but is ultimately able to resist. His films are as much about what does not happen between his characters as what does, a tendency that enchanted critics as often as it drove audience members to distraction.

“I saw a Rohmer movie once,” observes Gene Hackman's character in Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975). “It was kind of like watching paint dry.”

This wry, quintessentially American dismissal (by a gumshoe, after all) of the French filmmaker's work seems to have stuck - people don't generally think of Rohmer's work as attention-grabbing or sexy.  But although my favorite film of his is the atypical Summer - a compassionate ode to loneliness - Rohmer was a consummate portraitist of coupling.  The heart of his filmography could serve as a master class in classical romantic comedy.  So if you're working on one, it would be worth your while to visit his gallery of little beauties - Maud, Claire, Chloe, Pauline and the rest.

What you'll find in Rohmer World, too, is another increasingly scarce commodity in our loud and often dissonant cinematic moment: exquisite little bits of silence.  Rohmer's films celebrate the tiny slivers of inference and the tantalizing unspoken that make encounters between creatures of the opposite sex so intriguing and ultimately mysterious. 

Is everything going on in that seemingly pregnant pause, or nothing?  Did the long speech that preceded it  express what she feels about him, or eloquently circumvent it?  These are the kinds of eternal questions that lap at the edges of Rohmer's sun-on-the-sea frames, which are likely to keep delighting and infuriating audiences for many decades to come. 

Love and Disability

Story analysts for the studios live in a state of consistent incredulity.  Not a day goes by when we aren't confronted with a piece of material and/or a business decision that defies logic.  Why did this Useless Executive champion a piece of absolute drek?  Why did the studio pass on this killer script we loved?

The true coin of the WTF? realm, however, has to do with choices made by writers in project after project, where the world we live in is routinely discarded in favor of only-in-a-movie un-realities, and nowhere is the "this would never happen" plaint more common than in the romantic comedy genre.

He's a this, and she's a that, and high jinks ensue because of contrivance X, which ultimately causes this unlikeliest of potential couples, after singing karaoke pop tunes from another decade into a hairbrush, to go running to the airport to make declarations of love.  Uh-huh.  And I will now fart tweety-birds out my butt while rocketing into outer space to spray-paint "Obama Wants to Off Your Grandma" on the moon.

What I often find myself wondering - in a spate of stare-at-the-wall procrastination that's obligatory in the midst of covering such specs - is why more writers of romantic comedy don't base their characters and situations on people and circumstances encountered in real life.  That's where one finds stuff, genuinely outrageous and near-unbelievable, that nonetheless has an air of relate-able, comprehensible truth to it.

I've come across some of the most intriguing movie notions, for example, in the New York Times wedding "Vows" column of their Style section, and this Sunday's was a doozy.  The article, written by Francesca Segre, starts out with a great setup:

Before asking Anne Miller out on an official first date, Michael Davoli knew he had to make two major disclosures. “I was terrified how she might react,” he said. “I didn’t think she would break up with me, but it was one of those things. You don’t know. You can’t help but be afraid.”

 Nice teaser.  The cute meet's pretty good, too:

A friend had introduced them at a concert in fall 2005, and they happened to see each other again the following February when he was coincidentally moving into the same Albany apartment building where she lived.  They recognized each other, and she immediately offered to watch his beloved Weimaraner on the stoop while he and his father hauled boxes to the third floor.

Within the week, he locked himself out of his apartment, and because she was the only person he knew in the building, he knocked on the door of her second-floor apartment. She used a credit card to jimmy his door open.  “She’s hot, my dog likes her and she picked my lock,” he thought. “That’s pretty cool.”

The story goes on to its very effective first act turning point: Michael makes the first of his major disclosures, which is that he has Tourette's syndrome, manifesting itself in...  a combination of physical tics including constant eye-blinking, head-nodding and rapid arm movements. “I wanted her to know I may never be able to hold her hand in the way I would want to,” he said. “I needed to know she’d be O.K. with that.”

You really should read the entire article to enjoy, among other things, the nice surprise of Michael's second major disclosure.  The couple's story is poignant, even moving, and while it includes no dashes to the airport, mistaken identities or scenes of a forlorn Anne eating a tub of ice cream by herself, I'd say it's pretty damn good rom-com material.

It reminds me of the not-bad romantic comedy/dramedy Adam, currently in theaters: a boy-meets-girl story where the boy is afflicted by Asperger's, a form of autism.  Adam is the sort of small, indie-flavored picture that some may find delightful and others, deplorable.  I kind of liked it, mostly, though I found the sentimentality too strong (one Hollywood-unreality in this movie is its Hallmark card vision of New York City).

But the thing is, unlike say, Rain Man, the movie manages to deal with the characterization of its disabled protagonist in a largely realistic way; the story is bracingly un-sentimental in its third act crisis and resolution.  And I liked that the central romantic relationship exhibited the kind of detail work you only get from real-life research (apparently organizations associated with Asperger's have generally given writer/director Max Mayer their seal of approval).

I'm not saying that one needs to write about the disabled to find conflicts as dramatic as those trumped up in a contrived rom-com.  An African-American journalist friend of my wife's once went to interview a white teacher who'd been accused of racism, found the accusation to be baseless and that he cooked a great lasagna... and they've been married for fifteen years.

I suppose I'm merely pointing out that there's enough weird-flavored, unexpected reverals and conflict to be found in the romantic lives of neurotypicals (as those afflicted with Asperger's term "normal" folk), if the alert screenwriter is willing to take a look.  Read the paper.  Go for a walk, talk to a friend - you might just come across the kind of material that makes you say, They can't make up this stuff up. 

Aha!  Now you've got my attention.  Keep it real as you write about it, and the story lovers of the world will salute you.

What Women Want

It's not for nothing that, according to charts on boxofficemojo.com, the second most popular (i.e. biggest moneymaking) romantic comedy of all time is called What Women Want, a movie which suggests that the answer may be: Mel Gibson.  (Another possible answer to this age-old query, most famously voiced by Freud, may be found within the title of the number one box office-successful rom-com: My Big Fat Greek Wedding -- but I'm kidding, of course...  Right?)

Figuring out what the female of the species is after, really, has been a challenge for men, and a human preoccupation for all of us since the Stone Age (somewhere in the cave paintings of Lascaux, I'll wager, there's a portrait of a red-faced Cro-Magnon guy holding his freshly-beaten head in confusion as an angry Cro-Magnon woman shows him the cave-door).  And it's certainly been a focus of the romantic comedy genre since the silent era.  This is why, as a sort of public service, Living RomCom would like to virtually turn over its post-space this week to another writer and his subject.

What Do Women Want? Discovering What Ignites Female Desire is a fascinating article from the NY Times by Daniel Bergner about the work of a number of women researching this subject: psychology professor Meredith Chivers, sexologist Lisa Diamond, and professor of psychology Marta Meana, along with some eminent male counterparts.

It should surprise no one, I suppose, that Bergner finds more additional questions than answers in this field, or, more aptly, these woods:

“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.”

I'm not going to attempt to summarize this lengthy, in-depth report, beyond noting the inevitable contradictions that surface between ostensible experts, who not only occasionally disagree about fundamental approaches and findings, but at times knowingly contradict themselves.  After all, this is extremely complicated stuff:

“The horrible reality of psychological research,” Chivers said, “is that you can’t pull apart the cultural from the biological.”

The biological and the chemical roots of feminine desire get a thorough investigation, although...

Among [Lisa Diamond's] answers, based partly on her own research and on her analysis of animal mating and women’s sexuality, is that female desire may be dictated — even more than popular perception would have it — by intimacy, by emotional connection.

And yet...

The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating intimacy leads to better sex is, Marta Meana told me, often misguided. “Really,” she said, “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic” — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.

In terms of relevance to screenwriters, I found this particular paragraph of Meana's intriguing:

Yet while Meana minimized the role of relationships in stoking desire, she didn’t dispense with the sexual relevance, for women, of being cared for and protected. “What women want is a real dilemma,” she said. Earlier, she showed me, as a joke, a photograph of two control panels, one representing the workings of male desire, the second, female, the first with only a simple on-off switch, the second with countless knobs. “Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring. If I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of power and that he is a good man.”

At last -- a theory for why there were all those up-against-the-wall sex scenes in the '80s and '90s!  Though it doesn't explain Denzel's dearth of romance/rom-com projects...

But this is only a fraction of the fertile food for thought Bergner's article presents.  I'd suggest that anyone interested in sexuality, gender, and That Whole Mind-Body Thing give this piece a careful read. 

After all, if there's one thing women want -- I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here -- it's for us to give them their due attention.

This Time It's Personal

Have you ever in your life been so emotionally invested in an election? 

Getting married two days before November 4th certainly transformed both the wedding and the voting experience for my wife and I.  As we await the results of some two years of fevered anticipation, I thought I'd share with you Living RomCom readers an inspiring Daily Kos diary post written by Tater this morning.

Please enjoy I Guess I Gotta Get Past You. I Gotta Vote For That Black Kid.

Angry Women

At the end of Mad Men's season finale, my honey was in tears.  Certainly the climax, with all its terrible truths told and emotions exposed, had been moving, but that wasn't why she was weeping.  "I can't believe it," she sobbed, as I offered a consoling shoulder.  "It's so unfair.  What do I have to look forward to now?  We have to wait a whole year?!"

You're either a fanatic or uninitiated; Mad Men, a show that's all about conflicted emotions, doesn't generally elicit "I guess it's okay" responses.  Not for nothing did it make TV history and earn a Best Drama Series Emmy for its virgin run.  Tater and I are clearly not alone in our devotion to the best-looking (this, I think, can broker no argument) and often, best-written show on television.  Certainly as a writer, I'll miss the inspiration I've been deriving from each Sunday night episode.

Writers love subtext, and in Mad Men auteur Matthew Weiner's world, subtext is king.  Take the finale, which began with a quiet, almost throwaway exchange between Don Draper's unhappy wife Betty and their family doctor, as Betty learns she's pregnant.  "I understand this was a surprise, but blessings come that way," says the clueless doc.  Betty looks at him.  "Of course," she says.  We know the child is unwanted, given that she and Don are on the verge of a possible divorce and he's currently missing in action.  So what we hear in the simple phrase she utters is that to her, what could be cause for celebration is like a death sentence.

Of course.  Into its unflinching, often painful acknowledgment of The Way Things Are and The Way They Have to Be, Mad Men folds a cry: the wail of maddened women.  I believe that's the primary pull of the show for Tater and for all the women I know who watch it.  Ostensibly about the male animal's struggles for power in the jungle-like corridors of 1960s advertising, Men actually delivers the most vivid, eloquently articulated argument for feminism I've ever seen on the small screen.

 

What we're watching week after week are the pangs of an uneasy, protracted birth; Weiner's most brilliant conceptual stroke for the series was his choice of the early '60s, just before our consciousness changed.  We view all of the remarkably well-realized female characters on Mad Men through the prism of what we know, and they feel, but can't yet realize.  We're seeing how each of these unsung heroines dangles precariously over the boundary of her time and place, straining to leap into the future. 

It's educational for us men in particular, this Men: you can't watch an episode and not understand how horrific it was to live under the unchallenged yoke of sexist male supremacy.  Secretary Joan Holloway, mourning the suicide of Marilyn Monroe as she silently rages over the job promotion denied her (given, naturally, to an undeserving male) is only one of the show's devastating portraits of a woman as a revolutionary-in-the-making. But what makes the show greater than a polemic is that its men get their moments of empathy as well. 

In the finale's penultimate scene, Peggy (the amazing Elizabeth Moss, who's reportedly breathing renewed life into the female lead of Speed the Plow on Broadway) tells her one-time lover Pete that unbeknownst to him, she had his child and gave it away. "Are you serious?" he says, recoiling. "You can't be serious." Peggy's gaze is level; she seems to be looking into herself as she looks at him.  "I wanted other things," she tells the stunned and bewildered Pete.  "I don't understand," he says.

Of course he doesn't.  The very idea of a woman rejecting... well, what a woman is for! It's too much for a Mad Men man to comprehend.  In the fifty-odd minutes between one woman's hostile contemplation of a pregnancy and another woman's sad admission of motherhood lost, the season finale digs deep into a confused welter of profound miscommunication, its men and women often staring at each other across an abyss of connections never made.

It's all very heart-wrenching (and at times blackly hilarious), and it's probably about as good as we'll get these days, on screens of any size.  And truly, as another long-running show approaches its grand finale next week (what will we do with our TV time, after the election?!), I can't blame my baby for being bereft.

When Tater and I walked the dogs, our post-Mad Man afterglow cut with melancholy, I tried to cheer her up, noting that the first seasons of The Sopranos and The Wire beckoned on DVD sets underneath the TV, ripe for re-viewing.  "Yeah, we could watch those," she said, momentarily brightening, then sighed.  "But Mad Men is so yummy."

Our enforced diet until Season 3 starts will have to be endured.  But in the meantime, we decided, we're starting with Episode 1 and devouring the first two years again.