Death & Resurrection #18

A Rom-Com Memoir of the 2000s

[The final installment of a serialized work-in-progress.]

How could it be the same?  After an American decade bookended by 9-11 and the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, should we have expected the romantic comedy to remain frozen in time, simply because people still like to fall in love?  If nothing else, today’s rom-com is as realistic as we’ve been forced to become. 

Romantic comedies used to enable my fantasies, providing pretty lies with which I could avoid truths about my lovers and myself. Half of everything that happened to me in my romantic life was experienced as if.  As if it had to match some dream I saw onscreen, the willfully doctored document of an ideal romantic relationship.  Under the influence of rom-coms, I always believed, so fervently that I convinced many women of this, that each love would last, that it was permanent… until the messy realities of co-existing with another human being defeated me. I'd be stuck with the pain of another paradise lost.  And then these movies were my morphine.

Life forced me to grow up in the past decade, and the bedrock of the rom-com ethos shifted, too, by necessity.  The traditional romantic comedy was rooted in a stable social contract that’s no longer the norm.  As Kate Bolick noted in her Atlantic magazine piece All the Single Ladies, Americans are marrying older and marrying less, with more of them having children on their own: “A full 44 percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think that marriage is becoming obsolete… In 2010, the proportion of married households dropped to a record low of 48 percent.”  Klinenberg’s Going Solo cites the societal changes driving a pervasive shift toward living alone: “the rising status of women, the growth of cities, the development of communication technologies, and the expansion of the life course.” 

Singleton Bridget Jones lived alone only because she had no Mr. Right, and her story was resolved by a prince who would ensconce her in his castle.  A decade later, when Annie in Bridesmaids sheds her roommates, living alone is her prize – self-sufficiency – before she wins a guy who comes to her as an equal.  And their romance isn’t the entire point of her story. 

The mainstream romantic comedy, like the country it reflects, has been slow to accept a progressive future.  Despite the past decade’s few indie attempts (e.g. Kissing Jessica Stein, Saving Face), we’ve yet to see a studio rom-com that embraces a same sex romance.  Some African American rom-coms have performed well (e.g. 2012’s Think Like a Man), but they’re still perceived as being for a niche audience, while the studio romantic comedy pairing white and black (Hispanic, Asian, or Arab) lovers?  For now, dream on.  No, the two major signs of real growth in the genre are its acknowledgement of the changing role of women, and the higher level of uncertainty and confusion about gender and relationship that’s come with it. 

Even so, in the wake of 3D super-heroes having taken over the multiplex and character-driven stories moving to the small screen, TV is where a strong female point of view currently thrives: there’s New Girl (writer Liz Meriwether), Two Broke Girls (Molly McAleer), Girls (Lena Dunham), along with the cultural diversity represented by The Mindy Kaling Project and Issa Rae’s web series, Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl.  Barring the emergence of a Katniss Everdeen-like big screen rom-com heroine who truly levels the playing field, 2012’s Best Battle of the Sexes can be seen as a duet between the first season of Lena’s Girls and the third of Louis C.K.’s Louie. 

In them, a feminist 20-something meta-hipster and a sagely sad sack 40-something comedian fix their unblinking gazes on what’s become of our romantic sensibility in the modern age. You can hear the reality-based tone of where we are now as zeitgeist-meister Louis C.K. asks the bookstore proprietor played by Parker Posey out on a date (“I know that being a woman in New York must be hard - it's disappointing maybe because you try to be nice to men as human beings and they respond by torpedoing towards your vagina”).  And you can see it on the face of Girls’ Marnie (Allison Williams), riding atop Charlie (Christopher Abbott) in mid-makeup sex, as she recoils from his needy romantic declarations (“Keep your face close to mine… I love you… I’m right here”) and tells him she wants to break up. Today’s theme of rom-com confusion is sounded when single dad Louie’s one-night stand thinks that his inviting her to have dinner with him and his kids is insanely inappropriate.  It’s echoed in the season finale of Girls when one of the girls gets married and this is perceived as pure folly, an obvious ploy to avoid adulthood and self-actualization.

Living in relative comfort with my third and final wife, I can echo wife Marie turning to husband Bruce in the late great Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally… to say “Tell me I’ll never have to be out there again.”  But this doesn’t mean that the ever-evolving genre doesn’t have anything to say to a largely reformed rom-commer.  No one teaches us how to love each other, and how to keep our love alive.  We learn from our elders, friends, and lovers, but mostly we make it up as we go along, and we still get guidance from the movies.  They’ve gotten better at depicting our current mores now, but the work that remains to be done is suggested by writer Chloe Angyal in a recent Jezebel piece: “We need new grown-up fairy tales, ones that model gender equality in relationships.”  And peace on Earth while we’re at it, yes, but the striving is the point.

What I’ve come to realize, looking back over the past dozen years, is that what I felt so oppressed by in the wake of my last marriage’s failure was romantic comedy’s etched-in-stone formulaic story, that insisted any contrived means justified the inevitable end: an eternally married happy pair of breeders.  It was the conventional romantic comedy’s insistence that this was the only story to be retold that galled me, not the little nuggets of truth that got kicked up in its race to a tidy ending.  Now that we occupy an era of serious uncertainty, when the old romantic bets are off, the truthful moments seem to matter more – and maybe they’re what it’s always been about.  The life I live now makes the life I was living at the turn of this century seem strangely remote, but the moments of true romance and comedy I lived through then and since are as vivid to me as ever.

The resilient rom-com fan has to separate out such moments from the mercenary fantasies, since it’s all strung together in this genre, as it is in life – pearls among the bottle caps and rhinestones.  This morning at breakfast Judith and I were laughing over her comeback to some silly joke I’d made that only she would understand, and I noticed our pit bull Tabitha nudging her snout into a pool of sun on the living room floor.  “Look,” I told Judith.  The dog closed her eyes and gave a little sigh.  As the two of us enjoyed the sight of her basking in the sunlight, I brought my cup to my lips.  That one sip of coffee was golden.  And then we were lost in the rest of an ordinary day.

[Art by Adrian Tomine]

Comments

[Binnie]

Wonderful series, Mr. Mernit!

[Scott]

So much good stuff here. I suppose the fairy tale version of New York depicted in countless rom-coms couldn't sustain its illusions through an entire TV series, so you get the wonderful "nuggets of truth" from "Louie" and "Girls," but also the relief that I am not a single person, there in particular.

That moment with your dog? How nice to have someone to enjoy that with. And I will share "lost in the rest of an ordinary day" with my partner in romance, as inspiration to attempt to get lost less. To be present as much as possible, because I don't think you can have romance without being present.

There's a notion for a frugal Valentine's Day: Our romance requires only your presence. Yes, the spell-check is on.

[mernitman]

Thank you Binnie! And congrats on your continuing rom-com success. ;->

Scott: "Get lost less" sounds like a good motto to me (re: being here now, in a relationship or not). Thank you for sticking with this series and for your many comments - much appreciated!

[Teddy Pasternak]

Terrific series. Thank you!

[Daniel Smith]

It's been an interesting read. I must confess, I looked hungrily in my reader many times waiting on each morsel. But I wonder...

My wife and I of 7 years went to a marriage retreat about a year ago led by a Dr. and Mrs. Eggerichs. It changed how I view marriage, men, women, all of it. You can find out more at loveandrespect dot com. Everything they said is backed by decades of psychological research. As a self-professed rom-com junkie, you should look into it if only for a different but highly accurate view of how men and women interact with one another. But definitely go for one of the conferences over the book. I was very skeptical before we went, but very glad afterwards. So far, we're still together and I don't think that's going to change.

My best to you, Judith, Tabitha, and your work.

[mernitman]

Thank you, Teddy.

Daniel, that's interesting, and I'll look into the Eggerichs' work. Hope your romantic comedy continues to thrive...

[クロエ]

Thanks for finally talking about >Living the Romantic Comedy:
Death & Resurrection #18