Living the Romantic Comedy

'Rona Rom-Coms #4: HER

[This Romantic Comedies in the Time of Social Distance series suggests good rom-coms to watch at home during our current crisis. Some are directly apropos and some will take you away from it all, but none of them suck.]

You may not think of Spike Jonze's Her as a romantic comedy - perhaps because it's also a sci-fi pic, a social satire, and a character-driven drama - but "Man falls in love with his computer's operating system" is about as contemporary rom-com as it gets, in my book, and the movie, despite its often melancholic tone, is filled with mordant wit and features some genuine LOL laughs.

It's also, viewed from one's shelter-in-place couch, weirdly resonant with the current moment. Watching it now can induce a surreal nostalgia for the not-quite past, given that the urban near-future it imagines is cavalierly populous and crowded, but simultaneously it's a film about isolation and its discontents. It depicts a love story between an emotionally-disabled guy (Joaquin Phoenix), channeling other people's emotions in his gig as a professional personal letter-writer, and his disembodied female-voiced OS (Scarlett Johansson), but practically everyone on screen is engrossed in a screen, rather than dealing with the humans in their proximity.

As an exploration of how to sustain a relationship when one of you is only present via technology and not physically there, Her can serve as a metaphor for the relationships many of us are trying to sustain in the time of COVID-19. And ultimately, it's a clear-eyed, hesitant affirmation of hope, and the fundamental importance of human connection. Sound relatable? Take a look.

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. 

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) 

Science to Screenwriters: You're Toast

Well, we've had a pretty good run, haven't we?  But now I guess it's time for me to pack the pen, paper and laptop, saddle up my old hoss and ride on out of town -- me and the oh, however many hundreds of thousands of other unfortunate souls who've been trying to make a living writing movies.  Because some researchers over at M.I.T. have decided that what we've been talking about when we talk about story is over -- at least for screenwriters -- and they're busily throwing money at lab rats, trying to figure out what may already be taking the Old School story's place.

According to the New York Times, news that your mom's brand of movie isn't going to cut it for 21st century folk has prompted the M.I.T. Media Laboratory to create a new Center For Future Storytelling, founded by former Paramount Pictures president David Kirkpatrick: 

[The lab] will examine whether the old way of telling stories — particularly those delivered to the millions on screen, with a beginning, a middle and an end — is in serious trouble.

...2008's domestic motion picture box office appears poised to match last year’s gross revenues of $9.7 billion, a record.  But Mr. Kirkpatrick and company are not alone in their belief that Hollywood’s ability to tell a meaningful story has been nibbled at by text messages, interrupted by cellphone calls and supplanted by everything from Twitter to Guitar Hero.

“I even saw a plasma screen above a urinal,” said Peter Guber, the longtime film producer and former chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment who contends that traditional narrative — the kind with unexpected twists and satisfying conclusions — has been drowned out by noise and visual clutter.

The image of Mr. Guber seeing the writing on the urinal wall has a certain kind of perverse irony, given that it was he who helped usher in a new age of story-weak blockbusters with Batman, back in 1989 -- a visuals-driven progenitor of the very kind of movie that's now being declared the Angel of Story Death.

Gamelike, open-ended series like “Pirates of the Caribbean” or "Spiderman" have eroded filmmakers’ ability to wrap up their movies in the third act. Another is that a preference for proven, outside stories like the Harry Potter books is killing Hollywood’s appetite for original storytelling. ...“How do you compete with ‘Transformers’?” asked Mr. Guber.

Write better, would be my glib reply, and I'd argue that in fact, it's the virtues of good old-fashioned yarn-spinning that made the Potter books so popular.  True: in the current market, the present-day spec script (i.e. "original storytelling") comes in second to adaptations, according to Mike Scherer's enlightening statistics site, but it's hanging in there with surprising tenacity.

Still, Guber and the other Chicken Little-like film pundits interviewed in Times reporter Michael Cieply's
article of course have a point.  New media is expanding, shifting, and undoubtedly renewing the way stories are told and perceived. This past NY Times Sunday Magazine was a fascinating read devoted to screens -- e.g. from smart phones to Imax -- headlined How We Watch Stuff.  And its Moments That Mattered article, featuring "Twelve writers, directors and bloggers describing the year’s most memorable clips, scenes, shows, videos and computer graphics," featured only a single big screen movie scene among their choices (and that one, from an indie documentary).

Is a younger generation raised on today's technology less likely to relate to a traditional story told conventionally?  Probably.  But I'd say that's more about the packaging than the product.  Take a look at one of this year's biggest hits, the Pixar animation Wall-E.  It's about as classic a capital-s Story as you'll find under a 21st Century Christmas tree.  The Dark Knight, serial installment though it may be, had unusually strong story values for such a genre potboiler, even as everything else about it screamed video-game.

Journalists have a tendency to seize on the either-or dichotomy, as it makes for headlines (remember election coverage?).  Yet it always seems to me that with every push of the cultural pendulum comes a swing back in the other direction.  Digital hasn't killed the analog star; CGI-driven event movies actually help create an audience for a low-budget little indie like Juno.  And to his credit, reporter Cieply balanced his coverage by noting that at the Sundance Institute, the idea of traditional film storytelling is alive and well:

“Storytelling is flourishing in the world at a level I can’t even begin to understand,” said Ken Brecher, the institute’s executive director. Mr. Brecher spoke last week, as his colleagues continued sorting through 9,000 films — again, a record — that have been submitted for the coming Sundance Film Festival.  ...If anything, Mr. Brecher added, technology has simply brought mass storytelling, on film or otherwise, to people who once thought Hollywood had cornered the business.



Don't get me wrong: I'm not anti-science.  I believe in evolution, gravity, and toaster-ovens.  But having lived through the time when scientists told us that margarine was better for us than butter, and then told us that margarine was really bad, I tend to get the giggles whenever some guy in a white labcoat pontificates with great certainty about some new thing that's bound to replace the old.

You try telling a story that has no beginning, middle and end to a friend (especially say, a child) and see how long you can hold their attention.  Me, I'll be busy reading this article I just saw on how the theater's really dead.

 

Scary Monster

Dim the lights, cue the creepy organ music, rev up the fog machine, because I’ve got a whopper of a spooky story to share with you. Fans of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and that master of contemporary horror, Danielle Steel, gather round, and screenwriters or fictionists take note: this is true-life terror, so you may find grist for your mills here, since the subject matter is fair game and knows no copyright restrictions. It also knows no shame.

I speak of a nearly unspeakable horror, whose heinous proclivities defy human rationality. Imagine, if you will, a demon-like apparatus planted within your body from birth, with an agenda so insidious and skills so evilly ingenious that the mind reels in comprehension.

This… thing distorts your perception of reality, feeds your prejudices, betrays your moral code, feeds your vanity, weakens your will. Serving only its own guilefully secretive ends, it deludes you at every turn. And – most horrific of its horrible skills – it fools you into thinking that you are its master, while all the while, it is the true ruler of your quotidian life, and you, its hoodwinked slave.

Science fiction? Merely another headline from the Enquirer, or Fox News? No, my little ones, this is all too real. Be afraid, be vewwy afwaid. Because I’m talking about… (mwah-ha-ha-hah!)…

Your brain.

Cordelia Fine’s A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives is hands down the most terrifying book I’ve read in years, and I’m not being facetious when I say this. I found its contents so profoundly upsetting that I had to go through it a chapter at a time, dealing its dastardly revelations out slowly; there was only so much truth I could take on a given day.

Because it is truth that Fine’s highly readable, not at all academic tome traffics in, or at least, the closest to truth That Thing In One’s Head lets one comprehend without pre-packaging. Fine, with a degree in experimental psych from Oxford among other illustrious credits, expertly explicates the brain’s innate tendency towards self-delusion. And she backs up her conclusions with a plethora of studies conducted by professionals from all over the globe.

What these studies and research experiments cumulatively have to say about how the human brain “pushes, pulls, twists and warps our perceptions” is enough to encourage thoughts of suicide. The brain, in Fine’s presentation, is a quintessentially egotistical prima donna, voraciously self-serving and self-aggrandizing, automatically employing “hindsight bias, wishful thinking, unrealistic optimism and moral excuse-making” to make us feel that we’re okay (and you’re not), no matter what uncomfortable reality we may be experiencing.

The book’s divided into chapters – The Vain Brain, The Pigheaded Brain, The Bigoted Brain, etc. – which highlight different aspects of why “your unscrupulous brain is entirely undeserving of your confidence.” In sum:

An adroit manipulator of information, the brain leaves us staring at a mere façade of reality. Vanity shields us from unpalatable truths about ourselves. Craven methods of moral bookkeeping also attentively serve the principle of self-glorification, often at others’ expense… Irrationality clouds our judgment, leaving us vulnerable to errors and delusions—a situation that is only worsened by our stubbornness. The secretive unconscious delights in a handful of strings to pull, concealing from us many of the true influences on our thoughts and deeds. Our very own will, temperamental and capricious, weakly succumbs to unwanted impulses and distractions…

All of which leads one to one inescapable conclusion: we’re fucked. We are very, very fucked.

Fine has, thank goodness, a great sense of humor to leaven her grim tidings, and one of her favorite running gags is to address the reader when a particular finding is apt to make one squirm. You’re probably thinking, she’ll say, that this [horrible brain tendency] isn’t true of you – and she got me almost every time, I’m unhappy to say, I realized that my own mind had been subliminally whispering this reassuring thought to make me feel better – thus proving, fait accompli, that what was true of them (say, habitual denial) was clearly true of me.

So just when you’re reading along with a deluded sense of self-righteousness – reacting, for example, to that electrical shock study with a relieved sense that you, however, don’t have a mean bone in your body, you’re suddenly brought up short with the realization that you do, in fact, have at least enough mean bones to string up a little skeleton on your door for October 31st.

Don’t mean to scare you off of A Mind of Its Own (nice title, by the way, and the only other book with the identical title is a book about the penis, speaking of organs that have no shame). I actually think it should be required reading for all humans, as it might just nudge a few of us into questioning ourselves a little more readily (reading Fine, I finally found myself comprehending a certain mindset of the Bush administration – not forgiving, mind you, but understanding).

And as a primer on human behavior, this is an awesome resource for writers (not since the last Chekhov story I read, did I find myself so often thinking: yes – ouch -- that’s what we’re really like). If nothing else, Fine’s book has given me the costume to wear this Tuesday night. I’m going to attach a cardboard arrow pointing to the top of my noggin, with the words “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” written across my forehead, or perhaps simply, “It’s ALIVE!!!”

Happy Halloween.

Training Mates

I've tried to ignore it, but it won't go away, so dutifully, I bring the matter to you: for something like three weeks running, a certain article has topped the Top Ten Most Popular E-mailed Articles list of the NY Times (it's been unseated from the #1 spot a few times, but inexplicably has popped back up again), which is a nearly unheard of phenomenon.  I think you can file this under "Tempests in Teapots," but still -- it is a kind of news.

What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage by journalist Amy Sutherland is the hot-button article that's caused such a cybernetic flurry, and I don't entirely get it, but at least I'm not alone.  Many a perplexed columnist has weighed in on this event, like Paige Rockwell over at Salon; even Maureen Dowd devoted a musing "what's the fuss?" column to it (How To Train a Woman).

The basic gist: Sutherland, who's written a book on animal training, has applied what she learned in the wild to the domestic front, using positive reinforcement (as opposed to nagging) to "train" her husband.  You know, just like a pliable baboon.  And it's done wonders for their marriage.

Cannily, Sutherland forestalls some obligatory outrage (though there has of course been plenty of that) by ending her discourse with a description of how her husband used her own techniques on her; evidently a wife can be trained with the same methods: goose, meet gander. 

What's intriguing is that humans of both genders have apparently embraced as well as reviled the writer's report.  Interviewed by Rockwell, Sutherland suggested the source of the article's popularity: "It hit on two universals. People love animals, and everyone wants marital advice."  

Apparently the subtext is that human beings... are bloody ignorant apes.  Given the often head-splitting complexities of the modern romantic relationship, Sutherland notes: "People are hungry for really simple techniques."

Or as Forrest Gump might have said, simple is as simple does (whatever the hell that means).

Thing is, though Jennifer Aniston's character in The Break-Up could have used a Sutherland technique on Vince Vaughn's slacker-ly mate (i.e. reward behavior you like and ignore behavior you don't), would she have managed to get him to not just do the dishes, but to want to do the dishes?  More importantly, would he have been gone faster than a speeding puma once he realized he was being treated like a lowly beast?

I'm already hearing the typhoon-like clickety-clack of a thousand keyboards echoing across the Hollywood hills as any screenwriter with a Times subscription hurries to turn this material into a romantic comedy, but they may be too late.  Watch the trades, 'cause I'll wager that this little sucker of a concept's already been pitched and sold.  Animal Husbandry?  Wifery?  The mind reels, as if seasick.

In the meantime, are people glomming onto this issue because it's  the same old common sense as "you catch more flies with honey" done up in a fresh package (The Dummy's Guide to Relationships),  or is Sutherland truly offering news we can use? While I scratch my head (it's the simian in me), you take a look at this Shamu thing and tell me what you think.