Maria San Filippo - After Happily Ever After: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

G ENERAL E DITOR

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Edited by
M ARIA S AN F ILIPPO

Foreword by
T AMAR J EFFERS M C D ONALD

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DETROIT

Copyright 2021 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Three essays appearing in this volume have been previously published and are reprinted here by permission of Taylor & Francis, www.tandfonline.com:

Mary Harrod, Money Cant Buy Me Love: Radical Right-Wing Populism in French Romantic Comedies of the 2010s, New Review of Film and Television Studies 18, no. 1 (2020): 10118, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1664055.

Sueyoung Park-Primiano, The Awkward Truth: Failure to Romance and the Art of Decoupling in the Films of Hong Sang-soo, New Review of Film and Television Studies 18, no.1 (2020): 4964, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1664054.

Maria San Filippo, Breaking Upwards: The Creative Uncoupling of Desiree Akhavan and Ingrid Jungermann, Feminist Media Studies 19, no. 7 (2019): 9911008, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1667064.

ISBN (paperback): 978-0-8143-4674-7

ISBN (hardcover): 978-0-8143-4673-0

ISBN (ebook): 978-0-8143-4675-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948734

Cover art Mascha Tace / Shutterstock

Cover design by Laura Klynstra

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Tamar Jeffers McDonald

Maria San Filippo

Beatriz Oria

James MacDowell

Alice Guilluy

Betty Kaklamanidou

Ash Kinney dHarcourt

Maya Montaez Smukler

Tom Cunliffe

Martha Shearer

Manuela Ruiz

Mary Harrod

Elizabeth Alsop

Sueyoung Park-Primiano

John Alberti

Maria San Filippo

Deborah Jermyn

Tamar Jeffers McDonald

At the end of January 2017, pop culture site Vulture spent a week looking at the contemporary romantic comedy under the banner The Romcom Lives!

Looking at the titles and box office figures gathered by Box Office Mojo reveals that these comments were made in the context of a very definite fall in the numbers of romantic comedies being released in Hollywood, from an average of ten per year in the 2000s to just two in 2013 and one in 2017. Yet announcing the romcoms passing is not a new occurrence. The celebrated piece by Brian Henderson from 1978, Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?, declared not only the genres contemporary malaise but the impossibility of its recovery, given its then-current developments. Henderson used the 1977 film Semi-Tough as his test case, finding this and all 70s romantic comedies falling woefully short of the 30s screwball comedies he also examined. What did Henderson find so troubling about the romantic comedies of his own period? Examining this, and then considering how subsequent products of the genre might have assuaged or confounded his doubts about its continued validity, helps to illuminate why the genre has subsequently been deemed to have perished.

Brian Henderson raised many points of interest in his important article, but three of the most germane for this foreword were his assertions about subgenres, the heroine, and the role of sex in the romcom. First, noting that definition, even delimitation, is difficult or impossible because all Hollywood films (except some war films) have romance and all have comedy,

Hendersons chosen example, however, only led him into deeper despair. Comparing the romantic comedies of the 70s with the sophisticated, wordy, rapid-fire screwball comedies of the 30s made Henderson lament the decline of the genre in his own time. Further, he explicitly located the deterioration in the genre within what he viewed as the then-contemporary enfeeblement of the heroine, in comparison to her shrewd, active, and gutsy 30s counterpart. As noted, he took as his case study the example of Michael Ritchies Semi-Tough, a film that culminates in the heroines last-minute rescue from a wedding to the wrong partner. While noting that this trope was inherited from screwballs such as It Happened One Night (1934), Henderson denounced it with respect to Semi-Toughs Barbara Jane (Jill Clayburgh) as woefully ineffectual: In Semi-Tough the heroine does nothing after the rescue except to be catatonic.

Perhaps most significantly, a section of Hendersons article engages with the then-innovative filmic acknowledgement of sex, as reflected in Semi-Tough, and specifically blamed this for the demise of the romcom: At one point in Semi-Tough, the heroine says to the hero, How come we never fucked? It is arguable that romantic comedy depends upon the suppression of this question and that with its surfacing romantic comedy becomes impossible. The question always circulates in romantic comedy, it is its utterance that is forbidden.

To examine these useful points in order, I find Hendersons notion of subdividing the romcom provocative, because, like him, I have charted the changes in Hollywood products of this genre and have been interested in differentiating the films of the time he was writing from those of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and more recent developments. While romantic comedy as a whole remains a large genre, various trends within it have held sway for up to a decade or sonamely, the screwball, the sex comedy, and, from Hendersons own time, what I have called the radical romcom: a film that seems revolutionary by explicitly dealing with sex, and in being prepared to end the film without the couple together. The reversal of the realistic trend of the 70s and the resultant hegemony of its sexless successor eventually led to the short-lived appearance of the collection of films I have called the hommecom (2008), which took over cinema screens and attained dominance and influence for about a five-year period in the mid-90s.

Films in this group rehearsed all of the major elements of the romantic comedy but centered them around a male, rather than a female, lead character, thus making the tropes fresher and generating comedy from them in a self-reflexive way, as with scenes where, in a supposed gender reversal, men worried about what to wear on dates or asked their best friends for romantic advice. Seemingat least superficiallyso different, these films were for a time both very prevalent and very lucrative. Although the hommecom could be traced back at least to 1996s Swingers, the real watershed moment came in 2005, when Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin generated over $315 million between them in theatres. After the financial success of these two films, entries in the cycle inevitably snowballed: the next few years produced Good Luck Chuck, The Heartbreak Kid, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry