Experiencing The Film Pillow Talk: Forgiving Behaviors by Olivia

The Ever-Evolving RomCom: A Personal and Textual History of the Romantic Comedy

Between It Happened One Night (1934) and Isn’t It Romantic (2019) a gap of eighty-five years exists, yet these movies share a common theme: two people falling in love. 

Yep, that’s it. Two people falling in love and throw in a bit of comedy and you have yourself, as the name suggests a romantic comedy. That’s what I thought before I started studying the genre. While I liked romantic comedies and appreciated their happy endings and  comedic moments, I never actually thought about them. In my past film classes I may have studied a romantic comedy here and there, but I certainly never focused on the genre itself. Yet, watching the entire genre unfold over the course of five hundred years emphasizes the importance and complexity of the romantic comedy. Patterns emerge, changes take place, characters are repeated, and suddenly the genre becomes a bit more convoluted than just two people falling in love. 

Of course with any genre one has expectations, that’s quite simply why genres were created. It gives the director a loose set of guidelines and the audience preconceived ideas of what's going to happen in the film they choose to watch. For most romantic comedies the expectations usually fall along the lines that a man and woman will meet, an obstacle will arise, and they will conquer said obstacle in order to live happily ever after. While romantic comedies do often follow this loose set of guidelines, as I go through the history, themes, and elements of the genre, I seek to show how I have learned that romantic comedies are much more than meets the eye.

So, let's start at the beginning.

A Brief History

Pre-Film When we think of the romantic comedy, we often think of film. While the genre has thrived through the film format, it had its beginnings long before film was even created. If you asked me four months ago if I could name a romantic comedy outside of film, I genuinely don’t think I could have. I was definitely guilty of thinking the romantic comedy was simply a film genre, and yet, its beginnings can be traced all the way back to the late sixteenth century with William Shakespeare. While he’s written about ten romantic comedies, beginning with The Comedy of Errors (1593-94) and ending with Twelfth Night (1600), it’s his play Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99) that especially stands out. One of the key themes of the play is banter being a sign of love, showing that while two individuals may start out by hating each other, they are actually a great match. When Harry Met Sally (1989), The Proposal (2009) and Life As We Know It (2010) are modern-day examples, but before there was Harry and Sally, there was Beatrice and Benedick. In Much Ado About Nothing audiences often turn their attention to the bickering pair. While the two started out hating each other, with insults being exclaimed between them such as, “I wonder that you should still be talking, Signor Benedick. Nobody marks you,” (1.1.92-94) and “He is no less than a stuffed man,” (1.1.48) it’s certainly a surprise the two end up together. However the battle of wit between the sexes creates the perfect storyline for the romantic comedy, showing that sometimes you simply have to get over your preconceived notions of someone to fall in love.

The idea of the characters themselves being the obstacles is present two hundred years later in one of the most popular written works, Pride and Prejudice. In 1813, Jane Austen penned the characters of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, who need to humble themselves in order to fall in love. Once Elizabeth is able to move past her prejudice of Darcy and Darcy is able to move past his pride, the two are able to live happily ever after. While other couples emerge in the novel, it’s their constant back-and-forth that keeps audiences entertained.

Already in these early examples, two common modern-day themes emerge: obstacles and banter. The relationships between both Beatrice and Benedick and Elizabeth and Darcy are filled with the quick wit and banter that keeps audiences entertained today. So, from the first few weeks of class I learned not only that the romantic comedy had spanned hundreds of years longer than I originally thought, but also that it was heavily influenced by treasured writers Austen and Shakespeare. I’ve often heard people criticize the romantic comedy for being uncinematic and a step-below more serious genres like drama or action, yet its history with two of the world’s most well-known authors proves the importance of these stories. Early Films Sunny skies, young stars, black-and-white, one hundred years later and it’s the early beginnings of Hollywood. The romantic comedy genre flourished with film, with the 1930s seeing It Happened One Night (1934), Libeled Lady (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), and Holiday (1938) to name a few. Prior to this class the earliest romantic comedy I remember watching was Pillow Talk (1959) a 50s classic. Because it was the only one I had seen, I foolishly assumed all early romantic comedies were similar, which, if you’ve seen Pillow Talk, you know is a far cry from the truth. Thankfully, I learned pretty quickly that each decade pretty much had its own subgenre.

A personal and fan favorite, It Happened One Night, demonstrates one of the earliest romantic comedy themes: that money doesn’t buy everything. In the film, a wealthy woman, Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) and a newspaper reporter, Peter Warne (Clark Gable) fall in love. Significant to the story is the difference in class between the two, proving that love can push past these boundaries. While this message was popular during this time, it's one that was emphasized a few hundred years prior in Pride and Prejudice. Directors borrowing from past romantic comedies but altering the story to make it applicable to contemporary circumstances is seen in Elizabeth and Darcy getting reworked into Ellie and Peter. Yet, it’s something I would have never noticed had I not watched the genre develop over the course of a few centuries.

The role of class was just one of the many important parts of It Happened One Night, the film was also part of the screwball comedy. The screwball comedy emerged during the 1930s and often featured strong female characters, fast-paced witty dialogue and role play. One of the best examples, Bringing Up Baby (1938) sees Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) driving the plot by causing mischief throughout the film. The screwball comedy immediately made me think of the saying opposites attract because as Tamar Jeffers McDonalds explains these films often “paired a conventionally repressed person with an unconventional opposite” (Romantic Comedy, 27). By bringing two people who are fundamentally different together it allows for humorous moments that are often expressed through physical comedy. In Bringing Up Baby, the examples of physical comedy are endless. There’s the scene where the characters are frantically chasing down a pet leopard, where Susan is trying to steal Dr. David Huxley’s (Cary Grant) car, and where Dr. Huxley’s treasured dinosaur skeleton topples down. Screwballs were a stark contrast from the early Hollywood films I imagined, they demonstrated strong female characters and what McDonald calls “reverse class snobbery.” The reverse class snobbery often showed people who were rich or educated needing to learn crucial life lessons. Often I think of Hollywood as catering to the rich, and I certainly didn’t expect early Hollywood to deviate from the norm. Yet, surprisingly I learned that this subgenre aimed a majority of its jabs at the upper-class.

Then came the 50s, and I watched as the genre took a sharp turn. Romantic comedies during this period were driven by two main forces: the actors Rock Hudson and Doris Day and the rise of the sex comedies. Rock Hudson played the all-American heartthrob and Doris Day the naive, yet working woman who was on the hunt for the perfect man. In these sex comedies, the strong female characters turned submissive and a physical battle between the sexes turned into rivalry and competition between the two. As we came to this subgenre, I realized that while this was the romantic comedy I was most familiar with, it was only a small sample of the genre in the twentieth century.

In the early to mid 60s, romantic comedies took a break, but came back strong with The Graduate (1967) which shifted the preconceived notions of the romantic comedy by building off the sexual revolution and instability that had rocked the United States. In The Graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) enters into an affair with a classmate’s mother, Mrs. Robinson. However, he ends up with her daughter at the end, both of them unsure what their future holds. McDonald explains that the radical romantic comedy expresses the social upheaval that was occuring by showing that there is not always a happy ending, as shown in the film’s final scene with Benjamin and Elaine Robinsons’ (Katharine Ross) timid faces. As naive as it might be, this was actually the first time I heard of the radical romantic comedy. I always assumed that romantic comedies had happy endings, and if they didn’t, well that it was simply a part of another genre. Along with the radical romantic comedy, the 60s also saw the emergence of the MPAA ratings system, which gave rise to the depiction of sex over romance. However, nowhere was this difference as strikingly obvious to me as in modern-day romantic comedies.

Modern-Day Films Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), and We’re the Millers (2013) are all films that come to mind when I think of modern-day adaptions of the romantic comedy. Yet, before these films emerged the late 80s and 90s saw the releases of the classics When Harry Met Sally (1989), Say Anything (1989), and Sleepless in Seattle (1993). These movies tend to follow a neo-traditional format and focus on the characters themselves as well as happy endings. Often they feature white, heterosexual couples who stress monogamy.

Yet, while these safe, classic romantic comedies were emerging, so were other, more daring ones that broke free from typical conventions, such as The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). The Wedding Banquet follows Wai-Tung Gao (Winston Chao) as he balances his homosexuality with his parent’s desires for a traditional Chinese marriage. One thing I’ve learned about the genre throughout the semester is that, while Hollywood certainly has problems with diversity, few genres highlight this more than the romantic comedy. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the film followed a homosexual couple who was mixed-race. Meanwhile, in Four Weddings and a Funeral, while a homosexual couple is included, their the only ones whose pairing ends in a funeral rather than a wedding. However, I unfortunately wasn’t surprised by this given the genre’s history. The 21st century gave rise to the romantic comedies I know and love. When I saw Knocked Up (2007) on the syllabus, I definitely got a bit excited. However, as I re-watched it, it was clear that it was a stark contrast from the early romantic comedies we watched. The genre became more crude, trading in romantic plot lines for explicit sex scenes, the man became more pronounced, and the importance of blatant comedy was stressed.

Films like Knocked Up, Friends with Benefits (2011) and Trainwreck (2015) all feature sex more explicitly than their predecessors, largely due to relaxed regulations and sex being less taboo in current society. A lot of these recent films also, as David Denby notes, tend to focus on the slacker male stereotype. The importance of the man, and often his friend group, is seen in films like Wedding Crashers (2005), Knocked Up, and Life As We Know It (2010). In Knocked Up Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) has a one night stand with journalist Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), and while she is a motivated and hard-working individual, he lives with a group of his friends who are trying to start a porn website.

This imbalance between the characters is something I’ve never given much thought to before, rather I just assumed that similar to screwballs, the characters' differing personalities gave rise to easy moments of comedy. Yet, Wesley Morris notes that modern-day romantic comedies often stray away from the classic drawbridge, where two characters essentially meet in the middle. Instead, in films like Knocked Up, Morris writes the men are essentially “rescue operations” (Morris, 5). I think a large part of this probably has to do with my last point, that instead of romance being the center, comedy is, and thus having two mismatched characters gives easy excuses for laughs. While it’s clear the genre has experienced quite a bit of change in the past century, and though elements like the drawbridge have been replaced, plenty of modern-day conventions can be traced back to the early origins of the genre. In the next section, I discuss the three elements that have consistently stayed central to romantic comedies, even if they’ve seen a makeover or two.

Central Elements

Obstacles Without an obstacle, there’s not much of a story. Regardless of the media form, whether it be book, film, or play, release date, or subgenre, in romantic comedies consistency is found in the presence of an obstacle. Yet, one thing I’ve noticed throughout the semester is that while the obstacle takes on a million different forms, it can pretty much be categorized into three main types: an internal struggle, tension between a child and parent, and an external factor such as time, distance, or another individual. In Much Ado About Nothing, Pride and Prejudice, Love and Basketball (2000), and When Harry Met Sally the struggle exists within the characters. For example, in When Harry Met Sally Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) meet, spend years apart, meet again, and finally become friends. Their friendship eventually blossoms into a romance, but is at first held back by the individuals initially seeing the other in a non-romantic, and for Sally, negative light. Thus, the internal struggle is often used as a way to keep audiences entertained and watch as two individuals banter their way to love.

 

Diane Court and her father in Say Anything, who proves 
to be an obstacle to Diane's love life

The second obstacle that I saw repeatedly throughout the semester was tension between a parent and their child. This was seen in movies like It Happened One Night, The Lady Eve (1941), Wedding Banquet, The Graduate, and Say Anything. In these movies the parent, often the father (though not always) disapproves of the child’s romantic life or interest. In Say Anything, Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) falls in love with high school valedictorian Diane Court (Ione Skye), yet her father proves a difficult obstacle to move past. However, the father ends up in jail and Lloyd and Diane end up on a flight together in London.

Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy) and her father in Libeled Lady

Lastly, an external factor, oftentimes another person, took the role of the obstacle in the films we watched. The Philadelphia Story (1940), Roman Holiday (1953), and Four Weddings and a Funeral, all display external obstacles to love, whether that be class, another love interest, or timing. Additionally, a subgenre of obstacles that I have seen that merges internal/external categories is deception. Deception is seen in a wide variety of romantic comedies such as Much Ado About Nothing, Working Girl and Pillow Talk. The role of deception has varied significantly from film to film but oftentimes it includes one person portraying themselves to be someone else. However, I didn’t include deception as its own category because I found that these films usually include another type of obstacle whether that be bias against the person, the presence of another individual, or any other type of roadblock. In my opinion, I think deception is used heavily to provide entertainment and comedy to the romance aspect of the film. By including deception it makes the audience laugh along with the character as they watch an individual be misled, only for them to find out, forgive the person, and end up happily together.

As I studied romantic comedies throughout the semester it became clear that obstacles are a central element to the genre, it keeps audiences on their toes, provides moments of comedic relief, and offers a formula for the genre to abide by. I was surprised to see the obstacles easily categorized into so few themes, however each theme tends to get re-worked to become applicable for current society. Characters Characters are obviously a central element to any film, without characters there is no story. Yet, the characters in romantic comedies are often repeated, re-worked, and/or have similar characteristics. While there are a variety of characters in the romantic comedy, they are often young, white and heterosexual. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my film classes, it’s that Hollywood favors white patriarchal capitalism and heterosexual relationships. Thus, seeing the heavy presence of these characters in romantic comedies wasn’t necessarily surprising, though I’m definitely used to seeing greater diversity. Out of twenty films we watched, only three featured main characters of other races and two featured homosexual relationships. Thus, the characters being young, white and straight was often a central element to all of the films.

As I went through the films, I also mentioned various subgenres that emerged. Often, these subgenres are built on character types that are repeated, such as the rich socialite women (1930s and 40s), the naive women (1950s), the lost adolescent boy (1960s and 1970s) and the slacker male (2000s). While these characters are different in each film, they have defining qualities that make them similar to their predecessors. In the 2000s, the slacker male stereotype was featured heavily. As mentioned previously, in Denby’s essay, “A Fine Romance” he talks about how a subgenre of films that focused on the slacker male stereotype had emerged. These films all featured an underachieving, and often lazy male character who falls in love with a highly focused and motivated woman. While each of these individual characters were unique, they all had these same underlying qualities. For example, Knocked Up and The Break-Up (2006) are different films with different plots, yet both Gary Grobowski (Vince Vaughn) and Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) have qualities to them that give the movies a similar feel. Oftentimes, the characters that play these roles are used repeatedly to even further a sense of the stereotype. Thus, I think the characters that are used are a central element to romantic comedies because while there are exceptions to the rule, the romantic comedy genre has one of the most consistent character-types. Unfortunately, because diversity is a risk in the genre and Hollywood is an industry looking for profit, the non-standard romantic comedies are few and far between. Romance Romance as a central element, again, might seem too obvious, but I think that romantic comedies tend to feature a specific kind of romance. While it is dependent on the subgenre, it can really be divided into two main categories: pre-radical romantic comedies and post-radical romantic comedies; it can also be divided by the establishment of the MPAA ratings system in 1968. Early films saw a strong emphasis on the importance of romance, partly because sexual scenes weren’t allowed due to the Hays Code, thus the way to display romantic relationships was through expressing romantic scenes and actions. Romantic dinners, cocktails, evening clothes or perhaps spontaneity and adventure, were all central elements to the way that films expressed characters falling in love. Yet, with the radical romantic comedy and the switch from the Hays Code to the MPAA ratings system, these elements changed.

The two leads sharing a romantic embrace in Roman Holiday
as contrasted to the sex scenes in Knocked Up

Instead of romance, sex became highlighted. Oftentimes prior to the two characters falling in love they would have sex and then a relationship would develop. This is largely due to differing expectations from viewers and societal change, but also with the belief from Hollywood that sex and romance have to be mutually exclusive. After the radical romantic comedy emerged, the neo-traditional subgenre emerged which downplayed sex, however since the late 90s, sex has had a heavy presence in most romantic comedies.  

Less romance, more sex: The two main characters having sex in Knocked Up

In my opinion, this has to do with directors aiming to make their films less romantic and more comedic to appeal to wider audiences. Thus raunchy sex scenes are often included to attract viewers and for laughs. While sex and romance are not mutually exclusive, romance films are often geared towards female audiences and recent romantic comedies are geared more towards universal audiences, thus replacing the romance with sex keeps male audiences from feeling like they are watching a chick-flick. Now, I would argue a central element to most romantic comedies is usually some type of sex scene. While this of course isn’t necessary, it’s often prevalent. The change from romance to sex is one that occurred over the course of a century in response to various changes in Hollywood, society, and viewer expectations.

The Case for Romantic Comedies 

       While romantic comedies do have a lot of fixed qualities, I hope I demonstrated that they’re constantly changing and evolving. The genre began with writers like Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and now romantic comedies are experiencing a lull, with those being released radically different from the last century. Yet, despite the fact that romantic comedies often get a negative reputation for causing unrealistic expectations regarding love and having little to no diversity in the casts, I still think these movies are important and should be watched. For those that choose to watch these movies being aware of the fantasy being sold to them is, however, important.

       I find romantic comedies particularly important because they show the current societies general feelings on love, oftentimes they can even be a reflection of the decade they were released. If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout this class, it’s how much the genre was shaped by external influences. In the 1950s there was a strong emphasis on marriage and family-life and this is clearly displayed in films like Pillow Talk. Meanwhile in the 1960s and 1970s, the disillusionment and uncertainty that was being experienced can be seen and felt in the emergence of the radical romantic comedy. I think it can be powerful to watch the genre and see how it changes throughout time, yet, it is undeniably crucial to be aware of the fantasy they sell regarding love. In most films love is seen as something that is able to fix everything, to solve all problems, and to never falter once it is secured. Of course, love doesn’t fix everything, solve every problem, or stay forever, and rarely is it easy or perfect. Audiences, thus, need to be aware of the lack of reality depicted by Hollywood.

       Also, just as important, is needing to understand the bias depicted in Hollywood films, specifically romantic comedies. While Hollywood is trying to make progress to diversify their content, the romantic comedy genre is still far behind. Given it depicts the perfect relationship as one that exists between young, white, straight individuals it can be damaging to those watching. Therefore it’s important to be aware of the heavy bias that exists in Hollywood films, specifically romantic comedies towards the white heterosexual couple. By acknowledging that these movies represent a small portion of the relationships that do exist, it helps to understand how the type of love they portray is often unattainable. With the right understanding and knowledge of the genre, it is definitely valuable to watch. However, when watching purely for entertainment the genre can become dangerous. Unfortunately a large majority of individuals do watch these films solely for entertainment purposes and thus by constantly seeing a specific type of relationship and love portrayed to them they can become harmful to the viewers. Therefore, while it’s important for the audience to be informed, it’s also important for the directors and producers to take into account the message they are putting into the world.