Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre

INTRODUCTION

There is a moment in Sleepless in Seattle, Nora Ephron’s 1993 romantic comedy, where one character, Suzy (Rita Wilson), relates to her husband Greg (Victor Garber) her feelings about the romantic ‘old movie’, An Affair to Remember (1957). Recounting the plot, which involves star-crossed lovers meeting, falling in love and nearly failing to reconnect, Suzy begins to cry. Even talking about the film provokes an emotional response. Her male audience is unimpressed, however. ‘That’s a chick’s movie!’ dismisses Sam (Tom Hanks), mockingly volunteering that The Dirty Dozen (1967) is equally moving to male audience members.

I cite this scene here at the start of an investigation of Hollywood romantic comedies because it introduces a trio of important concepts which will recur throughout the book: notions around audiences, self-referentiality and intertextuality, and emotion.

In invoking the older romance, Sleepless in Seattle wryly acknowledges both its own fictional status, and its place within a tradition of films about fate and love (the later movie’s own couple, Sam and Annie (Meg Ryan), seem doomed to separation just like the earlier duo, but both pairs finally end up together). Suzy’s championing of the film and her male companions’ dismissal of it testify to the assumption that romantic comedies are films made for and enjoyed by women audience members; to back up this essentialist gender point, Sam’s young son (Ross Malinger) also does not ‘get’ the film, while his friend Jessica (Gaby Hoffman) instantly pronounces it ‘the best movie I ever saw!’. Furthermore, the male derision is principally directed at the pleasure Suzy gets from crying over the film: just recounting the story is enough to affect her emotionally. This appeal to tears, an excess of feeling which is permitted release in weeping, is a quality Sleepless in Seattle recognises in the ‘old movie’ it quotes and which it also aims to provoke within its own audience. The men mock this when they pretend to cry recounting the details of Robert Aldrich’s tough war film (‘Jim Brown throwing the grenades!’; ‘Richard Jaeckel and Lee Marvin on top of a tank dressed like Nazis!’). The implication is that women enjoy crying over love stories, even successful ones, whereas men much more calmly watch scenes of destruction where important actions are performed.

Providing another level of meaning within the scene is the fact that the actor playing Suzy, Rita Wilson, is performing arguing with her real-life husband, Tom Hanks, playing Sam. The idea of happy successful heterosexual love is thus in the background even as the characters ostensibly dispute the importance of portrayals of heterosexual love.

In this book we will consider and question the romantic comedy’s habitual association with female audience members, recognise and interrogate the genre’s inclination towards self-reflexivity and quotation, and discuss the seemingly paradoxical importance of tears to this form of comedy.

Another important idea we can take from the Sleepless in Seattle scene is a kind of institutionalised devaluing of the genre. David Shumway, in an insightful book which discusses the tensions between romance and marriage, tellingly notes the habitual neglect such texts receive:

The love story is so familiar in our culture that we rarely give it a second thought … ‘Boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back’ is exhibit A of standard plots in all fictional media. (2003: 157)

Shumway’s comment indicates a basic problem with the Hollywood romantic comedy: it employs so formulaic a storyline, is so over-familiar a product, that it is easy to take for granted. What this book seeks to do is turn a spotlight on this area, and ask questions about what elements go into the romantic comedy and why it seems such an obvious film form to overlook or underappreciate.

It should be noted at the outset that, while the romantic comedy is a genre popular with audiences and reproduced within national cinemas around the world, this book takes as its central topic the romantic comedy as made in ‘Hollywood’, exploring the conventions of romantic comedy as they were established and then modulated over time within mainstream American cinema. This is not to suggest the North American model is the only one: indeed, the different inflections given to the genre by different national contexts are very interesting and provoke revealing comparisons. For example, one of the current elements of the Hollywood ‘romcom’, as such films are frequently termed,¹ seems to be a de-emphasising of the importance of sex. By contrast, the contemporary British romantic comedy seems comfortable with including pre-marital sex but, fascinatingly, often seeks to excuse this within its narratives by making the sexually aggressive partner both female and American, as in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Wimbledon (2004).

A recurrent trend in the writing about romantic comedy is to divide it into sub-genres, like the screwball and sex comedies (Babington & Evans 1989: 180; cf Henderson 1978: 12). Writers also tend to assert that these different forms flourished in specific periods: for example, Ted Sennett (1973), Duane Byrge and Robert Milton Miller (1991) and Diane Carson (1994) note screwball lasting from 1934 to around 1942. This book, while examining the usual periodisation, suggests that the specific qualities which inform these sub-genres may be more fluid, providing continuities as well as contrasts, and persisting in the dominant mode of romantic comedy today. Thus, while the chapters here take as their specific topics particular sub-genres and their contextual timeframes, the film examples point to the continuation of certain motifs in the genre. In the screwball chapter, for example, discussion of recent films will augment that of movies from the 1930s, to illustrate the persistent nature of some of its chief characteristics.

Chapter one offers a brief overview of the Hollywood romantic comedy as a whole, discussing how to interrogate a film via its genre, and suggesting why the romantic comedy might traditionally be overlooked. It explores the elements requiring examination in a genre study, and offers a master definition of romantic comedy. Finally, the chapter uses the early work by Colin McArthur (1972) on the iconography of the gangster film, exploring his iconographical categories and applying them to the visual systems employed in the romantic comedy.

Subsequent chapters focus on exploring the characteristics of the screwball comedy, the sex comedy and the most self-consciously radical texts, those from the 1970s. The final chapter traces the continuities and contrasts that current romantic comedies maintain with the earlier forms; in generally returning to a much more conservative ending than the romantic comedies of the 1970s, the contemporary romcom reveals new insecurities and preoccupations underlying its version of the standard boy-meets-girl narrative.

Each of these chapters mentions many key movies, but also presents a detailed analysis of just one exemplary film; the synopses of these are found in Appendix A. In providing these case studies my aim has sometimes been to forgo what might be the canonical, obvious choice (as with perhaps Bringing Up Baby (1938), one of the most written-about screwball comedies), in favour of lesser-known movies which exhibit the classic characteristics but also permit fresh analysis. Thus My Man Godfrey (1936) and Pillow Talk (1959) are closely read to reveal aspects of the screwball and sex comedy respectively. Annie Hall (1977), on the other hand, while often discussed, does seem to be the most truly radical of all the 1970s romantic comedies, and thus merits another close look in seeing how it abandons attributes usually treated as indispensable by films of the genre, such as the happy ending. Finally, an analysis of You’ve Got Mail (1998) demonstrates how the current evolution of the romantic comedy has largely chosen to ignore the advances made by the genre in the 1970s, self-consciously reverting instead to more traditional textual strategies.

While I have emphasised that the following chapters will be alert to originating contexts, it should not be believed that films straightforwardly reflect the attitudes of their particular times. As socially created objects, they embody competing impulses, as Frank Krutnik aptly summarises:

In general one can see generic forms as a functional interface between the cinematic institution, audiences and the wider realm of culture. Films never spring magically from their cultural context, but they represent instead much more complex activities of negotiation, addressing cultural transformations in a highly compromised and displayed manner … In the case of romantic comedy, it is particularly important to stress how specific films or cycles mediate between a body of conventionalised ‘generic rules’ … and a shifting environment of sexual-cultural codifications. (1990: 57–8).

Thus, while this book sometimes follows the usual writing on romantic comedies by comparing different types of films and their specific chronological contexts, it also intends to problematise the strict relationship of originating moment and film form by showing both the continuation of elements across different historical periods and the contested nature of those elements within the films at the time of their emergence. I hope in this way to prompt some new directions on these films, by analysing and tracing the maintenance or mutation of core elements within them across time. The book will:

•  provide definitions of the genre and its sub-genres

•  discuss the relation of different sub-genres to their historical contexts

•  analyse the dominant characteristics of each sub-genre

•  offer closely-read case studies of each sub-genre

•  examine the ideologies underlying the genre

•  consider these films’ audiences, and assumptions about those audiences.

Above all, my intention is to problematise the romcom, so that such films become new and strange again, and can therefore open up to analysis. This seems necessary since, although they seem easy to dismiss, romantic comedies can have a hold on us. Even hardened academics can be swayed by the patterns of gain, loss and recovery these films present so repeatedly. Whilst formulating the ideas for this book, for example, I saw The Prince and Me (2004), a fairytale romance set in Wisconsin in which gutsy medical student Paige (Julia Stiles) meets, derides and falls for upper-class Eddie (Luke Mably), never dreaming that he is so upper-class he is actually the Crown Prince of Denmark. When the paparazzi expose their romance, the lovers part and Eddie returns home; Paige follows to Denmark and agrees to marry him. At a grand state ball, however, she is excluded from an important diplomatic conversation and realises that this is what agreeing to marry the Prince means: always being in public, never having a say in political affairs. Paige calls off the engagement and flies back to America. Several months later, she finishes university top of her graduating class: Eddie is waiting to congratulate her. He agrees that Paige should become a doctor but must also marry him; having broken one tradition by letting an American marry the Crown Prince, they might as well break another and let the future Queen have a job too.

While the trajectory of this romantic comedy is straightforward and fits entirely within the ‘boy meets girl’ outline to which Shumway refers, this bare-bones account does not adequately reflect my feelings on watching it. Putting myself in the place of Sleepless in Seattle’s Suzy for a second, I can relate that although the film did not make me cry, it did prompt emotions. As it seemed that Paige would give up her dream of being a doctor, I felt annoyed because, once again, the woman was making sacrifices for love. When she made what the film seemed to suggest was the ‘right’ choice, however, leaving Eddie and returning to university, I felt let down by the deviation from the norm. I wanted the two to end up together and I felt cheated that a romantic comedy could try to deny me the happy ending I expected from the genre, even though I wanted Paige to keep her career. When the actual ending, with the Prince’s capitulation, unfolded, I felt it was unrealistic, implausibly tying up ends that would really have been left untidy in real life – but I was glad it was there.

This personal anecdote suggests that even when we know how a genre works, can tick off its expected components and predict in which order its events will occur, there can be something in the romantic comedy – whether it is escapism, comfort, wish-fulfilment or irony – which keeps audiences enjoying, and consuming, the films of this genre. This book sets out to interrogate what that something, or somethings, might be.

1       ROMANTIC COMEDY AND GENRE

Genre is a French word meaning ‘type’ or ‘kind’. Thinking about film genres, therefore, employs ideas about different types or kinds of films. Deciding a film fits within a well-defined genre can be a way for film critics to dismiss it, since genre films are often assumed to be made in Hollywood, to strict guidelines, as mass-oriented products. To a certain extent, ‘genre film’ has as its implicit opposite the notion of the ‘art film’; furthermore, genre films carry connotations flavoured with ‘American, low-brow, easy’, while assumptions about art films include ‘European or independent, high-brow, difficult’. While genre critics have worked to unsettle these assumptions, contesting the idea that all genre films are inevitably ‘popcorn movies’, even genre criticism itself has culturally authorised some types of film, like westerns and gangster films, more than others. Romantic comedy is, arguably, the lowest of the low. Even a book setting out to review 600 ‘Chick Flicks’ ends up admitting its own lack of taste:

It’s about time we confessed: we might love the great and the good, but we can also adore the cute and the ridiculously bad, as long as the leading man is handsome or the story – no matter how cheesy – makes us laugh, makes us cry, or makes us hot. (Berry & Errigo 2004: 1)

Romcoms are viewed as ‘guilty pleasures’ which should be below one’s notice but, Jo Berry and Angie Errigo suggest, which satisfy because they provide easy, uncomplicated pleasures. I dispute this idea, however, and think that the appeal to audiences of such films is more complex, especially if the viewer is inhabiting a position where conflicting pulls of realism and fantasy are operating, as in my own reactions to The Prince and Me.

It is not only romantic comedies that are assumed to provide