IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU Exploring the rom-com genre’s fall from fame
ARTICLE BY AKHILA AYYADEVARA • PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS & DESIGN BY CHLOE LUU
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magine: you are a young, chic woman in New York City. You bump into a handsome man who you, in theory, should never meet again. Yet, you do. And you slowly fall in love over the span of a few weeks. You get past your third act conflict and live happily ever after. You have just experienced the plot of a romantic comedy. Rom-coms were some of my favorite movies growing up, and they still are. The first rom-com I ever watched was “The Princess Diaries” when I was eight years old with my mom. In 1998, my mom watched “You’ve Got Mail” when it first came out with a group of college friends, solidifying her love for the genre that she then passed onto me. From “Legally Blonde” to “But I’m a Cheerleader,” you name it, chances are I have seen it. My favorite is “13 Going on 30.” I blame them for my feverish love of New York City; my constant hunger to be 30 and single; my desire to throw dinner parties and be unexplainably wealthy even though I am a column writer for a women’s magazine and should only make $30k a year. Clearly, I love romantic comedies, yet even I can admit the genre has its flaws, and in recent years, modern rom-coms have felt less lovable compared to those made from the ‘80s to early 2000s. While the formula seems the same on the surface, they aren’t as memorable as they used to
OPINION 17 | Opinion
Seniors Nahum Hintsa and Tiffany Tran pose as Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) and Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles) from "10 Things I Hate About You."
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What originally made me fall in love with rom-coms was the perfect combination of simplicity in plot and variety between movies. Though the genre employs tropes, it always found a way to make each story feel different. Both “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days” and “Love Don’t Cost a Thing” employ similar fake dating tropes, yet can be distinguished from each other. In “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson) is a columnist who decides to date a Ben Berry (Matthew McConaughey), the most “undateable” person she could think of, with the goal of making him break up with her in 10 days or less—the twist being he is completely unaware of this, and Berry is simultaneously trying to make her fall in love with him in 10 days. Even though they are “fake dating,” the nuances in the details of the plot let it stand completely on its own. “Rom-coms, for me, are very comforting and safe because they present the kind of worlds that we all want to live in, which is the idea that there’s a happy ending with a loving partner waiting for us all,” English teacher Kristen Moore said. As nice as the predictable plot is, it can become derivative without other elements. Even when using a trope, older romcoms used their setting, costuming and soundtrack to make their movies memorable. In “10 Things I Hate About You,” two social pariah protagonists get flung together due to their odd circumstances. Even though the plot is predictable, every character’s outfit is quintessentially ‘90s, therefore making it unforgettable, and protagonist Kat Stratford’s (Julia Stiles) introduction scene features Joan Jett’s iconic “Bad Reputation.” Movies like “The Kissing Booth” and “The Perfect Date” from 2018 and 2019, respectively, are more modern takes on a teen romance reminiscent of “10 Things I Hate About You,” but they blur together due to their predictable plot void of other intriguing elements. The love triangle plots are no longer charming but rather formulaic. And part of the fun of watching a rom-com is rooting for a character or team, impossible when all characters are just plain unlikable. Admittedly, older rom-coms have problematic aspects. Well-loved Carrie Bradshaw of 1998’s “Sex and the City”—a sex writer who claims to open about sexual relationships—dumps the bisexual man she is seeing because “he would just end up with men anyway.” Bradshaw, unable to believe her boyfriend could be attracted to more than one gender, invalidates his bisexuality. In that way, I applaud recent progress. We can acknowledge that romcoms in recent years have made attempts to be more diverse and accepting.