A Festival Of Meaning: Seven Little, Somewhat Inconsistent Essays On

Romantic Comedy.
...enormous documentation … a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.
—Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 67

...romcoms...films whose defining characteristic was an absolute lack of cinematic value

—Geoff Dyer, Zona, 145

1. Cinematic And Plot-Driven

Of all screen genres romantic comedy is the most cinematic, more cinematic say than a movement
genre like action, or a genre like science fiction that takes advantage of film's great promise for showing
other worlds. Understand what cinematic means. Romantic comedy mise en scene depicts a festival not of
the senses, but of meaning, so it depends on the full resources of cinema: every scene of a romantic
comedy shows social relations, dazzling when compared, let's say, to a car chase or a star war. Hence
notice the way romantic comedy quickly took advantage when it became possible for a sound track to
sully the visual sensuality of cinema with the sensual impurity of talk.
And romantic comedy is more narrative-driven or plot-driven than thrillers or crime films. Because
usually what people call a narrative-driven or plot-driven film is one in which even-though-and-precisely-because we
know the beginning, middle and end, we watch to see the end anyway. We more or less know the plot and
we take pleasure watching this plot over and over. In this spirit we watch one romantic comedy after
another. No genre is more repetitious. We are like children wanting the same story or kind of story again
and again. It is necessary to appreciate that despite assumptions to the contrary, the description plot-driven
is seldom applied to films in which plotting is difficult, unsettling, unpredictable, unusual or dazzling. It is
applied most emphatically to films in which the beginning, middle and end are known but slightly
encrypted by the multiplication of complications, such as the complications of crime, intrigue or love.
Hardly anyone says a film with an unusual or dazzling plot like — to cite a recent example — Tree of Life is
plot-driven. Stupefied by excess of narrative, they are more likely to say it is non-narrative cinema. Just
where plot gets interesting, reviewers take refuge in the observation that the plot is losing its way, or
pretentious or no longer narrative but poetic or based on musical structure. In fact romantic comedy shares
with music the quality that no matter how used we are to the genre or even a particular work we can
appreciate it over and over again, with the enormous anticipation of its resolution. It is no accident that
romantic comedy, the genre of happy love, should vindicate Kierkegaard's thesis that love of repetition is
in truth the only happy love.
I have taken the liberty of this formal and exaggerated way of making these two claims because I
am sketching from reality, not formulating an elaborate thesis.

2. The Romance, The Fantasia

While watching a DVD of Serendipity (2001), a slight, light, starry-eyed romantic comedy with John
Cusack and Kate Beckinsale directed by Peter Chelsom, it occurred to me — as it has no doubt occurred
to you — what utter fantasy romantic comedy is. And that this is probably the key to understanding
romantic comedy, not just the stardust and moonlight of Serendipity but all romantic comedies.
Shakespeare called one of his stage versions A Midsummer Night's Dream. A romantic comedy is not the
dream of deep or troubled sleep. It is a midsummer night's dream or a daydream of romantic love, the
daydream as art.
If this is the case though, it might be hard to think that there is any more to romantic comedy
than that it is at best a kind of pleasant fantasia, a trifle or a flummery, and hence quite rightly marketed as
cool guilty pleasure with coy, self-deprecatory labels like rom com and chick flick.

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 No doubt, as fantasy it can be utterly fanciful, as serendipitous in its coincidences as Serendipity but
also, for that matter, as Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset or even Eric Rohmer’s Conte d’Hiver. Though
sometimes savoury, the pleasure is usually sweet, only as bitter as chocolate in a cake, or as sharp as lime
in a confection.
In their own ways the pleasant and the fanciful are serious, although it is mostly because they are
not merely serious that they are so serious as to deserve serious attention. We have to recognise that art can
give the utmost attention to all that lightness and sweetness of the romantic comedy fantasia. That it is not
all vanity and nonsense. In art attention matters more than seriousness, for seriousness is only one kind of
attention or rather one kind of attentive mood. Indeed the lightness of certain things — fun, romantic
comedy, humour, idle conversation — is a kind of satire on seriousness, for seriousness is too seldom
seriously serious and too often merely polite or pretentious or false. 'The only completely fearless thing'
wrote the poet M.T.C. Cronin 'is humour.'
In all romantic comedy's sweetness and light we may recognise the implacable drive of desire and
love. Romantic comedy is nearly always about and indulges in the pleasure and happiness of fulfilled
desire, but if that were all that it was about it would all be about the end and no more, when really — and
here I have to use a terrible platitude — it is about the process of getting there. It is to this that romantic
comedy gives its attention. Each film is a more or less intense daydream which indulges primarily the
sustained pleasure of anticipated consummation, but only as this pleasure perfuses into every scene of the
film.
Of course given these features — I should say potential pitfalls — romantic comedy is a hard
genre to do well, the easiest to do badly, and more excruciating in its failures than any other. A drama
shouldn’t be, but is, excused just for its serious subject matter, or worse, the quality of an actor’s
performance. A romantic comedy is condemned for the slightest misstep. Condemned sometimes even
before it starts: merely to have bothered making a movie like Down With Love — construed by many as
little more than an extended and misplaced homage to the Doris Day, Rock Hudson romantic comedies
of the late 50s — was to invite ridicule or condemnation. When a romantic comedy works, embarrassed
reviewers say things like what Liza Schwarzbaum said of Serendipity: it 'has no business working, but it
does'.
Barthes in his great mid-twentieth century interpretation of love, A Lover's Discourse, describes the
romantic gesture — the touch of hands, the surprising kiss — as an 'enormous documentation', 'a festival
not of the senses but of meaning'. Barthes was writing about romantic love almost in the Wertherian
sense, but this is the same ‘romantic’ as that of romantic comedy. The 'cold' romanticism that, according
to old ethnic stereotyping, is said to have originated in Northern Europe.
Some of us all of the time and all of us some of the time harden ourselves against this foolish
romance, condemn it for sentimentality or naiveté, maybe to scoff at the lovelorn or guard against
becoming that way. And sex has taken a familiar place in movies as a kind of antidote to or avoidance of
romance. People will avoid anything for the sex. It will ween people off all sorts of things: food, friends,
society, food, and in art as well as life, romance. In the 60s, when sex came on screen, romantic comedy
almost disappeared; a new anti-romantic gesture was given emphatic expression, romance having fallen
out of favour, as in a more Stoical age.
Yet think of the conceptual labour we have expended abstracting sex from love. Think of this
now-imposing conceptual monument, this great analytical divide, how it towers over every everyday
assumption about love, from pop to academic philosophy. Barthes used it as a given to lever his point
about a touch of hands being a festival not of the senses but of meaning. So did Jonathan Teplitzky when
he used it lightly to generate his title Better Than Sex, a beautiful little romantic comedy that is as good
about sex as any film I can think of. This reified division has become one of the most consistent themes
of contemporary romantic comedies. Hollywood screenplays have mined the problematic of common
sense's separation of sex and love, treating platitudes as deep philosophy in the conversation of romantic
leads. It's the theme in the dialogue and the circumstances of the lead characters in recent films like Friends
With Benefits and No Strings Attached, as it has been since those 80s comedies about ensembles of friends,
and as it was long before always encrypted somewhere in the mise-en-scene if not in the dialogue of nearly
every romantic comedy. Innumerable rom com philosophers have concluded such things as men and
women can't be friends, men just want sex, women just want a man, true friends end up making true
lovers. Typical Hollywood, they take an old canard or platitude, market it as the latest pitch, and think they

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are driving contemporary sociology and ethics. (Ten years ahead of the rest of the world. Like Thelma and
Louise was ground-breaking feminism.) Whit Stilman’s Last Days of Disco makes a sort of satire out of this
kind of talk. Set in a peculiar, claustrophobic, wellish-to-do milieu, the dialogue consists of endless talk
about the most trivial features of popular culture understood as world historical events. The lovers – those
who are meant for one another – emerge from the confusion and ambiguity of the talk, from the deceitful,
the hypocritical, the self-deceptive and the trite concepts in the image of which love is made, by their
virtue. The whole history of romantic comedy is a confounding of sex and love, body and meaning, a
celebration and indulgence of their inseparability, a laugh at the conceptual violence done by the
abstractions of common sense, the Stoics and Plato.
Romantic comedy is a festival of meaning, which does not mean that it is not a festival of sense
or sensuality. As the confounded English meanings of these words suggests, where love, meaning, sense,
sensibility and sensuality are concerned semantics is physical, something the body does, the brain
extending semantic perception to the fingertips, the lips, the penis, the clitoris. The physical character of
love's semantics has always been implicit in all those references to the heart — not the mind, not the
genitals — but the heart as a semantic organ.
At some stage in a romantic comedy — more or less from the beginning — it becomes obvious
to the audience, if not to the lovers, who its proper lovers are, those that are 'meant for one another'. The
ideology of romantic comedy is that happiness resides in the fulfilment of romantic hope. But here we
also have one nutshell in which to put romantic comedy: it is a romance whose happiness is taken to be
the confirmation of something like right or proper destiny. In its most common and popular instances it
confirms the ideology of romantic destiny.
It is a sufficient condition for a film's being a romantic comedy that it confirms the rightness of
this destiny. In Eric Rohmer's Contes d'hiver (Winter’s Tale) the female lover reasons that since true love is
sufficient condition for fulfilment of romantic destiny then romantic destiny will in her case be fulfilled.
The female lover in Serendipity reverses this conditional formulation: she posits the confirmation of a
romantic destiny as a sufficient condition for true romantic love. The former tests destiny; Rohmer, being
the better filmmaker, takes the hard way. The latter tests love. By suspending the destiny proper to
romantic comedy Before Sunrise withholds romantic comedy's confirmation of true love and withholds or
disguises the generic identity of the film. Yet, even without its sequel, what is Richard Linklater's Before
Sunrise if it is not a romance dedicated to this ideology of right and proper romantic destiny?
What Cavell called 'comedies of remarriage' are not really comedies of marriage, re or otherwise;
they are comedies of romantic love, of falling in love as falling in love again. There are no children, no
long domestic familiarity, no history of reliable companionate assurance. To the extent that all romantic
comedies plot the delay of love's consummation by a falling out of the lovers, all romantic comedies are
comedies of remarriage, that is comedies of falling in love again. Eternal recurrence. Amor fati.
A romantic comedy begins with the lovers being identified to the onlooking audience and ends, as
it were, with the kiss. That is with the lovers mutual acknowledgement of their love. The rest, the lot, is
variations on the theme of loved delayed — misunderstandings of oneself or the other (pride and
prejudice), shaming, embarrassing, repartee, flirting, jealousy, intoxication, falling, resisting, straying. The
whole is a spectacle in which the audience looks on like benevolent, amused friends. Not Werther but Anti-
Werther, or rather to put it in Hegelian terms, Werther preserved in its negation.

3. The Genre Problem

Romantic comedy has become a genre defined by its failures. In a standard line of film reviewing
each new candidate for the label 'romantic comedy' is held up against a handful of lauded cinematic
ancestors and found wanting. To quote from a recent review: 'of course it's not in the Hepburn-Tracy
league'. It was a review of Friends With Benefits , but the same sort of thing got said in reviews of He's Just
Not That Into You , and No Strings Attached . And others too; there are a lot of romantic comedies these
days. They are the product for an identified demographic. But something about this Hollywood product
seems especially to invite comparison with a canon.
In the back of their minds reviewers could have the high cultural criticism of Stanley Cavell's
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedies of Remarriage (1981) or some mainstream academic feminist film

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studies like Maria Di Battista's Fast-talking Dames (2001), works that stick resolutely to and help form the
standard canon of romantic comedies. Or maybe they have nostalgia, or they are in a whingeing mood, or
its a genre that demands the highest standards, or the definition-by-failure, a reviewers trope, has got the
better of them. The weak form of this line of reviewing is that the romantic comedy being reviewed is not
up to the great romantic comedies of the past. The strong form is that romantic comedy just isn't what it
used to be, or the genre itself is beyond redemption. It might be more convincing if reviewers stopped
citing Hepburn - Tracey films. Aren't they curious relics now, more of sociological than artistic interest?
The genre seems to have come out the end of its history as rom com, chick flick — in late 20th
century movie marketing jargon —posing as blasé, self-deprecating indulgence. Guilty pleasures are a big
market. And of course marketing is the powerful pressure for the shaping of genre cinema: what sells is
what gets produced. Repeatedly. And a genre is primarily a cultural lineage or family tree of films made
and remade according to a pitch. Each is made in the image of its cousins, in the genre's own image. Like
a highly selected plant variety, the DNA of the commercial romantic comedy genre has been narrowed
right down.

Where we draw the line between romantic comedies and other related genres might seem pretty
arbitrary, but so is where we draw the line between near and close family relatives. It's genealogy. We
could insist on defining the genre by plot elements alone — types of episodes and characters, the episodes
taking place in a particular order: the more or less early identification of the lovers, the ones who are meant
for one another; a plot that tells the progress to their love's consummation, that is, to a final, mutual
acknowledgement of love; a certain narrative attitude, a plot made with a sense of humour. We could
argue that As You Like It or Pride and Prejudice — the play, the novel — are as much romantic comedies as
His Girl Friday. Or we could insist that the genre is restricted to films and video narrative and therefore
also to the culture of love in post cinematic times. We could insist that the comedies of Eric Rohmer are
romantic comedies; or else that they lack certain elements — in most cases, for example, they lack any
episode of romantic consummation, or even the narrative drive toward it — which means they belong to a
genre more objectifying than romantic, which we might call comedy of manners if that weren't an
anachronism. Romantic satire. We might likewise also want to distinguish musical and farcical comedies
from the romantic variety. A Marx Brothers film will have a romantic couple — Zeppo and his girl — but
they are minor players in the overall comedy. And musicals are Musicals, even though mostly romantic
and mostly comedies. We might say John Carney's simple, beautiful Once is romantic comedy, but only
because it's music is the music performed in the everyday experience of its leads (i.e. diegetic) and, unlike
Fred and Ginger's, not orchestrated off-screen in the soundtrack.
We could insist that romantic comedies are primarily about the lovers equally as leads, and not
about a single lead or about friends as leads. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is about two friends more than about
their respective lovers. The recent, forgettable Crazy, Stupid Love was sold as romantic comedy but is more
about one man, Cal Weaver (Steve Carell), than about him and his wife equally. At the same time it has a
romantic comedy sub-plot about Cal's daughter Hannah (Emma Stone) and Cal's friend Jacob (Ryan
Gosling) falling in love, not to mention a buddy film sub-plot about Cal and Jacob, and various other
generic sub-plots about familial and romantic love. So is neither of these a romantic comedy? To some
extent these works sacrifice features of romantic comedy: the thematic dominance of the relations
between the lovers, equal dialogue between the lovers, equal viewer affection for each of the lovers, the
co-starring of the actors playing the lovers, and, with these things, the potential for certain insights into
the politics and ethics of gender and love; and the passion of-and-for romance and its fulfilment. I also
wonder sometimes if some reviewers assume that romantic comedies must be Hollywood films. Rohmer
would be out immediately on that score. Or whether romantic comedies have to be about heterosexual
love: for gay love is so common in life, so rare in romantic comedies. Is there not quite enough market
demographic?
A genre defined by its narrative features is a kind of thing, an abstraction. It is like defining a
family of people by their similar features rather than by their physical relation to one another, their shared
ancestry. When we define romantic comedy we are paying homage to an abstraction. Hollywood does it
relentlessly, and churns out product based on this abstraction: its concept of the romantic comedy genre.
Yet even though the instances of the genre are made in the image of this abstraction these instances are
individuals related by a kind of aesthetic reproductive ancestry. And these instances end up defining a

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pretty clear family of related films. The boundaries of the genre start to not seem arbitrary. It's Hollywood.
Conceived in this way, although the genre remains as an abstraction, the lineage of works (it's more like an
incestuous network) is something concrete and particular.
On the other hand, to conceive of a genre in terms of a more or less discrete network of related
works suggests different approaches to any particular genre. We are not restricted to defining the genre by
narrowing it down to its commonest features — the simple and usual way for a critics as well as a
producers, distributors and viewers conceive of a genre. When we conceive of a genre this way, we ignore
the particulars and miss much of what matters. No wonder critics took up the option of running a critical
line like: here is the genre and now we are going to look at the works that transgress the norm. No wonder
transgression was taken to be a sign of the better works. Sometimes it might be, but it might be better to
try a different take on genre theory. Rather than approaching a genre by trying to define the typical
elements of its family, by listing the typical string of plot episodes, the typical themes or the typical
cognitive and emotional registers and pertinence of the genre, we can try and describe the social and
psychic conditions that steer and select those features. That is, we can try to describe what kinds of social
conditions the instances of the genre are adapted to and what psychic and social functions the genre has.
For a start romantic comedies have to survive in the culture of modern romantic love, they have
to be a fit artistic response to its persistent sexual and romantic desires, and to the pressing demands of its
sexual ethics and gender politics. The identity of romantic comedy as a genre is quite stable and this
suggests that the genre is satisfying persistent social and psychic demands. This includes the demand that
it will sell.
But this approach also suggests why some films are romantic comedies or very closely related,
even though they are not of the reified form. It is not so much that they share certain generic features as
that they perform the same ethical, social, political, economic, emotional and artistic functions in slightly
altered contexts, e.g. Casablanca, La Regle du Jeu. And we must not stop there. Romantic comedies of the
most unambiguous kind should be regarded as something else altogether. With a vengeance Nicole Brenez
practices a method such as this in her essay, 'Shop of Horrors', on Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner,
Cassavetes' Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Abel Ferrara's Go Go Tales. The Shop Around the Corner 'slips in, at
the heart of prestigious MGM, a veritable cinematic pamphlet on the question of the reification of
emotion; it offers an analysis and a diagnostic on the invasion of the profit motive into human relations'.
As well as describing the social functions and shaping forces of the genre we can try to describe
the lineage of the concept of the genre and the social and psychic forces that shape the concept itself. That
is, we describe romantic comedy by a history of what it is popularly conceived to be. This takes us back to
the way Hollywood reproduces its genres. What producers and distributors conceive romantic comedy to
be is a major selection pressure in the evolution of the genre. The usual way a genre is explained by those
who generate it conceals the way it is generated; to explain it as an abstraction of narrative features is to
conceals its genealogy. Romantic comedy is manufactured in the generic image of what audiences,
distributors, reviewers, critics, pretty much everyone has expected, and expects. The genre conceived as an
abstraction is fed back as an abstraction into the works, you end up manufacturing product in its own
image — what the philosophers called the process of reification. In a kind of feedback of the image into
reality, the genre is made real in its own image.
No wonder romantic comedies look inbred. No wonder the transgressions can look good; they
show hybrid vigour. They demonstrate their particularity. But they also jeopardise their survival and risk
their own extinction. Unless they are marketed as transgression — which is itself a kind of Hollywood
pitch — the gay-or-lesbian romantic comedy, the aging-baby-boomer romantic comedy, the gross-out
romantic comedy. It is no wonder the official history of romantic comedy is one of decline: if you start
with L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1933) everything after is going to be Bride Wars. But L'Atalante, that wonderful
romantic comedy, would anyone call it romantic comedy any more? Did anyone ever call it romantic
comedy? Doesn't it contain the whole of cinema?

4. A Canon, The Canon

Not a 'drama of conviction', but a comedy of taste, a romantic comedy begins its life being
counted a lesser form, and less likely than most films to remain firm in the canons of admiration or brute

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artistic history. Yet in our times we can find works of the past — from our limited reading of it — that
still please us in the way contemporary romantic comedy does. Perhaps these works of the past only
survive (I'm talking pre-cinema) because the present finds them speaking to it, and not to some strange
past audience that is no longer easy for us to imagine other than as quaint or alien. Thus we still watch
Shakespeare’s romantic comedies and read Jane Austin’s and think we discern the ancestors of our own.
Beatrice banters with Benedict like Rosalind Russell with Cary Grant. We can find works of the past that
still please us in the way of our contemporary romantic comedies. Indeed we make movies out of
Shakespeare and Jane Austen unceasingly. Yet despite its prehistory in literary high culture — the
prehistory preserved in the works that survives, and which by that alone are deemed canonical —
romantic comedy is now not high culture or literary. But then high and low and popular are anachronistic
terms, whether applied to the present or the past.

Here is a list of romantic comedies: I Know Where I'm Going, Tales of the Fours Seasons, The Awful
Truth, His Girl Friday, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Romy & Michelle's High School Reunion, Minnie and Moskowitz,
Better Than Sex, Before Sunrise & Before Sunset, Last Days of Disco, Clueless, Down With Love, L'Atalante, To Jonas
Who Will Be Twenty Five In The Year 2000. It is not the canon of romantic comedies. It is not a canon; some
may not be romantic comedies.
A canon is always legendary, it's a legend that records what are said to be the good films. Like any
legend it is whatever survives the Chinese whispers of history, in the case of film, the whispers of
cinephiles in the foyers, the word of mouth, the tweets, the reviews, the critics, the academics, and the
distributors — always the iron gates, the brute force and wild intentions of the distributors who may or
may not release a DVD, in this but not that region, or who may be obtuse in any of their many ways. A
canon is not democratic; it forms by the same sort of social selection process that shapes a genre, or that
drives a market. It is ruthless and stupid. At the hands of distributors, works become extinct by not being
reproduced, or functionally extinct through neglect, or negligence. It thus exceeds the power of any
individual to steer its historical course, and the result can confront individuals as more or less alien. As
such it has its own objectivity, which, like that of any legend consists in brute incumbency. So of course its
truth as a record of the good films can be disputed, but what it records can be truly described. So like any
legend a canon's truth consists in its beginning with the phrase: 'it is said...'.

It is said that The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, and The Lady Eve are among
the great pre WWII American romantic comedies. A chronological American canon consigns them and
their like to a witty, wealthy and perhaps frivolous culture before the serious events of WWII made for a
very different kind of distribution between lightness and seriousness, love and sex, sentiment and
sentimentality. The great romantic comedies of the 40s almost don't exist — except as domestic interludes
like the Hepburn-Tracy films — in the new landscape of love. The Cary Grant of The Awful Truth (1937)
has been well domesticated by the time Mr Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse (1948). The Hepburn-Tracy
gender comedies of circa 1950, whatever their feminist reputation, still ooze domestic comforts and a kind
of mawkish and self-serving male wisdom. Even Howard Hawks cannot escape the sentiment of the age
when he takes the Cary Grant of His Girl Friday (1940) and shows him post war in I Was A Male War Bride
(1949), a comedy that changes from romantic to domestic farce half way through, and in doing so charts
the adaptations of the genre to changed social conditions. Infidelity, ambiguity and sexual tension mostly
give way to domestic misunderstanding; wry humour and sophistication give way to patronising the more
carefree pleasures of whimsy or wackiness. Eventually the fast-talking dames give way to the ambiguous,
pheromonal comedy of Marilyn Monroe — whose guileless wiliness is as pure and true as it is amusing
and erotic, and so dazzling that all that seems to be left of fast talkers is the wholesome, exasperated
careerism of Doris Day sparring with Rock Hudson, in films whose humour has mostly retreated to the
comic refuge of Tony Randle. Tony Randle, incidentally, is one of a great tradition of romantic comedy
supporting players — a kind of chorus really — that includes Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, Eugene
Levy, and Ruth Hussey
Howard Hawk's Monkey Business (1952) marked the end of the age of the Cary Grant Romantic
Comedies. Grant was paired with Marilyn Monroe, who took up the role of the leading player in the post
romantic comedies of the 50s. The now silver-haired Grant played in his own post romantic comedies,
notably Hitchcock's North-by-Northwest, also Stanley Donen's Indiscreet and Charades.

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 The canonical comedies were now Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Artist and Models or Some Like It Hot,
and like North By Northwest, possibly not recognised as romantic comedies at all, not now, not then. By
1960 Doris Day and Rock Hudson were playing out what the romantic comedy had become and possibly
killing the genre off for the 60s, when Doris became the frumpy symbol of the immediate past and the
genre became so aesthetically moribund as to be popularly and commercially moribund as well. Perhaps
modernism, especially its avant-gardist but also neo-Stoic sensibilities, became pop culture, and romantic
comedies of the past were relegated to TV reruns and only lived on canonically as cinephile taste. A
contemporary romantic comedy like The Graduate didn't tick the right genre boxes. It's ancestors were
social critique films like The Apartment. Dustin Hoffman wasn't a romantic lead but an anti-hero, a term
which the anti-heroic cool the times demanded. Post-pill, pre-feminism, Katherine Ross was just a pretty
face; Anne Bancroft's Mrs Robinson got the lines, but of a villain, not a feminist lover. And a feminist
romantic lead had always been one of the boxes a proper and decent romantic comedy had to tick.
In the 60s Modernism had well and truly became pop culture, and we can locate the precise
period, the 1970s, in which a certain melancholy infected film lovers, the sense that the age of the great
romantic comedies had passed, even that the genre had become no longer possible. A similar melancholy
was also being felt for the Hollywood musical and western. Under the influence of this attitude westerns
— the few that got made — were usually received, labelled and maybe conceived as 'valedictory'.
The time was right for the melancholy, and the resurrection. The way had been prepared by a
peculiar pop-cultural expression of historical self-consciousness that emerged as a fad in the late 60s-and-
early-70s. The historical self-consciousnes was diagnosed as postmodernity, its popular symptomatic
expression was the fad labelled 'Nostalgia', and like any pop cultural fad it was marketed. Bonnie & Clyde
(1967) was a notable cinematic marker of its emergence, accompanied as it was by the fashion-marketing
of the first post-mini and self-consciously retro 'midi' hemlines. Pop culture tried to recreate in itself its
image of the 1930s. Of course the mini lasted, and so did Nostalgia: forty years later the 70s are more
famous as an object of nostalgia or rather as a classic nostalgic style, than as the age when Nostalgia itself
was generated as a pop cultural style.
Peter Bogdanovic was as much a film historian as a filmmaker and his What's Up Doc (1972) self
consciously revived the screwball romantic comedy Bringing Up Baby, which, along with its like from the
1930s, were turning up in underground rerun cinemas along with Marx Bros and WC Fields comedies.
Quite self-consciously the romantic comedy was reconstructed from the body parts of (i.e. with knowing
references to) its ancestors. One of these was feminism which by 1972 was not going to rest. It was well
and truly articulate, self-conscious, and powerful, and had become, like the social movements of the times
and ever since, pop culture itself.
Anything like original, contemporary romantic comedy was almost unrecognisable. It was hardly
likely to be called romantic comedy, not so much because it had to get past the late and post 60s
sensibility that was still so wary of the genre but because it came out of the times and without a glance
back. Take Carl Reiner's crazy funny Where's Poppa (1970) or better, John Casavette's comic masterpiece
Minnie and Moskowitz (1971).
Minnie and Moskowitz comes from sources completely beside those of the classic romantic comedy
genre: the crazy, exuberant passion of Seymour Moskowitz, a kind of hero of committed love incarnated
in a 60s-70s counter cultural man, and played off against Minnie's weary and wary tenderness; the comedy
of their mothers (played so beautifully by Casavettes and Gina Rowlands own mothers) not so much mere
incidental entertainment as hilariously and joyfully crucial to showing the social and generational relations
of 70s urban love. The everyday milieu of Seymour's car-park job and Minnie's lousy domestic experience
made no knowing allusions to the canonical high class 30s. In Minnie and Seymour's visits to the movies it
alluded to the high romance of Casablanca, partly as contrast of art and life, but also to show how art and
romance infect life and form experience. Casavettes had no interest in succeeding — or failing — by
doing things the easy way, by doing good old genre reification. The same with his other 'genre' film, Killing
of a Chinese Bookie. Other than in love and passion, Seymour has no great interest in succeeding. Of this his
mother warns Minnie's mother. Seymour is not some 70s anti-hero but a hero of the passionate
experience of mundane urban life. With passion, Seymour tells Minnie she sleeps great. 'What a sleeper.'
He loves Minnie so much he eats ice-cream for her. They are in his truck when the Blue Danube is playing
on the radio. 'You're not ready for dancing?' says Seymour, 'Are you kidding?' And they dance in a carpark
to the truck's radio. Actually, Casablanca was a romantic comedy in the face of war.

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 But it was the nostalgic moment that shaped the Hollywood concept of the genre — if not always
the execution — for the 70s and beyond. In A Touch of Class (Melvin Frank, 1973) George Segal and
Glenda Jackson reproduced the generic couple from the Hollywood canon — witty, articulate, affluent,
and inconvenienced by love. Publicity ran the line 'They had the perfect love affair until they fell in love'.
The film might not have reached artistic or box office heights but it aligned cultural tradition and ritual.
Woody Allen's Play It Again Sam (1972), Annie Hall (1977), and Manhattan (1979) all had something of the
genre. In 1979 Robert Altman, on course to the pits of his unpopularity, made A Perfect Couple steadfastly
and beautifully against the generic grain. Even so when the genre took on the job of making sense of teen
and twenties sexual mores of the 80s, it at least turned to the contemporary social scene, it found some
generic backbone to sort out some of the common confusions of love or at least, palliatively, to make
humorous sense out of everyday romantic anxiety. And ever-fulfilling it always ended with the satisfaction
of the hope of fulfilment. It turned that hope into a promise and culminated in films like Reality Bites
(1994). Thus Hollywood set off again, re-reifying the form.
To prove it there was Carl Reiner's When Harry Met Sally (1989), and Nora Ephron's Sleepless In
Seattle (1993). Meg Ryan was almost a kind of 90s Doris Day, if not quite. The times were different and
Ephron made self-conscious references to the past Hollywood as a way to register that. Sleepless in Seattle
cited Leo McCarey's An Affair To Remember (1957) — a remake of his own earlier Love Affair (1939) — to
make her comic critique of gender responses to romantic love. Her You've Got Mail (1999) was made in the
image of Lubitch's Shop Around The Corner. (1940). Ephron was steadfastly contemporary, but Lubitsch
was a hard act to follow and the cinematic references were maybe more a romantic indulgence than a
comic take on romantic indulgence.
Also in the 90s there were those Hugh Grant comedies — Four Weddings and Funeral (1994),
Notting Hill (1998)— that had restored most of the elements of the 1930s works: sophisticated, mid-
Atlantic culture, witty dialogue and repartee, and sexual ambiguity, without the self conscious cinematic
references. And all those adaptations of Jane Austen — to one of which, Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility,
Hugh Grant also brought his romantic comic talent. Indeed Jane Austen became a kind of fertile literary
ancestor for both film adaptations of romantic comic novels and for meta romantic comedies. These were
not quite Hollywood or American films, and to that extent outside the canon I've run through historically.
Everything outside of American cinema is somewhat outside of its genres. But whereas great romantic
comedies like Powell and Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going (1945) might hardly be recognized as such,
or a small, beautiful little film like Jonathan Teplitski's Better Than Sex (2000) gets lost beyond the
Hollywood distribution system, these 1990s English romantic comedies belong to a kind of Anglo-
American extension of Hollywood. To that extent they have not only the recognized generic features, they
have the cultural selection advantage of brute marketing and distribution. They also have if not Cary then
at least Hugh Grant.
And there were ensemble versions of the genre, sort of like Altman only romantic comedies
where everyone seemed to be falling in love with everyone else. Midsummer nights’ dreams of films, and
to that extent not really all that novel, more or less successful, probably mostly dependent on the mood
and indulgence of viewers: 200 Cigarettes, Love Actually, He's Just Not That Into You — now etcetered and
etecetered by Hollywood. Alain Tanner's and John Berger's 1975 To Jonas Who Will Be Twenty Five In The
Year 2000 stands as an early, isolated and beautiful instance of this kind of film; a film so beautifully of its
times, it fell still born upon the earth and never passed on its genes.

So there was now the genre, which had found its pertinence again. But also a metagenre, the
comedy of romantic comedy, waiting for its opportunities and feeding itself back into the genre itself.
There are now some great instances of the metagenre: Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995), and Peyton Reed's
Down With Love (2003). Clueless judges the ethics of 90s teenage love with a plot structure from Jane
Austin's Emma that seems made for the times, and a wit and humour that is almost as sharp as the author
whose plot it is honouring. It is the heir of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a film about friends more than about
romantic love. It points to that classic of friendship comedies, Romy & Michele's High School Reunion, a film
in which the features of romantic comedy have dissolved into just another functional detail, whose
purpose, apart from quotation of the cultural tradition, is simply to provide a rich and appreciative
husband and thus a generous source of funding for the friends' creative lives. Flying from romantic

8
comedy via chicflic to a film about friendship and creativity as blissfully light as the bright silk scarves they
fold for fun at the end. As for Down With Love...?

5. Ethics and the Brilliantly Lovable Actor

Inspired by Michael Gordon's Pillow Talk (1959), Peyton Reid's wonderfully contrived meta-
romantic comedy, reaches its climax when Barbara Novak (Renée Zellwegger) reveals her own meta-plot.
It turns out Doris Day avatar Barbara is not really the 'down with love girl' and late-50s-early-60s feminist
author 'Barbara Novak' that she has been pretending to be. She is really little old Nancy Brown the former
secretary of Rock Hudson avatar Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor). Doris/Barbara/Nancy turns the tables
on Catcher whose own meta-plot cover as shy astronaut Zip Martin — his device for seducing Barbara
Novak — turns out to be not quite meta enough. It’s all denouement afterwards, down to Catcher's final
feminist enlightenment, and the couple's take off in a helicopter.
But not so fast. As the credits roll, to consummate this festival of meaning and meta-meaning,
Barbara and Catcher appear on 60s TV and seem to begin shedding their personae again. It's as if the
actors themselves emerge into the finale, a song and dance routine. The second time I saw this film, I
realised that all through the film the opening chords of the song they sing — Marc Shaiman's 'Here's To
Love' — are struck up and repeated all through the film like a long prelude. The final performance is the
romantic comedy Liebestod of Doris/Barbara/Nancy/Renee's and Rock/Catcher/Zip/Ewan's personae,
and the happy end of a prolonged, romantic cadence. Every scene in a romantic comedy is perfused by
the pleasure of anticipated consummation, the anticipation signified at the completion of each scene in
Down With Love by those chords. From start to finish the plot of romantic comedy is all cadence. By the
end of the song Zellwegger's husky voice can hardly hold, Ewan McGregor acting himself looking like an
early 60s nightclub singer is holding his head back to let the song out.
Meanwhile reviewers who didn't like the film said they were at a loss to know why anyone would
bother to do a homage to Doris Day and Rock Hudson — whose films had come to represent a low point
of the genre. Plainly the characters in Emma-Kate Croghan's metaromantic comedy Love and Other
Catastrophes (1996), whose romantic destiny is confirmed by their shared affection for the Day/Hudson
comedies, would not have been at a loss. The same reviewers also said that the film's stars lacked
chemistry, sometimes implying that they had less than Doris and Rock. For along with due homage to the
genre, star chemistry is the other critical critical criterion of reviewers.
Everywhere in romantic comedy we feel that somehow actors themselves are scarcely disguised
by their characters. Why is this? A critic like Adrian Martin can't help but praise the 'two brilliantly lovable
actors' in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Of course he can't. Writing about The Awful Truth with Cary Grant
and Irene Dunne he says 'above all the film is a monument to the sheer lovability of its stars'. Stanley
Cavell wrote that he couldn't avoid the 'leading thought' that romantic comedies 'have a way of
acknowledging the issue of the relation of actor and character, in particular that each has a way of harping
on the identity of the real woman cast in the principal pair'. Cavell emphasises the women because he is
concerned to emphasise the feminist theme of the comedies of remarriage, the feminist theme without
which romantic comedy from As You Like It to Pride and Prejudice to the present day is unthinkable. But
notwithstanding comedians like Irene Dunne, with her silver tongue, wide eyes and amazed amusement,
and Rosalind Russell, lightning fast, suspicious, delighted, exasperated, and disarming, the comic actor in
whom this relation of real to film identity is most harped on is Cary Grant, THE actor of the canonical
age of Hollywood romantic comedy.
He is said to have once said, 'Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.'
Cavell makes a shot of Grant from The Awful Truth into the frontispiece of Pursuits of Happiness and he
captions it with a line from Emerson: 'This man... carries the holiday in his eye; he is fit to stand the gaze
of millions.' Grant looks so gleeful he is prepared to look silly. Cary Grant also said 'I've often been
accused by critics of being myself on-screen. But being oneself is more difficult than you'd suppose.' Leo
McCarey, who directed the film, accused Grant of taking the character he played and making it his own.

9
 In the history of romantic comedy it would be hard to praise Cary Grant enough, if it weren't
somehow hard to praise Cary Grant full stop. Like the genre itself he seems too slight — as an actor, too
limited in his range of moves and roles. He was never really the existential hero like Humphrey Bogart
(even in Only Angels Have Wings), the Stoic like Gary Cooper or John Wayne, or the good citizen like James
Stewart. He's too good looking to be seen as a great comic actor: comfortable, genial, urbane without
being over refined. The limitation of his range is present as a virtue in his accent, the most distinct, the
most imitated, yet the most inimitable of Hollywood accents. Tony Curtis imitates it wonderfully badly for
half of Some Like It Hot, to woo Marilyn Monroe. The voice, the light, even lithe, bearing (he was a bit of
an acrobat), the over-gleeful smile, the double-take, the soft mutterings of dismay. In fact Cary Grant like
so many comic actors — and screen actors — is a finite, perfectly composed, set of precise gestures.
Perfect for comic discomposure, especially at the hands of women or plot. His virtue — the virtue of his
characters — consists in resilience in the face discomposure. The comedy consists, as does the moral, in
the display of his cool, his discomposure and his resilience. In Hitchcock's great romantic comedy, North
By Northwest, Cary Grant's discomposure is displayed before sublime landscapes: in a vast stubble field
beneath a swooping plane, or climbing on the giant presidential faces of Mt Rushmore, where Grant's
suave but fazed physiognomy is in utter contrast to the stony American heroes, or the wry, Medusan gaze
of Eva Marie Saint.
Grant's characters remind us that in their relation to women, the heroism of men can be present
as humour, a serious ethical reminder really, when there are too many men too weak to bear a woman's
sarcasm, let alone scorn. This must surely be one of the central ethical themes in the tradition of romantic
comedy. At the back of it all there hovers the comic notion that while women merely risk pregnancy or
rape, men must suffer sarcasm or infidelity or gay advances. But it is not just the male leads. All romantic
comedy, as well as being a kind of fantasy of romantic wish-fulfilment, is a kind of ethical testing of the
lovers, male and female. The two things go together: no romantic fantasy without lover's deemed worthy
of love. Peggy Lee said she 'learnt courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein and Cary Grant'. This
comic testing is a perennial feature of so many of Eric Rohmer's films. So practised in his own non-
generic version of the genre, Rohmer registers the sense that this kind of trial has a long history in
narrative art. Maud's trial of Jean-Louis in Ma Nuit Chez Maud could be from a medieval courtly romance
— Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Rohmer's own Perceval Le Gallois. Conte d'Hiver quotes, on many levels,
Shakespeare's late romance. The talk of the ethics of love, such a feature of the genre is often conducted
in pop psychology dialogue. Rohmer subjects everything from pop psychology to Kant and Pascal to the
eyes and ears of critical humour. So often the characters in Rohmer's films, especially the men, fail the trial
of love, in contrast to canonical romantic comedy in which the romantic consummation is a kind of
celebration of the lovers' worthiness, and in which the lovers are infused with the star aura of the actors
who play them.

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 'It's two brilliantly lovable actors' — that's how Adrian Martin describes Julie Delpy and Ethan
Hawke, the actors in every scene of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, films that cover a
similar theme to Conte d'Hiver: the test of love's providence by time and separation. One thing I like about
these films is that Ethan Hawke, or Ethan Hawke's 'Jesse', doesn't 'carry the holiday in his eye'. He is
lovable and anxious, but his anxiety is not the objectified anxiety of a stock comic character, or of a
discomposed hero. It is that of a troubled man. The young Jesse of Before Sunrise is uncertain, over
hopeful, over imaginative, all theory and inexperience. The Jesse of ten years later has lived through the
difficult years that have made him more uncertain, less hopeful, less imaginative. His progress
demonstrates that experience is not some font of wisdom. That wisdom has had its day. The youth and
freshness of the Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise, their aging faces in Before Sunset, these
physical semantic things in the festival of meaning, shine from and illuminate their characters, Celine and
Jesse.

'It's two brilliantly lovable actors.' Perhaps the answer to the question about why we feel the
actors themselves are scarcely disguised by their characters has something to do with a certain fondness, a
fondness that all talk of voyeurism — so popular in the conventional film criticism of the late twentieth
century — left unacknowledged. Or, if it acknowledged it, it pathologized it. A criticism of Bertolucci's
Stealing Beauty was of its voyeurism: all those middled-aged characters fixing Lucy in their gaze; all those
cinema viewers too. There is something similar in Vincente Minelli's Gigi (1958). Here the invocation of
voyeurism and the 80s academic watchword 'gaze' provided too convenient a tool for the job of critique.
Too convenient, too clumsy.
From War and Peace: 'Into the petty trivialities, the conventional interests that united the company,
there had a entered the simple feeling of attraction felt by the handsome and healthy and young creatures
for each other. And this human emotion dominated everything else and triumphed over all the artificial
chatter.' A precise description of one effect of lovers on those around them. And a description of one of
the two major concerns for the mise en scene of romantic comedy. The first is to bring the lovers together
in their relation to one another and the second is to place them within society. Stealing Beauty, as the title
suggests is about how the beauty of Lucy, the bearer of light, feeds the desire for beauty of the others —
the others of whom Guillaume says 'I loved you all when you were still alive'. 'Blessed are those who are
pure of heart' says the dying Alex — played by Jeremy Irons.
This is not the only (nor is it a dubious kind) of relation between the lovers and their society.
Almost typical of contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy is the chorus of the lovers' friends,
variously urging, ridiculing, patronising, perving, criticising, misunderstanding, envying,... the lovers. No
doubt this is a recurring concern of romantic comedy mise en scene.
And the society of the lovers extends beyond the world of the movie. The audience are as much
onlookers as the characters. Here that certain fondness for the lovers is experienced by the viewers, and
here, as much as with any so-called 'identification' with the lovers, lies the drive behind that concern with
the actors as much as their characters, or perhaps I should say the actors as inseparable from the
characters through whom they display themselves. We say we identify with the romantic leads. But it
could be called loss of identity. The lead actors, the lovers they play, the supporting characters and the
audience all seem to dissolve into the daydream of love. And there is no gender preference here. There is
none of this men/boys identifying with the male lead and women/girls with the female lead. Romantic
comedy dissolves gender. And think of its thematic fondness for confusing and disguising gender and
sexual proclivity, from Shakespeare, to Some Like It Hot to Go Fish to Bedrooms and Hallways (Rose Troth,
1994, 1998) We are all humans in the love of romantic comedy. Merely human. Merely semantic, loving
animals. As happens so often in the genre, from Midsummer Night's Dream on we are all drugged or drunk
and tested even when our identity is on the point of dissolving.
Love, so far as it achieves such virtues as are promised or indicated by romantic comedy, is a
matter of the lover's successful comic self-dissolution. That is, in love, successful comic self-
fictionalisation is a virtue — at least according to the ethic of romantic comedy. Here the fictional
character of comedy is present in the ethics of humour and self-representation and self-objectification.

6. Sentimental Ideology

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 If one were to judge by romantic comedy, romantic love would seem to be a good and the
capacity for it a virtue. Yet this is hardly a virtue recognised by western ethical tradition or even by
contemporary assent. Francis Bacon: ‘Love is ever a matter of comedies and then of tragedies; but in life it
doth much mischief. Sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury. You may observe that amongst all the
great and worthy persons (whereof the memory remaineth, and either ancient or recent) there is not one,
that hath been transported to the mad degree of love; which shows that great spirits, and great business,
do keep out this weak passion.’ Thus speaks the great Platonic and Stoic traditions — down with love! —
a tradition that seemed to rise again in the 1960s as a pop cultural form of sexual Modernism and to that
extent caused or corresponded to a gap in the progress of romantic comedy.
We love romantic love and ridicule it; As the song said, fools in love are just such heroes.
Romantic comedy is at the expense of the lovers. This conflict between what Stendhal saw as the tradition
of Don Juan and the tradition of Werther, or between the sentimental/romantic and Stoic traditions of
love, is played out within romantic comedies, between the lovers and their families and friends, between
the lovers themselves, and within the lovers themselves It is the most powerful force for the delay of the
plot. A romantic comedy that resorts to accidents and mistakes to delay the consummation of romance is
no more than a farce compared to one that uses this ethical rift in western life as its impediment to
consummation. And the same rift is played between the viewers and the characters. We, the viewers, look
on the lovers as the sublime observers. We are like the indulgent and to some voyeuristic 40 & 50
somethings of Stealing Beauty, or the parents in War & Peace looking on the loves of their children. Or the
parents in Boccacio's story, 'The Nightingale'. Cool and indulgent, knowing and hoping, cynical and
sentimental. We can aspire to that cool or indifference with which the lovers in so many romantic
comedy’s treat each other. Sarcastic and sardonic about one another, blissfully ignorant of what the love
poets would have pictured as the wanton boy hovering by them with his darts or arrows. They strive to
reconcile — as the genre and as Barthes in his Lovers Discourse strive to reconcile — sardonic
consciousness and the ecstatic romantic impulse, irresistible sexual affection and high ethical destiny.

The great driver of plot in romantic comedy is anticipation delayed, often due to the anti-
romantic attitude of the lovers by which the romantic impulse is frustrated. The great fault of romantic
comedies is to play the overcoming of this impediment as a kind of moral victory of romantic ideology.
Love is made to play second fiddle to a moral code, as if love, instead of being a crazy impulse or a drive
or a great passion were a sober and sentimental duty: to be true to love.
Think of the concert at the end of Love Actually, which probably gets away with it, and the
demented father's insight in Friends With Benefits, which doesn't, or the weddings at the end of so many
romantic comedies. How many romantic comedies climax with not just the triumph of love, not just with
the lover's mutual recognition of their love, but with an assertion of an ideology of love. Almost a
patriotism or chauvinism of love. It's an American speciality: the jarring mix of crudity and schmalz,
ideology and sentimentality. Is this the result of the coldness of a certain kind of romanticism?
The Philadelphia Story, which I would like to include with The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday in my
little canon, suffers from this strange need for moralistic justification: Tracy (Katherine Hepburn) is
portrayed as a character whose moral growth depends upon her overcoming her fault of having 'no regard
for human frailty'. The criticism bears no relation to her actions in the film. It's seems to be an arbitrary
contrivance. At best (and worst) it indicates the delusions or ill will or hypocrisy of those who make the
accusation about her. They seem to resent her for no more than her verve. Is it done to give the film some
kind of moral weight? A bit more dramatic interest? Is it just to justify the existence of a film that has
stooped to the genre's frivolities? To the shame of indulging in it? Is it a kind of good old misogyny?
When Tracy reassures her fiancé Kittredge that 'a woman should behave herself — naturally,' her ex-
husband and destined lover, C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) agrees with glee that 'a woman should
behave herself naturally'. And that's enough moralising for any romantic comedy.
This raises the question that is scarcely separable from romantic comedy's persistence. Just how
much does the genre reflect, and reflect on, romantic love and just how much does it reify it. Do those
Americans really practice and construct their erotic experience in the terms given to them by romantic
comedy? Does the rest of the world? We are all Americans now, but here I have to ask this not as an
American but as an anthropologist.

12
 Love being both an emotion and a virtue -- ethical and emotional life being inseparable -- the
reification of genre is one thing, the reification of emotion is another. All ‘American’ contemporary genre
cinema raises a question: how do the films of the genre reflect ‘American’ society and how does the genre
generate the society it depicts. (since most of us live to some extent in this ‘America’ now, this is a
question that seeps into any society that comprises ‘American’ popular culture). This is a venerable
question of both sociology and aesthetics. In sociology, where it has led to the most insoluble
methodological and epistemological problems, it takes the form of a question about the causal relation
between a social system and its self-representation, a question whose categories are at best only
ambiguously separable because a social system comprises its self-representations. In aesthetics it is usually
framed, inarticulately, in terms of the relation of art and life. In genres that depict violence it takes its
familiar form in controversy: do violent films cause social violence? In the case of Hollywood romantic
comedy it takes a peculiar form: do Americans really act the way they do in romantic comedies? Could
that sometimes almost shameless mix of shallowness and sentiment, schmalz and grossness really be a
feature of American culture, or is it being inculcated into it by the image makers? In other words, is art
imitating life or only changing it? Does bad Hollywood corrupt life? Marx's exhortation, or at least hopeful
thesis about philosopher's changing the world and not just interpreting, is just an everyday part of the
sociology of video and cinema narrative art.
Robert Altman is one film maker who makes it a theme. A Wedding (1978) is a kind of post
romantic comedy, a satire on the culture of romance, that starts where the romantic comedy finishes — at
the wedding. Almost every cliché of Hollywood romantic love is held up and scrutinised. Almost every
cliché of the romantic wedding is tested in the characters, who when tested are found wanting. Like La
Regle du Jeu, A Wedding is always signalling an affinity with romantic comedy, by its setting, its ensemble of
characters and the wedding story itself. Other wedding films such as PJ Hogan's My Best Friend's Wedding
(1997), a romance of friendship, and Jonathan Demme's wonderful Rachel Getting Married (2008) a romance
of family, community and art, do something similar. Altman, at his most deleriously and gleefully dejected
— so much so that he could be accused of an awful formulaic and exaggerated misanthropy — resolutely
denies viewers the ethical characters upon whom romantic comedy relies. Almost. The romance consists
in nothing but few glimmers of world-weariness in certain characters at the very end.

7. The Comedy

Romantic comedy is a simple enough term, but not if you try to define it by breaking it down into
romantic and comedy. The history of the word romance is a romance in itself: a long and complicated
journey from Rome to the romance languages, to tales told in the vernacular romance languages, to tales
and allegories of love and knight errantry, to Romantic poetry and music and Romanticism, to modern
romance or romantic love to romantic comedy. Romantic has quite different meanings depending on
whether the context is high or popular culture, technical or everyday language, on whether it's big R or a
little r. In romantic comedy it has its everyday pop cultural meaning as in 'romantic love', a term that
implies some fictional quality, for the romantic is that which is not quite real, or rather, it refers to reality's
capacity to exceed itself by means of its own potential for marvellous unreality . It all means it's not easy
to define.
Meanwhile, definitions of comedy are notoriously unsatisfying, and not just because they aren't
funny. If the section on comedy in Aristotle's Poetics had not been lost then it's likely we would have been
better off losing it.
A romantic comedy is a comedy trivially in the sense of its having a happy ending, but more
importantly it is a comedy also in its humour. It is certainly not tragic but it also not torrid or dark or
melancholy or even 'high' romance, except perhaps in parts. It might not be funny or happy from
beginning to end, and it might be sad in parts, even in its end, but it is happy. And its happiness is more
than the happiness of any work of art that works. It is the happiness of humour as in the phrase 'a sense
of humour'. It refers therefore to a virtue, and to this extent it is a genre concerned with ethics. For all that
drives it, romantic desire and hope, is also an ethical drive: how to live a good life.
Like romance, comedy too has a sort of fictional quality. Even a comic account or film of actual
events has this quality. This is not to be interpreted, by any means, as a claim that such an account blurs

13
facts and fiction or truth and falsehood. In making this claim I have no mischievous or misleading intent.
That would be such a cliché, the dull old pseudo-subversive line. Nor is it some kind of wishful thinking
on my part — that we can construct the world with our own wishful narratives. For our narratives,
cinematic or written, can merely argue about the world, from truths about it, to truths about it. Nor do I
think that the narration of actual events in a comic fashion need be in any way untrue or 'a mere fiction'.
Like romance, comedy is a kind of narrative argument.
I hesitate also to see this fictional quality as a trace merely of the subjectivity of the teller. It is
more like the events themselves being amusing. Comedy's argument demonstrates this. I would prefer to
see in the fictional quality the trace of the mood of the doers, the sufferers and the witnesses of the
events. It is the objective social mood of the events themselves and it leaves an indelible trace in a truthful
or valid comic account. For so far as events are social, the experience of those involved as doers or
sufferers or witnesses is always already part of the events. Life, as Wallace Stevens said, consists of
propositions about life. Whether those propositions are visual — the shots in a film — or linguistic
sentences. Since most of our deeds are communicative deeds, indeed many are acts of narration and self-
narration, comedy and whatever fictional quality it has works its way deep into actual experience. So long
as that experience is happy it works its way into the facts and is recorded truthfully by comedy. This surely
lies at the heart of the concepts of happiness and humour. The humour of understanding is social.
Comedy has the same collusive quality as fiction, a collusion in attitude. The collusion of humour is a kind
of social contagion; the smile is both its symptom and the agent of its contagious transmission. In its
fictional quality the humour of comic representation does not indicate something merely subjective; rather
it is a sign of and satisfaction of the effort objectification. As comedy its physiological expression is the
smile. Roisin, the female lover in Ken Loach's Ae Fond Kiss (2004), calls it the twinkle. In romantic comedy
dialogue it is humour, wit, repartee or flirting.
It might seem as if all this should only apply to linguistic accounts of events and that none of this
should apply to film of events, but not only does film record the language of dialogue, the events it
records are actions and therefore social and to that extent communicative right from the start. Mise en
scene is always, to use (I think) Adrian Martin's term, social mise en scene. The humour of romantic
comedy, in particular the wit of the dialogue and social actions that are so characteristic of the genre, is
present in its social mise-en-scene. This is partly why romantic comedy, artistically and historically, came
into its own with the talkies.

Romantic comedy need not be happy from beginning to end. It is happy in parts, happy enough
to be comedy. Ken Loach's Ae Fond Kiss may be a romantic drama most of the way through or it may be a
comedy. In fact the drama — the clash of love and tradition, western secular romance and Islamic familial
love, sex and religion — is not so different from the bourgeois and feminist themes that drove the novel's
comedies of romance — and later the cinema's. Samuel Johnson thought that in the novel there had
emerged a new genre that he called ‘the comedy of romance’. There is a common assumption that Loach
does serious social, or even socialist realism, as if his strength does not lie in his tenderness for his
characters. In Ae Fond Kiss the story of the fulfilment of love, western enlightenment romance, sex and the
secular does not miss an historical beat. Progress, the great narrative of western enlightenment, progresses.
Ever since I first saw La Regle du Jeu I have been unable to help thinking of it as a romantic
comedy, even though it lacks the romantic/comic ending. What is the ending of La Regle du Jeu. It’s not
tragic. The shot hero is hardly a hero that we have loved, not like we love say Renoir’s own character,
Octave. It has the romantic sadness of passing time, passing friendship, and unrequited love more than of
tragedy's passing life. Of lost opportunity rather than lost paradise.
At the climax of La Règle du Jeu, instead of the jealous gamekeeper’s bullets all missing, the last
one, by a farcical misrecognition, kills the lovelorn aviator hero. Rather than turn the film from romantic
comedy to tragedy, this follows the logic of romantic comedy: it confirms that the aviator hero never was
the romantic hero. Robert, the Marquis, would be if the film were a comedy of remarriage, and Octave
would be, were he not, as his bear suit reminds us, by his body destined to remain the friend and
confidant of Christine, no lover. Admirers of the film often seem constrained to praise the comedy of
manners as a critique of French society on the eve of WWII. Complacent with gravity and hindsight, they
can’t resist loading up the film, so poignant with its sense of passing time, with the weight of the coming
war. They place much emphasis on the symbolism of the slaughter in the hunting scene. It is as if, in their

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admiration, and licensed by what Renoir himself said of the film, they feel compelled to give it a moral and
political explicitness by calling it an antiwar film or a scathing social critique. But this is sheer abstraction
done by way of justification or excuse. It misses the film’s passions and its sufferings, the experience of
the living, the emotional depth of the film, which are only there in the warmth and fun of the crazy,
funny, passing present, so beautifully depicted in the whole episode of the concert and the danse macabre.

Addenda: Little Canonade

L'Atalante, Jean Vigo, 1934

Minnie and Moskowitz, John Cassavetes, 1971

Contes des quatre saisons, Eric Rohmer, 1990-98

Conte de printemps, 1990

Conte d'hiver, 1992
Conte d'été, 1996
Conte d'automne, 1998

Before Sunrise, 1995 & Before Sunset, 2004, Richard Linklater

'I Know Where I'm Going', Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1945

Better Than Sex, Jonathan Treplitzky, 2000

Last Days of Disco, Whit Stilman, 1998

Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000, Alain Tanner & John Berger, 1976

La Règle du jeu, Jean Renoir, 1939

The Awful Truth Leo McCarey, 1937

His Girl Friday Howard Hawks, 1940

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Howard Hawks, 1953

Clueless Amy Haeckerling, 1995

Down With Love Peyton Reid, 2005

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