A Brief sociAl History of tHe rom-com
It Happened one nIgHt: everett collection; Breakfast at tIffany’s: SunSet Boulevard/ corBiS; WHen Harry met sally: columBia/everett collection
Mid-1930s through early 1940s: increased censorship has the ironic effect of ushering in a heyday of verbal sparring between the sexes. Key Films: It Happened one night, the awful truth, Bringing Up Baby, His girl friday, the shop around the Corner, the philadelphia story, the lady eve
Early 1940s through early 1950s: during and after World War ii, the genre darkens, and tension over gender roles becomes more evident. Key Films: Woman of the year, a foreign affair, Unfaithfully yours, adam’s rib, the marrying kind
Early 1950s through mid-1960s: conflicting sexual goals become more clear-cut and cynical. men want sex without strings; women, matrimony.
marriage of true minds. Love is increasingly presumed—perhaps in Hollywood most of all—to transcend class, profession, faith, age, race, gender, and (on occasion) marital status. When Sydney Pollack, for example, made the disastrous decision to update the Billy Wilder classic Sabrina in 1995, one of the remake’s (many) faws was its failure to modernize the obsolete dilemma of the rags-and-riches romance. As Samuel Taylor, who wrote the original Broadway play and collaborated on Wilder’s script, told The New Yorker at the time, “If they really wanted to make it interesting, they’d fnd a really good black actress to play [Sabrina].” Eighteen years later, of course, that wouldn’t be enough. She’d have to be a mummy. Perhaps the most obvious social constraint that’s fallen by the wayside is also the most signifcant: the taboo against premarital sex. There was a time when carnal knowledge was the (implied) endpoint of the romantic comedy; today, it’s just as likely to be the opening premise. In 2005’s A Lot Like Love—a dull, joyless rip-of of When Harry Met Sally—Amanda Peet and Ashton Kutcher meet cute by having sex in an airplane lavatory before they’ve spoken a single word to the author narrates scenes from the history of romantic comedy. t He At lA nt ic.co m
Key Films: gentlemen prefer Blondes, How to marry a millionaire, the seven year Itch, some like It Hot, pillow talk, the apartment, Breakfast at tiffany’s, that touch of mink
reinvention Mid-1960s through mid-1980s: integrating the counterculture, the genre presents sex
more frankly, but its faith in happy outcomes recedes. Key Films: the graduate, Harold and maude, the Heartbreak kid, shampoo, annie Hall, the goodbye girl, manhattan, Hannah and Her sisters
annie Hall with a happy ending, and pretty Woman reestablishes that love conquers all. Key Films: moonstruck, When Harry met sally, say anything, pretty Woman, sleepless in seattle, Jerry maguire, shakespeare in love
Mid-1980s through early 2000s: When Harry met sally rewrites
Early 2000s through present: romantic optimism gives way to narrative laziness. Key Films: maid in manhattan, fool’s gold, the proposal, the Ugly truth, Valentine’s day
each other. Where’s a flm to go when the “happy ending” takes place at the beginning? Serious obstacles to romantic fulfllment can still be found—illness, war, injury, imprisonment—but they have a tendency to be just that: serious. There aren’t likely to be many laughs, after all, in the story of a love that might be torn asunder by an IED. It is perhaps no coincidence that romantic melodramas (such as last year’s The Vow and the recent epidemic of Nicholas Sparks adaptations) are doing quite well at the multiplex even as their comic siblings falter. So new complications must be invented, test-driven, and then, as often as not, themselves retired. (The idea that geography posed a substantial challenge to true love seemed a stretch all the way back in 1993, for Sleepless in Seattle. In the Internet age, it doesn’t pass the laugh test.) The premises grow more and more esoteric: She’s a hooker. He’s a stalker. She’s in a coma. He’s telepathic. She’s a mermaid. He’s a zombie. She’s pregnant. He’s the president. And if worst comes to worst—as it does, all too often—there’s the everaccommodating fallback that one partner is uptight and the other is a free spirit (if a woman) or a slob (if a man), requiring the two to work in tandem to respectively unwind and domesticate. Happily, the cinematic landscape
is still dotted with exceptions, experiments in romantic chemistry that in many cases beneft from steering wide of the usual tropes. There’s a case to be made that the two best romantic comedies of 2012 succeeded in large part because they weren’t really framed as romantic comedies at all. David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook may have had a rom-com structure, but it was darker and more idiosyncratic, with a premise at once novel and true to life: two lovers thwarted by mental illness. Better still was Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, which ofered as its obstacle an ironic update of the old parental-disapproval plot: young Sam and Suzy can’t run of together and get married because they’re 12 years old. (It’s an obstacle that, incidentally, is not presented as insurmountable.) One could argue that the easy profitability of the past decade was the worst thing to happen to the romantic comedy—an invitation to stale formulas and ridiculous conceits alike—and a few lean years might do the genre good. It was, after all, 75 years ago this Valentine’s Day that Howard Hawks’s comic masterpiece Bringing Up Baby opened in theaters—and bombed. Christopher Orr is an Atlantic senior editor and the principal flm critic for TheAtlantic.com. t h e at l a n t i c
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