After "Happily Ever After"

Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age

Maria San Filippo, Maria San Filippo

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780814346754
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In defiance of the alleged "death of romantic comedy, " After "Happily Ever After": Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age edited by Maria San Filippo attests to rom-com's continuing vitality in new modes and forms that reimagine and rejuvenate the genre in ideologically, artistically, and commercially innovative ways. No longer the idyllic fairy tale, today's romantic comedies ponder the realities and complexities of intimacy, fortifying the genre's gift for imagining human connection through love and laughter. It has often been observed that the rom-com's "happily ever after" trope enables the genre to avoid addressing the challenges of coupled life. This volume's contributors confront how recent rom-coms contend with a "post-romantic age" of romantic disillusionment and seismically shifting emotional and relational bonds. Fifteen chapters contemplate the resurgence of the "radical romantic comedy" and uncoupling comedy, new approaches in genre hybridity and serial narrative, and how recent rom-coms deal with divisive topical issues and contemporary sexual mores from reproductive politics and marriage equality to hook-up culture and technology-enabled sex. Rom-coms remain underappreciated and underexamined—and still largely defined within Hollywood's parameters of culturally normative coupling and its persistent marginalization of racial and sexual minorities. Making the case for taking romantic comedy seriously, this volume employs critical perspectives drawn from feminist, queer, postcolonial, and race studies to critique the genre's homogeneity and social and sexual conservatism, recognizing innovative works inclusive of LGBTQ people, people of color, and the differently aged and abled. Encompassing a rich range of screen media from the last decade, After "Happily Ever After" celebrates works that disrupt and subvert rom-com fantasy and formula so as to open audience's eyes along with our hearts. This volume is intended for all readers with an interest in film, media, and gender studies.

Act 1

What’s New Is Old

Regenerating Romcom

1

We Found Love in a Hopeless Place

ROMANTIC COMEDY IN THE POST-ROMANTIC AGE

Beatriz Oria

Romantic comedy is in a permanent state of crisis. In its long history as one of Hollywood’s oldest genres, it has gone through countless “deaths” and “rebirths.” This tendency has continued into the new millennium: the 21st century inaugurated a period of renewed turmoil for the Hollywood studio romcom, whose output followed a steadily declining path during the 2000s. Its fall from grace became even steeper in the 2010s: from 2012 to 2017 the number of romcoms widely released oscillated between two and zero.1 By the end of the 2010s these figures had increased slightly, with the success of Crazy Rich Asians (2018) timidly hinting at a possible revival for the genre at the box office, but in general terms it still remains in a slump, commercially speaking.2 The raunchy, often sexist, male-dominated romcom popularized by Judd Apatow during the 2000s seems to be on the wane, but it has not been replaced with a clearly identifiable single trend. Arguably, it is precisely a lack of homogeneity that characterizes contemporary romantic comedy, challenging perhaps this sort of pronouncement about its commercial performance. The genre has developed a range of strategies for reinventing itself in the so-called “post-romantic age,” a context defined by a cynical attitude toward romance that has rendered the traditional romantic plot increasingly suspect for media-savvy millennials. The prefix “re-” is key here, as none of these formulas is really new, but a reworking of ideas previously tested in the genre’s long history that have been adapted to the contemporary zeitgeist.

These formulas include the rise of multiprotagonist films such as the five-part Cities of Love (2006–) franchise, He’s Just Not That Into You (2009), Happythankyoumoreplease (2010), The Romantics (2010), Valentine’s Day (2010), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), Friends with Kids (2011), New Year’s Eve (2011), To Rome with Love (2012), What to Expect When You’re Expecting (2012), The Big Wedding (2013), The Little Death (2014), She’s Funny That Way (2014), Love the Coopers (2015), That’s Not Us (2015), How to Be Single (2016), Mother’s Day (2016), I Do . . . Until I Don’t (2017), and Book Club (2018), which provide multiple iterations of the fantasy of “the One,” perhaps to overcompensate for people’s loss of faith in soul mates.3 These films suggest that this trope is wearing thin, as they replace a single grand romantic narrative with a mosaic of relationships that, together, present a complex, more nuanced picture of contemporary intimacy and dating.

Similarly, the increasing visibility of queer characters—in, for example, I Love You Phillip Morris (2009), Is It Just Me? (2010), The Kids Are All Right (2010), Your Sister’s Sister (2011), Gayby (2012), Appropriate Behavior (2014), Boy Meets Girl (2014), Date and Switch (2014), Life Partners (2014), Me Him Her (2015), Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List (2015), That’s Not Us (2015), The Feels (2017), Alex Strangelove (2018), Hearts Beat Loud (2018), Love, Simon (2018), and The Half of It (2020)—points to a hopeful future for the genre in terms of representation, and the success of films with protagonists of color, such as Just Wright (2010), Jumping the Broom (2011), Think Like a Man (2012), Baggage Claim (2013), The Best Man Holiday (2013), About Last Night (2014), Top Five (2014), The Big Sick (2017), Crazy Rich Asians, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018) and its sequel To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (2020), Always Be My Maybe (2019), Falling Inn Love (2019), Last Christmas (2019), Yesterday (2019), The Half of It, and Love, Guaranteed (2020) may help resurrect the romcom at the box office. As the popularity of these films suggests, one key to romantic comedy’s rebirth may lie in the particularization of sexual and racial experience: increasing the genre’s specificity may wind up, paradoxically, encouraging its expansion.

Contemporary romantic comedy is also diversifying by wooing the “gray dollar,” meeting the needs of an aging audience that had been overlooked. The recent cycle of “mature love stories”4 such as Last Chance Harvey (2008), Mamma Mia! (2008), It’s Complicated (2009), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), Larry Crowne (2011), Darling Companion (2012), Love Is All You Need (2012), At Middleton (2013), The Big Wedding (2013), Enough Said (2013), The Love Punch (2013), And So It Goes (2014), Learning to Drive (2014), The Rewrite (2014), Hello, My Name Is Doris (2015), I’ll See You In My Dreams (2015), The Intern (2015), Finding Your Feet (2017), Hampstead (2017), and Book Club is challenging romantic comedy’s ageism by featuring “older” women as both desirable and desiring subjects.5

This chapter explores some additional new directions that have not received as much attention in recent years—namely, unexpected genre mixing, an increased emphasis on friendship as an alternative to heteronormative coupling, and a focus on the individual instead of the couple. These formulas are not exclusive to the post-romantic comedy, having been previously deployed at different points in history, but the specificity of the context in which they are being resurrected at the beginning of the 21st century imbue some of these familiar tropes with new meanings that are worth exploring.6

The ability of film genres to express the zeitgeist is one of their most compelling attributes and, arguably, what helps them stay fresh, culturally and commercially relevant. As Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker state, “Genre cinema has long been understood as revealing both cultural anxieties and fantasized solutions which emerge in response to them.”7 The directions being taken by contemporary romantic comedy seem to constitute a response to a crisis of intimacy closely linked to millennials’ pessimistic attitude toward romantic love. So too may these new generic inflections be symptomatic of cultural anxiety about the future of romantic love in an increasingly individualistic society fueled by a neoliberal ethos. This sociosexual context threatens to throw the shared project of the couple off-center and compels the post-romantic era romcom to imagine possible solutions.

For Lauren Berlant, the historical present is always hard to grasp, as it is perceived “affectively”: it is “a thing that is sensed and under constant revision, a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now.”8 Film genre mediates the perceived “affect” of the present so as to help us make sense of it. For this reason, genres are in constant flow, continually evolving to keep current. As Berlant argues, “Older realist genres are on the wane because their conventions of relating fantasy to ordinary life and their depictions of the good life now appear to mark archaic expectations about having and building a life.”9 In the romantic realm, Berlant’s concept of the “good life” translates to the traditional fantasy of lively, durable intimacy, complete with marriage, a family, and financial security.10 Arguably, one reason for the decline of the traditional romcom formula may lie in its apparent incapacity to faithfully represent the reality of contemporary experience: the fantasy of the “good life” has become unsustainable in the face of today’s romantic and socioeconomic turmoil. Hence, the need for a significant “repackaging” of the genre.

This romantic turmoil is inextricably linked to the cynical attitude toward romance that is said to characterize U.S. millennials. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center study, only 28 percent of Americans aged 18 and older believed in the idea of “one true love.” Among those believers, about half (54 percent) of 18- to 29-year-olds thought themselves to have found theirs, compared with nine in ten adults aged 50 and older.11 Unsurprisingly, people’s loss of faith in traditional romance is also reflected in record low rates of marriage among the young, as only 20 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds were married in 2011, compared with almost 60 percent in 1960.12 These figures seem to explain the obsolescence of the trope of marriage as traditional romantic comedy’s telos and viewer skepticism regarding its ideological pillars of “the One,” “love at first sight,” and “happily ever after.” For instance, in the era of Tinder, the lovers’ “meet cute” is more likely to happen online, which limits its dramatic and representational possibilities. As Emily Yahr posits, “Romantic comedies are fueled by an idealized version of love, while modern sensibilities about gender roles and romance have increasingly caused audiences to see these films through a much different lens.”13 This new lens prevents 21st-century audiences from buying into the sincerity that the genre has traditionally assumed. Spectator engagement with iconic romcoms such as When Harry Met Sally . . . (1989), Pretty Woman (1990), or Sleepless in Seattle (1993) crucially depends on their capacity to believe in the mighty power of romantic love, capable of sweeping human beings off their feet and lasting forever. Contemporary viewers, however, appear reluctant to suspend disbelief about romantic relationships. These neotraditional movies are revisited with nostalgia and ironic knowingness, but, if made today, they would be considered hackneyed and hard to relate to.14 Furthermore, some of the tropes traditionally championed by the genre, such as the concept of the soul mate, are in...