From Creator to Revealer

Lauren Leal

5/13/20

Prof. Sinowitz

Romantic Comedy Final

Introduction

As I look back on the semester and think of all that we had been exposed to about the romantic comedy genre, I have noticed that there is an intricate relationship between the stories and the concept of infidelity. According to google dictionary, infidelity is defined as “the action or state of being unfaithful to a spouse or other sexual partner”. While we were evaluating the stories within the romantic comedy genre spanning over decades and even centuries, it was unnerving for me to witness the gradual normalization of disloyal relationships. In early romantic comedy stories during Shakespeare’s time, I noticed infidelity was a big deal and not taken lightly in society. However, with the aging of the genre, it was clear to me that the stigma around infidelity in stories greatly lessened over time.

This is certainly tied to society's views of women’s virtue over time changing as well. But for the purpose of my paper, I am more concerned about the changes in society's viewpoint over infidelity as a result from the influence that stories have on us. The movies in the beginning of the film portion of our class were creating and shaping the cultures’ attitudes towards infidelity; that is, until the creation of the birth control pill and the end of the Hays code. After the creation of the pill, the roles of society and stories flipped. Instead of society being created by the romantic comedy stories, the romantic comedy stories were reflecting society’s behaviors. It is this transition that I am going to illustrate. 

The Power of a Story

The very first thing we did in this course was read an essay by J. Hillis Miller called Narrative which introduced the idea that the role of stories in culture is complicated. In his essay, he asks his readers a very mind rattling question: “The human capacity to tell stories is one way men and women collectively build a significant and orderly world around themselves. With fictions we investigate, perhaps invent, the meaning of human life. Well, which is it, create or reveal? It makes a lot of difference which we choose” (Miller, 69). For me, this question was like the question asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. When I was trying to figure out the answer to Miller’s question, I found that my thoughts were just circling each other, and I wasn’t actually making any progress to achieving an answer. While Miller does pose the idea that “narratives [could] reinforce the dominant culture and put it in question, both at the same time” (70), he never says that stories didn’t have the ability to both create and reveal. I made the assumption on my own that stories couldn’t do both which left me with the task of trying to pick between one or the other. It is now, as our semester is coming to a close, that I have reached a conclusion that I am satisfied with declaring is the answer to his question. The answer is that stories have the ability to do both just not at the same time. There are ways in which stories shape our culture but there are also ways stories are shaped by the culture too to some extent. 

Fiction stories have what Miller titles the “policing function” (69) which he uses to explain a story's ability to create. We learn that stories shape (or police) our culture through their displays of behavior “that are then imitated in the real world” (Miller, 69). The power of romantic comedy stories such as It Happened One Night, Libeled Lady, and The Awful Truth is that they collectively watered down the severity of which the audience originally viewed infidelity. These films don’t explicitly state that it is a good thing to cheat, but they are drastically different in their way of dealing with infidelity than Much Ado About Nothing. Those three movies listed above are screwball comedies which were taking place at the time of the Hays Code meaning they weren’t able to depict certain things. But by the use of their comedy, these movies were able to mask the issue of infidelity. This allowed the audience to find enjoyment in the stories and not notice the bigger problem which was the cheating element that saturated the storyline. This resulted in subconsciously normalizing infidelity.  

As years passed, and the romantic comedy genre aged, the infidelity aspect of stories changed, and as a result, so did audiences' viewpoints on the matter in real life. When the birth control pill was created, stories pivoted from being creators to being revealers. According to Miller, “to say “reveal” presupposes that the world has one kind or another of preexisting order and that the business of fiction is in one way or another to imitate, copy, or represent accurately that order” (69). Leading up to the pill’s creation, audiences had shifted their stance on infidelity. As a result of the pill, society was better able to carry out the modes of behaviors the stories were exposing to us. Since the behaviors portrayed in movies began to happen more in real life, stories were no longer utilizing their creating abilities. They were instead reflecting the actions of society showing you and I in this course that the culture had in fact shifted. This created a pre-pill era and a post-pill era.

What Used to Be

            The first story we came across in our course was Much Ado About Nothing written by Shakespeare, which provided us an example for what the cultural views used to be and how society used to feel about infidelity before it became watered down by the screwballs. The plot of this play is built on top of the theme of infidelity. The topic of cheating is introduced early in the story with Benedick expressing that he will never marry for fear of being made fun of as a result of being cheated on, “I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none” (1.1.218-220). In class Professor Sinowitz took the time to explain the meaning of cuckoldry which refers to when a man who has been cuckold becomes socially humiliated and mocked by having to wear horns and parade around after his wife has cheated on him. This explains why Benedick states to Don Pedro and Claudio that should he ever be dumb enough to get married, to go ahead and “pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in my forehead” (1.1.237-238). Right in the beginning of the story we learn that infidelity was a big matter in society during that time. 

Infidelity returns later in the story as it is the major factor that gives this romantic comedy plot its momentum. Hero is accused of being unfaithful to her betrothed, Claudio. Determined not to be cuckold, he not only humiliates but greatly shames Hero in front of everyone at their wedding by saying: 

Leonato, take her back again: 

Give not this rotten orange to your friend;

She’s but the sign and semblance of her honor.

Behold how like a maid she blushes here!

O, what authority and show of truth

Can cunning sin cover itself withal!

Comes not that blood as modest evidence

To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear,

All you that see her, that she were a maid,

By these exterior shows? But she is none:

She knows the heat of a luxurious bed;

Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty (4.2.1671-1682).

A woman’s faithfulness coupled with her purity was held extremely high in society during that time. The audience is able to easily understand this when Hero’s father says that she would be better off dead after the accusation: “O Fate! take not away thy heavy hand. / Death is the fairest cover for her shame / That may be wish’d for” (4.2.1762-1764). In his essay, Male Bonding and the Myth of Women’s Deception in Shakespeare’s Plays, Shirley Nelson Garner pushes that it is the males’ want to enhance their bonds with one another that places such an emphasis on infidelity in society. The betrayal that comes with infidelity brings men closer together. In the case of Much Ado About Nothing, Garner asserts that Hero’s ““betrayal” draws [Claudio] closer to [the other male characters] as they conspire to catch Hero in the act of betrayal and to punish her for it” (140).

Pre-Pill Era

         Within minutes of the beginning of Frank Capra’s 1934 It Happened One Night, Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) is desperate to escape her father and return to her husband. The audience begins to understand her struggle against her situation slowly throughout the opening scene after Ellie yells to her father, “Can’t you get it through your head that King Wesley and I are married! Definitely, legally, actually married. It’s over. It’s finished. There’s nothing you can do about it. I’m over 21 and so is he”. Right from the beginning the viewers are set up to dislike the father for keeping two lovers apart from each other. The audience members are excited by Ellie’s attempt to avoid detection and get back to her lover at all costs. Yet, as the movie continues on, the audience is groomed to subconsciously change their mind about how they hope the film will end. Viewers start wanting her to be with Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and we forget about King Wesley (Jameson Thomas). For me personally, I even forgot about the legitimate marriage already established between Wesley and Ellie. The movie is structured to go against the immorality of infidelity and lure the audience away from their cheating-is-wrong mentality by compelling them to want Ellie and Peter to end up together in the end. By not allowing audience members to meet Wesley until late in the movie and by not showing the audience much of what Ellie and Wesley are like together, the movie successfully sets us up to ship Ellie with Peter and forget about Wesley.

Her body language in the beginning of the scene screams longing and her tears display the sincerity of her plea. This scene was significant because she physically crosses the Walls of Jericho which symbolizes the final shift in her heart’s allegiances. Although she doesn’t kiss Peter or have sex with him, her actions still constitute as cheating.

Along with watching It Happened One Night, we also read Elizabeth Kendall’s review of the movie in her book, The Runaway Bride. This write-up shocked me because although it was indirect, it still endorsed the infidelity aspect of It Happened One Night. The fact that Ellie leaves her already-married-to-husband for another man is, in a sense, praised by Kendall who states that “in rushing away from her wedding, (Ellie) is unclassing herself to join with Peter Warne in a new kind of unit held together by something besides class” (49). The fact that this is the exact action that the audience finds themselves hoping Ellie takes when the moment comes, illustrates the magic of stories’ influences on us and our morals. Many can understand that it would be morally wrong for a wife to leave her already-married-to-husband at the altar of their official wedding ceremony, so what does it say about a story’s power when it successfully pushes us to hope for Ellie to choose Peter in the end? 

Kendall largely admires a movie depicting a “cross-class love affair” (49) because it “contained profound cultural resonances at the time it was made” (49). While I admit that breaking the dividers of social class is regarded as a monumental movement in history and a good thing, I can’t quite shake the thought that this movie unintentionally served as a stepping stone, along with other screwball comedy movies, that took stories in the direction of eventually normalizing infidelity. The movie might not flat out state that cheating is good, and granted the purpose of Kendall’s writing isn’t to highlight infidelity; but by not addressing the matter for what it is, the combination of both these media platforms have an effect on the audience's subconscious opinion over infidelity because it pushes the issue to the back of the audiences’ mind.  

As we continued moving through the historical timeline of the genre, Jack Conway’s 1936 movie Libeled Lady further demonstrated a story's ability to police cultural views by indirectly continuing to normalize infidelity. Because of its screwball comedy nature, Conway’s movie does this by allowing the audience to get lost in the fun of the characters' schemes. We are so invested and caught up in the silliness of Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy), Bill Chandler (William Powell), Gladys (Jean Harlow), and Connie Allen (Myrna Loy) running around, that we are able to find so much enjoyment in this story that we don’t really stop to think about what is happening. As we know, the original libel scheme in the movie falls through by the end because Bill actually falls in love with Connie. This means that he inevitably cheats mentally, emotionally, and physically on his legitimate wife, Gladys. One could easily question if this can be considered cheating if Bill and Gladys didn’t marry for love in the first place. While perhaps they didn’t have feelings of admiration towards one another at the time of their union, their wedding to one another was still legitimate and legal and should be honored as such. 

The reason the class doesn’t think about this is because this romantic comedy does an extraordinary job at aiding audiences in their abandonment of their stance on the wrongness associated with cheating by fixing their focus on the silliness of the screwball genre film rather than the infidelity. We laugh at Bill’s failed attempt to set Connie up on the boat because she outmaneuvers him. We laugh at Bill’s whole fishing charade and him falling into the water. We laugh at the disputes between Gladys and her long-time fiancé Warren. Because of the lightheartedness that encases the movie, we are groomed to put aside our morals as we don’t even think this movie has anything to do with infidelity. Conditioning the audience to think this way is an example of Miller’s “policing function” in action. 

            The last film of the pre-pill era I will shine a light on is Leo McCarey’s 1937 The Awful Truth. This movie opens with a husband and a wife seemingly caught red handed in their disloyal actions against one another. The audience is able to hear Lucy’s (Irene Dunne) excuse for spending the night with a man and we are left to decide for ourselves if she’s telling the truth about everything being innocent between her and him. Based on her fidgety body language it is difficult for us to fully believe her faithfulness. On the other hand, we are never able to hear Jerry’s (Cary Grant) excuse for lying about his trip to Florida. Just as Lucy never finds out where he really was, we never know either. The married couple agree that a marriage can’t survive on mistrust and they are led to a divorce which sets the whole movie up for their return back to one another. 

It’s this return journey to one another that provides the audience with a comfortable and lighthearted world of silliness that is given to them by the screwball comedy. As stated in her book, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (Short Cuts), Tamar Jeffers Macdonald says “much of the pleasure and energy of the film is derived from the couple’s efforts to resist being a couple, to deny their fitness for each other and the inevitability of their union” (39). During Lucy’s and Jerry’s attempts to resist one another we are able to find comedy in the silly positions they get put in. This situations include when Jerry crashes Lucy’s date with Dan (Ralph Bellamy) and they are forced to suffer through an awkward performance of Jerry’s date, another is when Lucy pretends to be Jerry’s sister as she crashes his gathering with his fiancé, and lastly is when Jerry and Lucy are in the old cabin and they mess with the door separating their rooms. 

The elements of ridiculousness and humor that fill the journey of Jerry’s and Lucy’s reunion enables the viewers not to look back and question the reason for their original divorce. We forget that there is a high likelihood that they were unfaithful, and we find ourselves longing for their reconnection. So, as the movie comes to an end with the predictable ending of Lucy and Jerry coming together, the audience never gets closure on the question of whether or not they were ever in fact unfaithful to each other. That aspect of the movie lingers over the audience at the end. Yet because of the feel-good feeling that the screwball provides the audience when walking away from the movie, the audience forgets about that piece all together and overlooks the supposed unfaithfulness of their previous marriage. 

Looking back at these screwball movies in the pre-pill era, it is easy to see how stories had the ability to shape the attitudes of society. These films got audiences to think differently about scandalous behaviors, whether or not the film meant to do so intentionally. These films manipulated us because most viewers weren’t even thinking that any of these films had anything to do with infidelity when they were watching them. These movies accomplished this through tropes such as lightheartedness and silliness that came along with the screwball romantic comedy genre. One could argue that the nature of these screwball comedies was reliant on the falling apart of relationships in order to achieve establishing a silly and funny plot. But perhaps since It Happened One Night, Libeled Lady, and The Awful Truth all deal with the falling apart of marriages as a cornerstone piece of their storyline we should be looking at what they are saying about the stability of the marriage institution. 

Post-Pill Era

Two major changes that altered society was the creation of the pill and the abolition of the Hays Code not long after. Changes in viewpoints of infidelity had already been occurring in an incrementalism fashion. Therefore, by the time these two changes occurred, cultural norms had shifted. Films were partly the cause of this shift and they also responded to the shift by reinventing themselves around the new cultural norms. They reinvented themselves to be, as Miller states, revealers. I remind you that in order for films to act as revealers or reflectors of society, the world must have “one kind or another of preexisting order” (Miller, 69) for the stories to ““imitate, copy, or represent accurately” (Miller,69). This order was established by the story’s creation abilities in the pre-pill era. However, when society started watching films which were revealing the real world, it only resulted in the furthering the normalization of infidelity; creating an endless loop of reflection and normalizing.

With the end of the Hays code in 1965, “sex, sexuality, and desire [became] hot topics” (MacDonald, 39) in society at the time and thus the sex comedy genre was born. Also, around this time, the pill became more widely and readily available to citizens. Because of this, “films based on the withholding or postponement of sex because of the implicit fear of unwanted pregnancy seem outmoded” (MacDonald, 43). There was no need for people to fear the consequences of sexual activities because they had access to the pill. Therefore, “insistence on delayed sex felt out-of-step with the times” (MacDonald, 43). With these changes in society, “it no longer seemed realistic to centre an entire plot on the ‘would they or wouldn’t they?’ question” about sexual actions between lead characters (MacDonald,43). Films responded by making other life struggles their central topic.

Mike Nichols 1967 film The Graduate was the first movie our class came across in this post-pill era and it was noticeably different from the previous movies we saw in the course. The film’s freedom to display sexual content was very evident. While the main character, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is extensively involved with infidelity throughout a large portion of the film, “the story is more about his inability to fit into society than about [a girl’s] importance to his life” (MacDonalds, 62). By making his contemplation of his life the major focus and coupling it alongside his role in Mrs. Robinson's (Anne Bancroft) marital affair, audiences are confused on what this film is trying to highlight. 

All of the films in this course before The Graduate made the audience walk away with a happy feel-good feeling allowing them to believe in the idea of happily-ever-afters. However, The Graduate doesn’t have this same effect. The final scene shows the pairing of Benjamin and Elaine (Katherine Ross) which is the couple that the audience wants together during this movie. Regardless of that fact, viewers aren’t left with the same hopeful feeling about happily-ever-afters. The film leaves us with Ben and Elaine looking straight ahead with expressionless faces. “Ben and Elaine’s silence on the bus suggests there will be life after the happy ever after, but it may involve the couple splitting up” (MacDonalds 63). With this troubling ending we are given, our minds aren’t occupied by the infidelity in the movie, but rather with the wonder of what the ending meant. We are used to assuming the characters' lives will always be as happy as they are in the moments that the movie leaves them off to be; for the first time, we are challenged to consider the other possibility. 

Another Mike Nichols film that continues to follow suit in this transition from creating to revealing is his 1988 Working Girl. This movie is largely geared towards following Tess McGill’s (Melanie Griffith) struggle to rise in the business world; a common struggle for females in society at that time as it was a new concept. Along with this focus, the movie also adds in the element of romance as another focus. Tess’s goals were always work related and her love life seemed to act as a sidecar to the focus of the movie. She had a full-steam-ahead mentality and was always going to carry out her plan regardless of whether or not Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) was present. In the movies so far, our lead characters had a level of dependency on one another, however, Tess isn’t nearly as dependent on Jack as the past female characters have been on their partners. A scene that displays this as evident is the wedding scene. She doesn't need Jack at the wedding. She came up with the idea to crash the wedding on her own to help them get the business deal. She displays confidence in her actions and body language. She takes control of the conversations when her and Jack get confronted. And she gets things taken care of by seeking out the bride’s father to make the business deal with him. Jack on the other hand follows her lead and also drinks alcohol to calm his nerves and the viewers can visibly see his discomfort. 

As for the part of the movie that covers her love life, Tess is involved with not one but two men throughout this movie who both tamper with infidelity. The first man was her boyfriend whom she walks in on having sex with another girl in their bed. The second man was Jack. After their intimate night together, close to an hour and 20 minutes into the movie, Jack confesses to Tess that he has been in a relationship with another woman the whole time: “Ok, there’s this woman, it’s over. But technically it’s not. I just haven’t gotten the chance to break it off yet”. After finding out that Katherine (Sigourney Weaver) is Jack’s girlfriend, the audience doesn't seem to mind that he has been cheating on her the entire film. Disturbingly enough, Jack also doesn’t seem to be bothered by his actions. This reveals that society turns a blind eye to cheating if it takes place between two people we don’t believe belong together. We have been conditioned to find an issue in infidelity only if it is between two people we believe are meant to be together. Tess and Jack both seem to believe that they are supposed to be together and so neither one of them seem to feel any remorse about the affair. 

Coming to the end of our romantic comedy timeline, I would like to bring up Sofia Coppola’s 2003 Lost in Translation. According to Roger Ebert’s review of Lost in Translation, Coppola has one objective for this movie: “she wants to show two people lonely in vast foreign Tokyo and coming to the mutual realization that their lives are stuck” (Ebert). This movie was about two people who can share empathy with one another because they are at a very lonely and isolated point in their lives. This romantic comedy’s focus is to command a sense of empathy from its audience. Even in a movie where romance between Bob Harries (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) isn’t the focus, infidelity still finds a way to be present. When Bob has his one-night stand with the lounge singer, it’s occurrence in the movie holds little weight. This is because it doesn’t split apart Bob and Charlotte since they are not in a romantic relationship. It also doesn’t split up his marriage because he still chooses to go back home to his family, instead of leaving them for the lounge singer. It was a meaningless one-night stand and the audience can see the regret on his face when he wakes up the morning after. The fact the movie incorporated a meaningless affair into the story, which doesn’t lead to either of those significant changes in relationships occurring, shows just how deep-seated infidelity is in our society. It has no purpose in ending the relationships in the story, yet it is still included. There are no repercussions for his actions and that goes to show how far the culture has change in its attitude towards sexual relations.

Conclusion

Looking back over the history of the romantic comedy genre with a focus on the depiction of infidelity in the stories, there is no question that the topic has always been present. The difference between the stories found early on in the timeline and the stories found later, is that the later stories are more accepting of the issue. What was responsible for this acceptance was the effects the creation of the pill and the end of the Hays code had in shifting the functions of stories from creating to revealing the modes of behavior in society.

The films of the pre-pill era certainly seem to be filled with more romance and comedy than the films of the post-pill era. This is not to say that the later movies aren’t filled with some comedic and romantic aspects, but the films are much more muted in their lightheartedness and romance because those two features are not a big set piece for the stories. As a product of its time period, the post-pill era stories began openly including infidelity. This relatively normal attitude towards such actions reveals just how immune our culture has become to infidelity. When thinking about the three films that are mentioned in the post-pill era section, The Graduate, Working Girl, Lost in Translation, we can clearly see love and romance begin to fade out of the story's central focus. This is because stories shifted to reveal other struggles that many people could relate to in society, since the struggle of withholding from sex became an outdated concept thanks to the pill. As a result, the love aspect of these films became the secondary plot. 

Therefore, in looking at the genre as a whole, it is a fair question to ask whether or not romance is dying. The romantic comedy genre is important for everyone to look at, even those outside of our class, because it begs the question of what direction society is taking romance. There isn’t a lot of romance today amongst the younger generations compared to past younger generations and that is because of the way society has normalized unfaithful relationships. As the significance of loyalty in relationships declined over the years, society's opinion on infidelity had been coaxed into a more lenient stance on cheating in relationships. This is a result of the pre-pill era indirectly promoting the change in viewpoints as well as the post-pill era’s reflection of the changes. By reflecting society's actions instead of shaming them, changes in culture throughout time weren't reverted.  

Currently in real life, we turn a blind eye to the immorality of infidelity. While we still have yet to think that cheating is necessarily a good thing, we seem to be moving in that direction as we continue to do nothing about its obvious prevalence. As a consequence of its regular occurrence in our world today, we unfortunately have begun to be immune to infidelity happening around us. We are constantly exposed to it whether it be from the relationships of our peers around us, or in the stories that we have been provided.