Living the Romantic Comedy

Begin Again

That's me in my home office with Tabitha, one of our family of dogs. If you were here, she'd be tail-wagging and wiggling a welcome.

I've been off this blog for about a year, and was neglecting it for a few before that - largely because Facebook and Twitter took over my social media attention, and because the romantic comedy genre itself was in the doldrums. But as of this week, I may be leaving Facebook, for reasons that should be clear to anyone paying attention, while the romantic comedy - in the wake of Crazy Rich Asians and 80 million Netflix subscribers embracing a new crop of funny love stories like To All the Boys I've Loved Before - is back in force.

I like being where I can share interesting stuff and just sound off about whatever, while engaging friends and strangers in conversation about it. It does say "other topics apropos" above, under Living the Romantic Comedy, so I'll be here appreciating the world and analyzing the likes of anything from The Kissing Booth to Karl Ove Knausgaard and beyond.

Happy to have you aboard, first time visitors and returning readers alike. I'm currently working on the revised and expanded 20th Anniversary edition of Writing the Romantic Comedy, which Harper/Collins will publish in early 2020, so as I wrestle with putting the genre's last 20 years in perspective, all input welcomed! Please do comment, and I promise to reply. 

La Reine

Christine of Christine and the Queens, in a pause between blowing out the rafters of the Ace Hotel last night, got confessional with us. She recalled once seeing people laughing and pointing at a homeless "freak," and admitted, "I'm a coward. I did nothing. But in this odd little job I've got," she said, "I get to make it up to him," thus introducing the song she'd written for him, St. Claude:

Christine (Heloise Letissier) has a physicality that drives her show, a string of tightly choreographed assaults of musical joy. Self-identified as pansexual, voice and moves inseparable, she is an instrument: she seems to play and be played through by her powerfully minimalist band as she dances out each song, whether she's in pounding four-on-the-floor disco mode, or in subtler stuff like this this cover of Beyonce's Sorry:

A galvanizing force in her native country's LGBT club scene, Christine charmed the Ace crowd with her Gallic sense of wryly distancing humor. "I'm coming out to you, Los Angeles," she announced. "I'm French." She seems poised to take over America, and if her next release contains anything as good as Tilted, my personal heavy rotation list-topper and the one that had the entire audience singing along, I bet she will. 

 

A Million Views

There was a fine white mist at the foot of the Santa Monica mountains as I biked up the path early this morning - my last bike ride on the beach as a resident of Venice: Tater and I are moving to the suburban wilds of North Hollywood tomorrow. It'll be quite a change, as I've lived in Venice for 23 years, but as we're trading a small two bedroom apartment in the over-traversed epicenter of West Side hipsterism for a three-bedroom house with yard and garage, etc. in a charming, quiet neighborhood... Well, I bought a bike rack for the car. I'll happily trek out here once a week.

Seems perfectly synchronistic that Living the Romantic Comedy is celebrating its tenth anniversary this weekend - end of an era, and all that - though not end, I hasten to clarify: I intend to keep blogging, for as long as it's still fun. But the blogger's landscape has certainly changed since I first moved into this neighborhood, ten years ago.

In June, 2005, Facebook wasn't yet as ubiquitous and Twitter didn't exist, let alone all the other platforms. And though I was late to a party that was still going strong - at the time, you could tell someone you had a blog without getting an eye-roll in response - it was a heady, stimulating community to join, especially in screenwriting site circles. These days, to have an active blog makes you feel a little... quaint. It's a bit like writing in longhand and sending an actual letter.

The most exciting aspect of it, inarguably, was and still is getting a response. These days we're all used to being liked, shared, favorited, and retweeted, but back then it was a more novel experience to blather on about something online, and suddenly get agreement, or disagreement about it from a total stranger. By the time Living RomCom was going strong, it wasn't uncommon for me to get 25-35 comments on a given post. That's astonishing, then and now.

The essential experience - reflected for me in the title of the blog - has been of growing up in public (I like to think I'm still growing), and when I looked back, digging up things to re-post this month, I saw all manner of momentous events annotated here: In my very first post, I was wondering how to write a dating site profile, and over the course of a decade, after seeking romance in all the wrong and nearly-right places, I found true love in my third and final wife; America elected its first president of color; my first novel sold to a major publishing house; and my beloved father passed away.

What I hadn't quite foreseen was a major sea change in my genre of choice. No, the romantic comedy is not dead, as I've exhaustively discussed in these pages, but in the past few years, a certain kind of formulaic chick flick (I call it the Career Girl Gets Alpha Guy movie) has finally lost its audience. I myself had dutifully supported the so-called formula of the traditional romantic comedy, but I lobbied fiercely here for more progressive fare.

One of the things that keeps me blogging about the genre, in fact, is that the rom-com seems to be morphing into something newly relatable, as such hits as Silver Linings Playbook and Her have demonstrated. I'll go out on a very short limb now to declare that when Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer's Trainwreck (which I did notes on for Universal) comes out in a few weeks and makes millions, you're suddenly going to hear - from the same people who danced on the rom-com's grave last year - that "romantic comedy is back!"

Such is the ever-cyclical nature of the industry. Meanwhile, what truly makes the blogging practice worthwhile continues to be the people I come in contact with by doing it, from my first-ever commenter Caroline Ferguson to the blog's most stalwart fan E.C. Henry. I'm amazed and gratified to talk with not just friends, but folks from all over the world on a weekly basis.

Probably the most humbling of such encounters occurred when a former consult client living in Eastern Europe informed me that having read a certain Living Rom-Com post had helped her to make a major life decision about when and how to have a baby. Her child is over a year old now, and the idea that something I wrote on this blog could turn me into a sort of cyber-godfather fills me with awe.

That's the thing, I guess: What I've mostly learned here is that when you write something and offer it to the world at large, you can never know what effect it may have, even on people you don't and may never know. And this is the best endorsement for facing one's fears and continuing to write that I can think of.

Thank you all, at any rate, for keeping me company thus far. And please comment to let me know what you'd like to see more (or less of) on this blog. Largely due to the efforts of blog colleague Scott Myers, whose promotion of a recent post currently has my total page view numbers at 999,690 and rising, I'm within 300+ hits of reaching one million by the day's end. You, my friend, may even be my millionth viewer!

May your days be filled with love and laughter.

(Illustrations by Adrian Tomine) 

Love Wins

"No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were... 

"As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage.  

"Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves.  

"Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. 

"They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. 

"The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed. It is so ordered."

We are the mirror as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

-- Rumi

 

(photos from NY Times/Simone White, NY Times, O-lan Jones, Richard Kelly Jang, NY Times, eonline, goosepimplyallover, Sean Rockoff, White House)

Meryl & Ellie

How do we mortals experience a little glimpse of heaven on Earth?  For some, it's a certain recipe for beef bourguignon, published in 1961, that reputedly transformed the eating habits of America.  For me and many others of my generation, it begins with a unique drum figure first heard in 1963, in two bars of music that announced one of the wonders of the rock'n'roll world: bum-bum-bum-BAP, bum-bum-bum BAP!

This opening salvo (played by legendary studio drummer Hal Blaine) at the top of the Ronettes' Be My Baby has been a part of the genetic code of popular music ever since.  People have been cooking Julia Child's beef perhaps more than ever, with the release of Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia;  no doubt many have recently dusted off their copies - or purchased their mp3s - of the Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry-penned classic single (produced by Phil Spector) to savor in the wake of Greenwich's death.  I happened to catch up with Julie & Julia only days after Ellie's passing, and was struck by the juxtaposition of master songwriter with a master thespian.

Love her or hate her, Meryl Streep's artistry is undeniable, and hard as it may be to believe, she is the only contemporary actress in America whom studios can currently depend on to open a movie - at the age of 60.  How exceptional is that?  Watching her as Julia Child, lighting up and wiping up the screen with her younger co-star (one feels bad for the delightful Amy Adams, in a thankless role that was even less sympathetic on the page), I found myself thinking of Ellie Greenwich.

With her partner Jeff Barry, Ellie entered a predominately male world in the early '60s, and proceeded to kick major butt, almost single-handedly creating the wildly popular "girl group sound" that dominated American airwaves at the time of the British invasion.  Mike Ragogna's informative Huffington Post tribute quotes some eye-witnesses:

"Ellie was a real pioneer both as a songwriter and producer," Tommy West explained. "She was one of the first women to break through the exclusive men's production club. Sometimes she had to get down to a man's level to get them to listen, and there were times when she would cry after a session because they wouldn't listen to her as readily as they would a man. But her legacy is one that will never be duplicated."

Meryl, when she first came on the scene, was up against similar resistance.  Famously dismissed by Dino DeLaurentis when she auditioned for his King Kong remake ("She's ugly," he commented to his son in  Italian, "Why did you bring me this thing?"), she had an uphill climb in the Hollywood trenches, even after winning her first Oscar (Supporting Actress in The Deer Hunter).  Here's an interesting bit from Wikepidia:

Asked to comment on the script for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in a meeting with the producer Stan Jaffee, director Robert Benton and star Dustin Hoffman, Streep insisted that the female character was not representative of many real women who faced marriage breakdown and child custody battles, and was written as "too evil." Jaffee, Benton and Hoffman agreed with Streep, and the script was revised.

That Streep will inevitably receive yet another Oscar nom for her turn as Julia seems only fitting, given the similarities of gender struggle common to both famous women (the movie chronicles how Child out-cooked the men at her Cordon Bleu classes and overcame male publishing prejudices - with the help of some smart female editors - to get her eventual bestseller published).

So where is Ellie's movie?  You could say that in a sense it's already been made, in the form of Allison Anders's Grace of My Heart, which was loosely based on a fictionalized version of songwriter Carole King's career, Brill Building days and all.  But there are some choice nuggets in Ellie's own saga I'd love to see on the screen, such as the time producer Jerry Wexler asked Ellie to work on the back-up vocals for Aretha Franklin's Chain of Fools (the result is another piece of pop music history).

To contemplate Julia, Meryl and Ellie is to behold power (Put on River Deep, Mountain High today and it's still like... stand back!)  Yet Streep's anecdote about being cast in Deer Hunter ("They needed a girl between the two guys and I was it") sounds like almost any young actress discussing the vagaries of casting, circa 2009.

Same as it ever was and ever will be?  Maybe not for long.  From Beyonce to Imogen Heap, women to be reckoned with are still having at it, in spite of it all.  There may never be another Ellie Greenwich, but her spirit (a-woh-oh-oh) lives on.

 

Big Screen Shrews v. Small Screen Truths

I had an e-mail the other day from my good friend Bob Dolman, enclosing this link to an L.A. Times article by Mary McNamara, which represents a prevalent state of perplexity in both the critical and moviegoing public community:

Watching Katherine Heigl attempt to inject life into yet another cardboard cut-out of a controlling, manic working woman in "The Ugly Truth," you have to wonder: For this she wants to leave television?...

There are more and better roles for women on one season of "Brothers and Sisters" and "Big Love" or "Damages" and "Desperate Housewives" than there will be in an entire year of Hollywood films. Roles that require depth and wisdom and boundless energy, that demand of their performers the dramatic flexibility and exploration of character. Roles that don't seem to punish them simply for being women.

Unfortunately, an actress who wants to be a movie star doesn't have that kind of choice, especially now that bromance has replaced romance and so many comedies seem happy to dispense with women altogether.

Bob's e-mail went on to query: "What is it I wonder that makes so many movies so bland in the romcom department?  It’s as if the TV execs are saying 'more like movies' and the movie execs are saying 'more like TV' ...But then there’s a TV crowd who want their TV lives to be spicier." 



How I see it is that studios sell "situations" when they pitch and develop movies - then they try to write characters into them.  On the other hand TV series, particularly on cable, tend to write and develop character-driven material, precisely because such concepts have to feature substantive characters to sustain a series.  You tune in to see what happened to Jane/John (i.e. What terrible fix have they gotten into now?), not because there's a new "event," necessarily, but because you want to see how this character responds to a given situation. 

Note that when a long-running TV series is feeling low on character-driven developments, they a) introduce new characters or b) go for the event, e.g. ER having a chopper crash into the hospital, or a criminal take hostages, etc.  By contrast it's usually not characters that pull people into a multiplex to see a movie, unless it's an "event-driven character" (Spiderman, Batman, etc.) who wouldn't be of any interest unless they were, in fact, facing some major world-threatening crisis.

The problem with women in cinema and to a lesser degree TV strikes me as analogous to the current Obama/Gates/police flare-up, i.e. We pretend that Obama being elected means we've dealt with/ transcended race, only to find that of course we haven't.  McNamara criticizes "Heigl playing a woman like this in 2009?!" as if our society had somehow dealt with/ transcended sexism, when obviously it hasn't (We're shocked, shocked, to see gambling in Casablanca).

Here's the disjunct that confounds me: With both The Ugly Truth and The Proposal doing so well at the box office this summer (i.e. trad-stereotypical, formulaic rom-com chick flicks) and women being the target demographic (btw, three women wrote Truth and a woman directed Proposal), apparently women are just fine, thanks, with everything that McNamara (and Bob and me) are decrying.  I don't really believe that, mind you, but the evidence is there in box office ducats.

These days it seems a challenge to find a reasonably recognizable human being, female or male, in American romantic comedies - you know, just like it is when you go looking for any in Congress.  I'm actually in the midst of musing on the stereotypical representation of men on the big screen (meet me here next week for a look at Funny People), but this Woman Thing - the terribly dated, stereotypical portrayals of them v. the seeming widescale acceptance of same - is a head-scratcher, so I turn it over to you.  Tell me, dear readers: What's up with that?  Living the RomCom wants to know.

Explain to Me Matthew McConaughey

Every now and then you just have to give it up.  A fellow writer has written a piece that I could not have written better myself, expressing exactly the sentiments I've long felt about this particular subject.  So allow me to turn Living the RomCom over to Richard Corliss, whose witheringly witty Time Magazine article definitively addresses the Mystery of McConaughey:

The obligatory Matthew McConaughey scene — as crucial to his fans as a Miley Cyrus song or a Seth Rogen penis joke is to theirs — is the ritual removing of his shirt, to reveal a torso that could have been sculpted, or certainly caressed, by Michelangelo. The gesture is not so much an act of narcissism as a votive offering to his core constituency. A showman as much as an actor, McConaughey is ready to give the people what they want; and abs make their hearts grow fonder...

Why is McConaughey a movie star? Because he gets a significant number of people to pay to see him in dreck. And Ghost of Girlfriends Past is down there with the worst...

[His] fluffy films earn no awards, no critics' raves — nothing but healthy box-office numbers; How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days broke $100 million domestic. So somebody must love McConaughey. In Ghosts, one woman says of him, "He's all surface," and another observes, "But a really hot surface."...

You really ought to read the whole of Corliss's diatribe for yourself, but let me just add this about that.  For me, the "hot surface" isn't entirely the issue; I can comprehend beefcake just as I can cheesecake (it's not always easy, for example, to defend Scarlett Johansson).

No, what confounds me is how so smarmy and smug a hot surface as McConaughey's is continues to command such a sizable audience.  It's the bewilderment felt by men the world over since the dawn of time, who've watched otherwise intelligent and discerning women lose it over a "bad boy" who we can clearly see is... well, full of steaming manure.

I guess I wouldn't begrudge the guy his success if it wasn't giving my favorite genre such a bad name.  But since I do want to understand this phenomenon, I really do -- I open it up to you.  How come the guy isn't over yet?  How's he managed to get as far as he's gotten?  And is there, dear merciful powers of Heaven, any way to make him go away?

Bromantics and Romanchicks

In case you missed the trailer: A guy who's about to get married finds that while his fiancee has friends for bridesmaids galore, he doesn't have a best male buddy for the gig... so he goes on the prowl to find one.  See, our guy's been mainly a girlfriend's guy -- not gay, just a man who really does love women.

Hey, nice to know that I'm not alone.  While I do have some great male friends, I've never thought of myself as a man's man.  So in movie role models, I like to see a guy like me -- a guy, that is, who's a healthy heterosexual male but who isn't a guy -- a football-throwing, beer-swilling insensitivo.  In John Hamburg's I Love You, Man, one of the best Judd Apatow movies that Apatow didn't make, there are two of them, and they kind of add up to one my-kinda guy.

Paul Rudd as Peter, the pic's adorably hapless hero, is such an atypical male that his chosen sport is fencing, fer chrissake, and when he drinks too many brewskis he projectile pukes.  Jason Segel as Sydney, the somewhat more macho dude who loosens Rudd's screws, may be into air guitar, chasing after cougars and refusing to pick up dog poop, but he turns out to be as sensitive as a guy can be.

One I thing I love about movies: they're equal opportunity wish fulfillment fantasy machines.  For years, romantic comedies have presented us with contemporary dream girls: lovely and lovable, charmingly kooky, perhaps even beautiful-but-difficult, but nevertheless the kind of woman most guys would cherish... if they could only be found in off-the-screen reality.  Now that men have raided and virtually taken over Romantic Comedy-land, the contemporary Bromantic Comedy has yielded a male equivalent: the kind of guy most guys would love to have as a best friend, if they, too existed in the world as we know it.

While he may be a bit too good to be true, Sydney-as-dream-girl is the fundamental gag at the core of I Love You, Man, a movie that successfully reverses what had been the stock-in-trade of rom-com constructs for decades.  Here, our boy has already got the girl -- it's the lack of a best buddy in his life that's keeping him unfulfilled.  Peter's pursuit of Sydney is what drives this boy meets/loses/gets boy comedy. 

Fiancee Zooey (Rashida Jones) is a perfect soul-mate match for Peter, and true to form, even when Peter and Zooey hit their requisite Dark Moment break-up beat, it doesn't get too dark for too long.  And Sydney, like most rom-com dream girls before him, is an idealized perfect buddy.  His less-feminized, more overtly macho persona completes the near-wussy Peter.  It's the scenes where Rudd and Segel are just like, y'know, hangin', that the movie settles into its warmest and fuzziest groove.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.  Rudd has been waiting for a leading role like this for some time, and it's great to see him make the most of it.  There aren't too many other actors around who can make social ineptitude and an infinite variety of cringing embarrassments seem quite so endearing.  And Segel -- he who had "the girl's part" in last year's Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- fits into his quirky-slob Professor Higgins role with admirable ease.  Watching him continually let poor flailing Rudd off the hook in one humiliation after another is an oddly satisfying pleasure.

All in all, it's the sunny congeniality of this casually raunchy rom-com that's so appealing.  Nobody gets  badly hurt (even when one character is attacked by the Hulk, i.e. Lou Ferigno out of makeup, he doesn't get his head busted, but put into a "sleep" hold) and despite making a total jackass out of himself, adorable Paul gets not only the girl but the guy in the end. (Oh, did I give something away?  Sorry, I was writing this for people who'd at least seen a single movie.)

The peculiar appeal of Paul Rudd as bromantic hero in this pic was aptly analyzed in Richard Corliss's Time review of the movie:

There's a reason Peter seems so... so very odd. He's an avatar of traditional Hollywood romantic comedy, where the male tries to be suave and caring, to be the man women love. But that form of movie romance is anachronistic, when most pictures insist that the crucial relationship is guy-guy. Peter has honed the wrong skills; in this movie he doesn't have to get the girl; he already has her. He has to become a supporter of Guy Marriage. And he needs another guy, someone who lives in the modern movie world, to teach him. Peter and Sydney represent old and new movie men as sure as Vivien Leigh's Blanche duBois and Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire cued the collision of old-movie refinement and the new brutalism.

True that.  And maybe it's because the tropes of I Love You, Man already felt so familiar, that I found myself wondering after seeing it if we might be ready for the next step.  With the buddy movie's bromantic subtext long-established (see Time's compendium of Top 10 Buddy Love Pics), and so many "boy meets boy" movies already extant and coming down the pike, maybe we can think about... moving past it?

If anybody has a handle on where the next nouvelle vague of romantic comedy may come from, it ought to be this gang:

Self-proclaimed "The Fempire," this quartet of hot screenwriters (Dana Fox, Diablo Cody, Liz Meriwether, and Lorene Scafaria) appears poised to give our genre a new spin, should they be so inclined.  And judging from Scafaria's work on Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, one of them at least knows fresh from dated. 

The NY Times' coverage of this crew has already brewed a tempest in a teapot, with its emphasis on the women's sexuality and girly-ness infuriating many in the blogosphere (It certainly was weird and culturally tone-deaf of the Times to print the profile in their Style section; I haven't seen any puff pieces on say, Simon Beaufoy relegated to the fashion pages, have you?).  But controversy aside, Cody and her posse could be the ones to push the rom-com from its present boy-centric romper room into the big girl's bullpen.

How about a girl meets girl romantic comedy?  Not a lesbian love story like Saving Face or Kissing Jessica Stein (what is the deal with these gerunds?), but a movie where the feuding-at-first buddies are babes.  It's been done before, of course (in this sense, Leslie Dixon's Outrageous Fortune is a girl/girl rom-com classic, and Audrey Wells' Truth About Cats and Dogs was a great one, too).  It'd be a welcome shift, 'cause as I never tire of asking in this space: Where are the rom-com women?!

We couldn't call it a Chick Flick, obviously... Romanchick Comedy doesn't exactly sing, so I put it to you folks.  Say we give the guys a rest and let some girls take over, be they slackers or mackers or some types yet unseen.  What'll we call the female version of a bromantic comedy?

Maybe if we name the genre, someone will start making the movies.

Chick Flicks Are For Which Chicks?

Peter Travers, a film critic for Rolling Stone magazine described He's Just Not That Into You as "a women-bashing tract disguised as a chick flick" and Kevin Maher has written in the Times that the "so-called chick flick has become home to the worst kind of regressive pre-feminist stereotype". Dr Diane Purkiss, an Oxford fellow and feminist historian, feels that we have reached a nadir in the way that women are portrayed on screen, and says that there's been "a depressing dumbing down of the whole genre. That's not to say that I want all movies to be earnest and morally improving. But I think that you can actually have entertainment with sassy, smart heroines, rather than dimwitted ones."
(--Kira Cochrane, The Guardian)

As a young single gal, in Australia, I saw He's Just Not That Into You twice... both times in packed cinemas, and both with extraordinarily big audience interaction. This movie is exactly what us girls are craving right now. The women in the movie seemed real (not such over-the-top 'characters' that rom coms typically have). We could relate to their situations, and how they reacted...  Finally a movie that explored issues that we're all thinking/feeling in modern relationships, with no simple answers, just the complexities, dilemmas, ups and downs that happens in real life!
(--Alley K, comment on a Living RomCom post)

Kinda confusing, isn't it?  While I can't say I'm as befuddled by the success of HJNTIY as some of my colleagues (in my largely unfavorable review, I did acknowledge the factors that seemed to cinch its popularity), it's always a bit perplexing when there's a serious disjunct between critical consensus and the box office.  But what do I know?  I'm just another blog-hard.

So let's hear from the front lines of this particular teapot tempest.  Cochrane, quoted above, did an interesting experiment for her London newspaper (thank you Simone White for the link): She watched some recent so-called chick flicks "with a group of teenage girls, all studying for their A-Levels at Kingsmead school in Enfield, London, to find out how the ­target audience for romantic comedies responds to them."  She then showed these girls, who are very much the intended demographic for such studio fare, some classic rom-coms to see what they thought of those.

...[17 year-old] Bronté Terrell says of [Isla Fisher's character] Bloomwood in Confessions of a ­Shopaholic, "She was very dopey, wasn't she - a woman who can't grasp love or a job or manage her bills." She adds that she "can't think of a recent film where the main female character has been someone successful, someone normal". "And if they are successful," says [17 year-old] Shanice, "it's like they have to get married so that they're not so concentrated on their work."

Rhiannan Brown, 17, is impressed by Meg Ryan's character in When Harry Met Sally. "She's more subtle, more real life than the women in rom-coms today. She's working, she has her own house, she knows what she wants, and what she wants is very similar to what the average woman of today wants – even though," she adds, as only a teenager can, "it was made back in the eighties."

Reacting to the recent spate of wedding rom-coms like Made of Honor and 27 Dresses, these teenagers are "bemused." Cochrane asks whether they're obsessed with marriage themselves, and they laugh... "I see marriage as a bit of a negative thing," says Bronté. "You're signing your life away. Very few of our parents are still together, so why would we want to go through all that?"

The group write off many of today's rom-coms as predictable, cliched and exaggerated, but they're not too bothered. They prefer horror films.

Right, then -- and who can blame them?  Meanwhile, back here in the less enlightened States, Hollywood is evidently crowing over having supposedly found the formula for pleasing females.  This L.A. Times article by Rachel Abramowitz cites HJNTIY, Shopaholic and other recent successes as indicative of chicks finally coming home to the studio roost:

"The movie industry has distinctly underestimated the female audience and their box-office clout for a long time," said box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "...Now movies that have innate appeal to women are paying off. Finally Hollywood has cracked the code of what is appealing to women."

Evidently quality -- however that increasingly ephemeral factor can be quantified -- is becoming beside the point, as no one (in her or his right mind) compares these current hits with acknowledged classics of the genre.  But what is one to make of the ever-ditzy, neurotic and man-crazed caricature leading ladies found in these contemporary winners, which relegate the strong, capable and competent career women of His Girl Friday and Adam's Rib to the dustbins of distant celluloid memory?  The conundrum can't be entirely explained away by Abramowitz's answer:

For most in Hollywood, it's not a particular mystery why the chick flicks are suddenly gaining so much traction in the marketplace.  It's the economy, stupid.  So these often portray fluffy, happy worlds where life's woes are settled with a song or a martini. There are no foreclosure signs or stimulus packages (at least of the economic kind).

This strikes me as simplistic, especially since all the chick flick rom-coms cited were made before our current economic downturn (even Shopaholic was in the can before last Fall's big crash, though it received some tinkering in the aftermath).  So their appeal must be rooted in something deeper within our collective unconscious.

My suspicion is that the term "chick flick" is in need of revision, as the question seems to be: Which chicks are we talking about?  Hillary fans were rightfully enraged by the idea that Sarah Palin would earn their vote simply because of her gender.  So isn't it time to acknowledge that chicks are actually a more specific subset (and a fuzzily defined one) of women?  And that many women -- both 17 and older -- abhor "chick flicks?"

I won't pretend to understand why it is that He's Just Not That Into You delights one kind of tomato while another one throws to-mah-toes at it, so I open it up to you.  What's going on here, people?  Living RomCom wants to know.

MONDAY MERNITS UPDATE: My dad's major surgery is still scheduled for this Tuesday (3/3).  Thank you everyone for all the good wishes and prayers.  I'll let you know how it goes.

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.