Can We Go Back in Time?- Older vs. Newer Romantic Comedies

Ja’el Thomas

Professor Sinowitz

Romantic Comedy

May 13, 2020

Can We Go Back in Time? - Older vs. Newer Romantic Comedies

        “Isn’t it romantic? Every note that's sung is like a lover's kiss.” We heard this song on the first day of class, and we would hear versions of it throughout the semester. When I previously thought of Romantic Comedies, I thought it was the genre in which people fall in love, and I had images in my mind of all the happy couples and how much I wanted it for myself. So, when I had the chance to sign up for the class, I jumped at it. I didn’t do this thinking that this class would help me get a guy, but I figured I would get to read about so many successful women that do. I think that’s why this class ended up being filled with all girls. After all, McDonald says that Romantic Comedies are geared toward the female audience. I, for one, wanted to see these stories over and over again throughout the semester. J Hillis Miller says, “We want to watch these movies or read these books repeatedly because we are never satisfied with the story. (68)  As we watched more films throughout the semester, my view on gender equality, messages the films deliver and the scripts of the newer films have changed, some for the better and some for the worst. Regardless of that, I still think audiences should watch Romantic Comedies because there is much that can be learned. 

         The class started by reading Much Ado About Nothing, a play I had only seen once but never read. We spoke of ideas that I had never really given much thought like women’s role in these books and the fact that the women always forgive the men. The idea of women’s forgiveness is what we read about in Shelly Nelson Garner’s article, “Male Bonding and Women’s Deception”. She says, “The determination of Shakespeare’s male characters to believe that women betray them further affirms their need for betrayal.” (137) She goes on to explain that the reason for this is because the men want to return to their homosocial bonding (the men’s desire to be together). I didn’t know it then, but this would change the way I saw all of the following Romantic Comedies because this ideal was not only in Shakespeare’s plays but a common trope in the films we would watch as well. The more that we began to watch and critique the movies, I became more skeptical about the messages the films send. I was used to how easy things seemed to be in the movies, but then the question of realism came into play. This question of realism in the films made me question romance in real life. Have I been placing unrealistic expectations on men?  Do the endings in these films reflect what we hope rather than what is?

        In the relationship between Hero and Claudio, Shakespeare also allows us to consider the notion of love at first sight. This notion might help explain the trope of the meet-cute. A meet-cute is a charming way the main characters of the film first meet each other. Oftentimes, the main characters will bump into each other or see each other across the room and the moment their eyes meet, they fall in love. A few examples of meet-cutes in the films we have seen are: Roman Holiday, when Princess Anne (Audrey Hepburn) is laying on the sidewalk bench and begins to roll off when Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck)  catches her and wakes her up; Love and Basketball when Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) met on the basketball court as little kids; The Big Sick when Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani) is on the stage doing his comedy and Emily (Zoe Kazaan) is the only one who cheers for him; lastly, Lady Eve when Jean Harrington (Barbra Stanwyck) trips Hopsie (Henry Fonda) on the cruise ship. Majority of the class including me agreed that there may not be love at first sight but attraction at first sight. I like to think this is when we began slowly picking apart the movies and translating what they were saying about real life and how love should be. McDonald explains that David Shumway’s idea of the common plot of the Romantic Comedy is boy meets girl, boy loses girl and boy gets girl back (12). To me, this sounded rather simplistic, but I began to realize that this was true. 

       This plot was featured prominently in the early era Romantic Comedies. Two that stuck out to me were It Happened One Night and Trouble in Paradise. In both films, Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) and Peter Warne (Clark Gable) end up losing the girls, Lily Vautier (Miriam Hopkins) and Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) and successfully get them back. I was pleased by the happy endings until we began to consider why we were pleased by these endings. Why must the audience have the happily ever after? It’s because it leaves the audience satisfied.  However, it was not until I saw Roman Holiday, that I was unsatisfied by a film, and this altered my definition of Romantic Comedies.  This brought up again the question of what was real and what was not. I debated whether their ending was more realistic because it coincided with what happened more often in real life. In the end, I decided that this didn’t have to be more realistic than the couple ending up together. This could just be a different type of realistic ending.

        Something that was also surprising to me about these films was how clean they were. They were a lot more family friendly, not very risqué. This was because old movies were bound by the Hays Code which was a “set of rules that enforced censorship on the American cinema...It  prohibited nudity, ridiculing the law, ridiculing religion, showing of illegal substances and more.” (American History) I’ll be honest; I still didn’t fully understand what he meant by it until we began to watch the films. I saw how clean they were, no foul language, and hardly any kissing. It was actually really refreshing. Because filmmakers were not able to openly express sex, they got creative. The old films used a lot of innuendo and subtext to get their point across to audiences like the ‘Wall of Jericho’ in It happened One Night. The ‘Wall of Jericho’ represented the divide of society saying that men and women should be separate if they are not together or married. At the end, the trumpet signaled them finally crossing the 'Wall of Jericho' and being able to be with each other intimately. Another example of the old movies’ inventiveness was in Lady Eve when Jean Harrington went back to her room on the cruise and changed her shoe. The camera panned her legs as she bent down, giving the audience the view of what Charles or Hopsie was thinking about. It showed the sexual attraction and genuine admiration he felt for her. Films like this were before the pill, so audiences read sex very differently. Back then, to have sex outside of the confines of marriage was viewed negatively in society. This was represented by the Weeper films.  In these films, promiscuous women suffered terrible consequences.  Rebecca Kendall mentions that “the basic weeper heroine was beautiful and smart, and no longer young, had once given into reckless impulse and was now paying for her mistake with a maimed life, a life without dignity or security. Pitying her and condescending to her, the audience could atone for its sins of fast living in the twenties; the weeper heroine was a Depression scapegoat.” (29) So, when it comes to sex, the audience’s minds were shaped to think of it as a taboo subject. To contrast, in the Romantic Comedy films of that time, sex was something that was done only after marriage; there were no one-night stands as featured in films today. 

        As the years moved on, and we got closer to the present day, I noticed that the films got more vulgar. McDonald explained that when the pill came out, “it made films based on the withholding or postponement of sex because of the implicit fear of unwanted pregnancy seem outmoded.”(43) Movies like Working Girl and Knocked Up are great representations of films that have resulted due to society's change in belief. These movies showed more nudity and sex than I had seen in the entire early era. Examples of this are: the scene in the limo when Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) was being seduced by a prospective boss and was shown on TV, a nude man and woman in a pool being intimate; the audience sees Tess partially nude when she is getting intimate with Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford); the audience sees Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) in an intimate scene with Ben Stone (Seth Rogan) before and during her pregnancy as well. As sex became more apparent on film, the love began to fade away; it wasn’t as romantic anymore. David Denby gives an example of this when he states, “...the slowly developing love between Ben and the pregnant Alison comes off as halfhearted and unconvincing-it's the weakest element in the movie. There are some terrifically noisy arguments, a scene of Rogen's making love to the enormous Heigl... but we never really see the moment in which they warm up and begin to like each other.” (7) One could argue that this was just that film and that some of the newer films are romantic like Love and Basketball, or When Harry Met Sally. I’d agree, but it's also important to note that in these films there was also a lot more development for the relationship. There were hints of the old romantic comedy films that kept it interesting, like witty conversation when Harry talked about how men and women can't be friends, and the competitiveness between Quincy and Monica. I'm not saying all modern romcoms are stripped of genuine romance, but a lot of them are. It is the films that lack inventiveness and use sex as the center of the romance that makes them less romantic and engaging.

        One of the main problems with movies today is the script! There is a lack of inventiveness with the plot. Not everything needs to be explicit.  A lot of the newer versions of these films have Lady Eve exhibits inventiveness with its use of the perfume scene to show how Hopsie is intoxicated by Jean. He stares at her like a lost puppy. It’s funny and intriguing because of the way Hopsie was acting, and it made me want to know what was going to happen next with them. Whereas, in Knocked Up, the characters didn’t exactly get to know each other before being intimate, so I didn’t get enough time to get attached to the characters and their story. If not given enough time to get invested in their relationship, it makes it hard to feel the romance. Where’s the fun and the mystery of reading between the lines?  Even though older script writers resented the Hays Code, it brought out creativity and intrigue in films because they had to work around the rules. The dialogue was quick and full of wit, and while there is presently witty comedy, it’s just not the same. In that time, many of the women were equal to the wit of men. The older romantic comedy films created the ideal relationship.

         Though we crave this ideal relationship, the image has some holes in it. There is more to relationships than what films show us, more than just sex, more than that special feeling. Real life relationships must consider all factors like occupation, location, beliefs, and culture. Relationships in romcoms can also be as Wesley Morris says, “At its worst, these movies could be painfully formulaic, corny, retrograde about gender and so unrealistic about love that they were often accused of poisoning real-life romance.” (1) Even though they are not perfect, I love the older Romantic Comedies because I believe they still have something to teach us as an audience. Older Romantic Comedies provide a view of what could be if we worked toward it. My classmates have often said that unfortunately guys in real life just aren’t like the men in romantic comedies; they don’t make huge romantic gestures. This makes me think of what Sinowitz said in the podcast for Say Anything; he said this movie was not only for girls but guys as well, to show them that they can get the girl by being a nice guy. Morris says a similar thing when he says, "The stereotype was always that these movies were for women, but some of their value surely came from the fact that men and women both watched them, often together, everybody absorbing images of what it looked like to engage with each other."(6) Everyone should watch Romantic Comedies because they have the power to bring people together, and they have themes we could all use like compassion, love, forgiveness, selflessness and courage.

Four Weddings and a Funeral  -What Romantic Comedies say you should feel, a thunder bolt.

Works Cited

• Denby, David. “A Fine Romance.” The New Yorker, 16 July 2007, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/23/a-fine-romance.

• “1929-1945: Depression & WW2.” Rules, Censorhip and Hollywood Movies ***, SiteseenLimited, 9 Jan. 2018, www.american-historama.org/1929-1945-depression-ww2era/hays-code.htm.

• Holland, Norman N., et al. Shakespeare's Personality. University of California Press, 1989

• Kendall, Elizabeth. The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930's. CooperSquare Press, 2002.

• McDonald, Tamar Jeffers. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2007.

• Miller, J. Hillis. Narrative, 1974, pp. 66–79
• Morris, Wesley. “Rom-Coms Were Corny and Retrograde. Why Do I Miss Them so Much?”