“Cary Grant, right?”
"You know that movie?” Meg Ryan’s face, yet undisturbed by plastic surgery, lights up with hope.
“One of my wife’s favorites.” The crusty old Empire State Building desk clerk, who has a well-timed soft spot for romantics, waves her to the elevators so she can make her date with Tom Hanks, and by extrapolation, destiny.
That I know the lines from this scene, and most others, in Sleepless in Seattle is probably not all that surprising. Many women of my generation, myself included, developed their cultural consciousness in the age of the romantic comedy, and I personally have a mind like a steel trap for ridiculous and useless information. That I was reciting these lines, almost without realizing it, while folding my laundry this weekend is admittedly a little weird.
That a large part of the movie I was reciting is based on its own characters’ reciting another movie’s lines—that’s when the level of removal becomes downright strange.
As we continue into our twenties, many of my friends and I have increased the frequency of our griping that romantic comedies have completely warped our expectations for how our relationships should happen. A co-worker of mine, who grew up in Russia, recently commented to me that the fairy tale and the idea of happily ever after, replete with Prince Charming and perfect, straight, white teeth, is a distinctly American preoccupation. Reflecting on my own fantasies and four painful years in braces, I couldn’t help but think she was on to something.
The collective movies of our childhoods (generally of the Disney persuasion) had no qualms about labeling themselves as fairy tales. As I got older, I was able to rationally separate myself from the main characters—I can acknowledge, for instance, that I am neither a mermaid nor an Arabian princess. My life is not populated with helpful, singing rodents and crustaceans. I am, in the most literal sense, not a cartoon character.
I am, however, in my Mid-Twenties. I live in a City. I have Supportive Girlfriends. I have been known to carry a Baguette in my Cloth Tote when walking from the Alternative Grocery Store. I feel as though I am constantly at the ready to become one half of a meet-cute. I am performing the modern equivalent of sitting at a window and singing about how someday my prince will come: I am waiting to become the star in my own romantic comedy.
God help us all.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton must be rolling over in her damn grave.
When I pull myself up short and actually examine thoughts like that, I feel vaguely nauseated. I perform so many other useful, independent, important functions, and this? This is what preoccupies me? Ye gods, for lack of a better interjection.
The romantic comedies with which we grew up are fairy tales in contemporary drag: they are stories we tell that reflect not only our values but how we see ourselves in our culture. As we get older, the stories with which we are presented sometimes begin to look a lot more like the lives that we find ourselves leading. The catch is that, as far as I can tell, the plausibility of the romantic scenarios does not increase proportionally with the visual similarity. And therein lies our problem.
Sometimes I wonder what it means that the romantic comedies to which I refer in fact themselves refer to an earlier generation of romantic cinema. I can’t help but remember an interesting phenomenon in Western art, which follows a similar trajectory: artists reach a level of classicism that is regarded as ‘perfection,’ equidistant between nature and an ideal. The Greeks did it, the Romans copied them, and the Italians made their way back to it in the 16th century. However, things always get very interesting with the next generation of artists, because where exactly do you go from ‘perfection’? It seems that the artists take one step closer to the idea, the abstraction, rather than to nature, and from there, things get just plain weird. As an enthusiast with a soft spot for the younger, less perfect siblings of art history (wonder why), I’ve always liked the Hellenistic and Mannerist movements—they may be kind of weird-looking, but they’ve certainly got imagination.
If you take the classic romantic movies—the Affairs to Remember and the Roman Holidays—and you remove them one more step from nature, you get a kind of mannered (or comedic) romance. After all, it’s one hell of a leap to go from Cary Grant to Tom Hanks—there has to be some manner of abstraction in there.
So where exactly does that leave us? I’ve noticed lately that movie critics mention in passing the demise of the romantic comedy in favor of even more far-fetched genres (bromance or insemination comedy, anyone?). I think the first step is to stop abstracting and start trying to figure out what real relationships look like, beginning with the fact that they don’t tend to follow a script. Still, I believe there’s hope for the thing that we’re really looking for, in our own twisted ways: real live, sustainable love.
A few weeks ago I watched my sister marry the man she loves, and I realized something very important. That day, there were two functions: a wedding and a marriage. The wedding was a great party, but it was an abstraction, something that culture teaches most of us to want in a certain way. The marriage was my sister and her love, standing up in front of their friends and family, committing to one other for the rest of their lives. In the movies, ‘the rest of their lives’ means about four minutes of credits (ever notice how romantic movies don't tend to have sequels?). For my sister and her husband, it means the actual heavy lifting of promising to love each other for every day of their lives together.
My sister won’t wear that beautiful gown for the rest of her life, but she’ll be married to her love for that long. And when I really think about it, it’s not the ball gown or the meet-cute I want forever. It’s what comes after when I get to change back into my blue jeans and go back to being who I am in my life rather than the star of my own abstracted romantic comedy. Because, in the words of the Avett Brothers,
Real life is more than just two hours long.
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