Last month I was hanging out with some friends and we watched two or three romantic comedies. I was making my standard nerd comments about how this moment reminded me of something-or-other in Shakespeare and this other plot device goes back to Greek New Comedy. In my defense, the evolution of the comedic genre genuinely fascinates me. Throughout most of literary history, people associated comedies with cookie-cutter plots where boy and girl meet, encounter and overcome obstacles, and get married. We still have that basic outline for comedies.
However, past audiences also expected their comedies to consist of sheer, outrageous absurdity, like grossly implausible miscommunication, flagrant cross-dressing, siblings switched at birth, and family tokens that prove identities in just the nick of time. In other words, stuff that would never actually happen all at once. Also, you think comedies are formulaic now? Ancient Roman comedies run like this: the rich lovesick young man, who is barely smart enough to put his toga on the right way around, must rely on his clever slave to lie and manipulate everyone, thereby ensuring that his beloved doesn’t get sold into slavery as a prostitute. All this is to say that when folks saw comedies performed for most of history, they knew that what they were watching was straight fiction, for the purpose of pure entertainment.
What ticks me off is that nowadays the plots of rom-coms are still wildly unrealistic, but with enough believable elements that people take them seriously. And then—I know this has been said before, but it’s true—people have unrealistic expectations of relationships. Katy Perry is no help—“If it’s not like the movies/ That’s how it should be.”
Ok, Katy Perry, I’ll take up that gauntlet. Let’s talk about The Notebook. Forget how identical every Nicholas Sparks story is. And yes, forget the Alzheimer’s for a second. Noah first gets Allie to go out with him by threatening to kill himself if she says no. And then when she walks out on him, instead of getting drunk, cursing her memory and moving on, like a sensible person, he stays obsessed with her for years. He writes her hundreds of letters. He buys a plantation house and decorates it her specifications. I guess Sparks’ editor deleted the part about Noah’s shrine to Allie in the basement, because they have to draw the line somewhere.
Ladies, if a man ever emotionally manipulates or fixates on you, no matter how handsome he is, it will not be romantic. It will be super creepy, not to mention between moderately and significantly alarming.
(Please note that I have the class not to mention Twilight.)
This is getting a little too preachy, so I’m going to pass over everything else I was going to complain about (mainly Tom Cruise and Zooey Deschanel, and probably Keira Knightley, as usual). Interestingly, as I was mulling over this topic, I realized that the most traditional comedy I’ve seen in the past few years is Superbad—it’s ridiculous, it’s vulgar, oh, and it’s completely ridiculous. Wikipedia tells me that the movie’s writers had finished the script by the time they were 15, which explains the film’s breathtaking subtlety and depth.
Damn. No wonder people don’t want to watch movies with me.
