Posted on 08/25/2016 10:34:43 PM PDT by nickcarraway
I was surprised to find myself writing a play that seemed very much like a romantic comedy. It had been a long time since I’d really, truly enjoyed watching rom-coms. My fun would be scuppered when, say, in You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan capitulated to the man who has made her bankrupt and lied to her.
I’d shout angrily at the screen when, in Crossing Delancey, having realised the raffish author is horrid, Amy Irving ends up with the pickle seller, as though there are only two men in the world, as though there are no other choices. I would find it almost impossible to watch Knocked Up; why was Katherine Heigl cast as the shrew? Why couldn’t she get an abortion rather than end up with that loser? All the rom-com heroines seemed so hopeless, and they all seemed to go for such terrible men.
I want to watch and read stories about love. Love is important. It’s the most important thing there is. And choosing the person you end up with is huge. I want to see heroines make that choice, and to enjoy recapturing that heady feeling of being in love. As I struggled to write my own play, I started thinking about rom-coms that did all that without demeaning women.
I started, of course, with When Harry Met Sally, which has always been my favourite. Harry and Sally fascinate each other, and they like being fascinated. They admire each other. They get each other. I love the film’s message, that you have to be friends with the person you love; you can’t just be swept up in mad passion. Not if it’s going to last. But still – and I hate to say this – it does feel like a film in which only the man has to change. Harry realises he wants to be with this clever, difficult woman after all, and that he can face life and love with just a little of her optimism, enough, anyway, to power him through the obligatory rom-com run. At the end of which he finds Sally, the same as ever, and she accepts his love.
What about a rom-com where the heroine was active? Why does every book I read on romcoms tell me that they have to begin with boy meets girl? What about girl meets boy? I remember the amazing moment in Four Weddings and a Funeral when Kristin Scott Thomas tells Hugh Grant she loves him. She knows it’s not going to make a difference, but her honesty sets her free from the hell of undeclared and unrequited love, allows them to become friends and paves the way for her to find someone else. What about a film where her character was the heroine?
I start wondering if the most feminist romcoms are the ones where girl and boy don’t end up together. What about Annie Hall or Shakespeare in Love, films which celebrate love, but also show that just loving love isn’t always enough? What about My Best Friend’s Wedding, another film where a love confession falls flat? Just saying you love someone doesn’t always work. Nor should it. Personally I would be horribly creeped out if Andrew Lincoln, having been best man at my wedding, turned up at my door and declared love as in Love Actually. I certainly wouldn’t think he was adorable.
Richard Curtis gets it much more right in Notting Hill, where Julia Roberts’s declaration fails because at that point, she and Hugh Grant are still too unequal for him to say yes to love. She’s had all the power, made all the moves. He’s got to do the romcom run to find her and be as brave as she has been, as honest. Only then do they have a shot at a relationship.
Clare Grogan in Gregory’s Girl takes charge of getting her man. I love how this film looks like a love story from a boy’s perspective. Gregory meets the girl, is amazed by how well she plays football, pursues her, but she doesn’t want him. Instead of them ending up apart and both single, it turns out that Grogan has been pursuing him all along. At the end, with help from the other girls, she gets him. She even walks him home rather than the other way around.
But… like Sally in When Harry Met Sally, she has all the answers from the start. Where are the romcoms where a woman changes too? It took me far too long to return to the screwballs. In these 1930s and 1940s comedies, the heroines didn’t wait to be pursued, and they didn’t hang around while the men went on their sentimental journeys and took their sweet time realising that they needed love, and whom they needed to love. The screwball heroines see the men they want, pursue them and do everything they can to wake them up to love. And in the meantime, they grow up.
It’s quite a shock to rediscover these women. They are raging, anarchic, wilful and wicked. They run around with leopards (Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby), ruin their husbands’ new marriages (Irene Dunne in My Favorite Wife), and jump off yachts (Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night). The men don’t stand a chance. They end up reeling, not sure how they’ve been conned into love.
This is literally true in The Lady Eve where Barbara Stanwyck plays a sultry con artist on a cruise liner. When Henry Fonda’s millionaire joins the ship, all the other women coo and flirt. Stanwyck trips him up, has a go at him for breaking her shoe, and makes him escort her back to her cabin. By which time he’s grateful to be allowed to kneel at her feet and help her put on a new pair of heels. By the end of the film, several con tricks later, she gets her man.
It’s not quite as terrifying as it sounds; having exposed all the lies people tell to find love, Stanwyck gets Fonda to love her for who she is, and she opens her heart. She does have to be honest in the end to get her man. She has to show her real self, be vulnerable. That’s what she learns. So her love confession isn’t what wins him over; it’s about how she changes.
It made me think about Wuthering Heights. OK, not a rom-com, but bear with me. Heathcliff is the wild outsider who liberates Cathy and shows her she has a dark side. But in the end she marries boring, solid, wealthy Edgar. She refuses to leave her comfort zone. That’s why they end up miserable. In the screwballs, the heroines are Heathcliff. (But without all the tiresome bashing of heads into trees and gnashing of teeth. And definitely without hanging puppies.) They drag the men into chaos, and the chaos is the relationship. Because love has to be a bit chaotic, it has to be a bit messy.
As Nicolas Cage says to Cher in Moonstruck, “Love don’t make things nice. It ruins everything, it breaks your heart, it makes things a mess!” Another thing to love about Moonstruck is that Cher is 41, Cage is 23, and this is never mentioned. They love each other, they are willing to give up on settling for the wrong love, and to be messed up, to be transformed, and that’s much more interesting than harping on about an age gap.
I had a list on the go by now. I wanted to write a rom-com where girl met boy, where heroine and hero were equal, where both had to change, and where love was as joyous and transformative as it really is, where love was an adventure. I thought about Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, deciding to stay with Cary Grant because he knows she’s the best journalist in town, and they love chasing stories together, and they will thrill and challenge each other their whole lives.
And, finally, it struck me that maybe I could write a rom-com that was also about feminism, about how those of us who want to have relationships with men can try to have them without compromising. And that’s when I started enjoying rom-coms again.
Samantha Ellis is the author of ‘How to Be a Heroine‘. Her new play ‘How to Date a Feminist‘ previews at the Arcola Theatre, London from 6 September (020 7503 1646)
She said a lot, with commentary going in all manner of directions. Not to say she’s ‘flighty’or scattered.
They’re certainly better written, to say the least.
BTW, the female character in “Crossing Delancey” doesn’t settle for the pickle man. The pickle man is a hard-working, level-headed, decent guy, and she’s been a flighty, shallow twit for most of the film, the type who judges people as inferior if they aren’t snobbish artsy liberals and who would probably want to have a long, pretentious discussion about this article. She’s lucky that the pickle man wanted her, not the other way around.
Human beings who are deeply, fundamentally angry will always find a “target” for their ire.
In most cases, they’d be better off taking a few deep breaths, thinking more clearly, and maybe getting some therapy.
Or a tall Jack Daniels with ice.
Yeah, Hugh Grant’s real life was a rom-com where he gets picked up with a two bit hooker in Hollywood trying to get a “Monica” from the crack ‘ho. I bet it was hilarious trying to explain that to the ever beautiful Elizabeth Hurley. A million laughs there.
She’s a moron, who sees “feminism” ( whatever the hell that means to her )where none exists; just old fashioned, pre-girly-man, pre-”FEMINISM” writ large took over.
Uninformed drivel...
I can hardly wait. A bitchy woman character tossing out a stream of sarcastic barbs at/about men for a couple hours.
...then, wondering why no men are interested in her, she goes home to be with her cat.
If that's what she said, I agree. Women in the 30s and 40s were tough - including women in the movies, especially Barbara Stanwyck.
...and it will be about as funny as a vasectomy.
Hugh makes me think of a latter day Peter Sellers. Both men witty and wacky.
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