“Death & Resurrection: A Rom-Com Memoir of the 2000s”
Billy Mernit, host of the excellent blog Living the Romantic Comedy, has been running an 18-part series [titled above]:
It’s been a decade since it happened: the moment I lost my faith in romantic comedy. The genre I’d loved all my life was in crisis, and sitting amidst the wreckage of a failed second marriage, I was having a crisis, not sure I could believe in love’s happy endings anymore, in reality or in make believe. The reasons for my own romance’s end were perfectly clear. But it was particularly galling to realize that romantic comedy couldn’t offer me any counsel and consolation.
Pronounced dead in critical quarters, seemingly doomed to unconscious self-parody, the average studio released rom-com of the early 2000s had all the cringe worthy appeal of a 50-something matron in go-go boots and a bell-bottomed aging playboy gamely trying to dance the Watusi.
The movie would star two exceedingly beautiful people, who’d meet in some contrived bit of cuteness: Jennifer Lopez, her high heel stuck in a manhole cover, nearly flattened by a falling dumpster before she’s rescued by Matthew McConaughey (The Wedding Planner). After falling in love for no convincing reason, they’d be torn apart by a misunderstanding, or the revelation of a secret that any real life lovers would have revealed going in, like Patrick Dempsey suddenly discovering that Reese Witherspoon is married (Sweet Home Alabama). Inevitably, one of these stars would save the day via the grand gesture of running after the other to declare his or her love, as in David Duchovny flying to Italy and joining a bicycle race there to retrieve Minne Driver (Return to Me).
Flying to Rome to win back my real life Italian wife was not going to do the job, far as I could see. Tried that — didn’t work. And meanwhile, in its rigid adherence to a series of tropes that were replete with far-fetched sentimentality to begin with and had grown increasingly irrelevant with age, romantic comedy was turning into the Miss Havisham of cinema: a batty old biddy passing out stale bits of fossilized wedding cake for a party that had ended decades earlier.
The traditional rom-com’s retro values made little sense at a time when songs like “Big Pimpin’” and “Bootylicious” topped the charts. And its happily-ever-after belief system wasn’t jibing with the tidal sweep of a statistical shift that I’d unhappily just joined: shortly after the turn of the new century, nearly half of all American marriages were ending in divorce.
Romantic comedy’s failure to address my issues really hurt. It wasn’t an idle pleasure for me, this form. The ethos of the genre had helped shape my sensibility. I was the original sucker. I believed in it — the bracing banter of smart, sexy people, the amusing confusion of gender collision, the transformative power of true, hard won love. In my gullible mind, I had intertwined what was up there on the screen with what could be out here in the world, imagining that my own future would be a combination of the two, that I would get to live a romantic comedy. And now, not only the life I’d been living, but the movies that embodied this dream life had become virtually indefensible.
Losing my religion led to my questioning its tenets. While I struggled with reentering the single life in middle age, I took a long, hard look at what the romantic comedy’s belief system is about, how it both reflects our culture and influences it. And while I was trying to deconstruct the symbiotic relationship between romantic comedy and all of us, the declining genre shifted direction.
This is a must-read series for all your rom-com fans. Below the fold, links to all 18 installments in the series.