The Glamour of Romance

Glamour is essential to romantic comedy. Most modern romantic comedies will have a scene in which we see a character, usually the heroine, getting dressed, applying make up, etc.

Katherine Heigl in Life as we know it (2010)

Katherine Heigl in Life as we know it (2010)

Two of the greatest threats to the romantic comedy, that came in the 1960s and lingered until around 1990, were cinema verite (direct cinema) and the New Hollywood. Both have an interest in "realist" aesthetics.

Here is a quote from Robert Towne, one of the leading screenwriters of the New Hollywood:

When I was a kid, I noticed four things about movies: the characters could always find parking spaces at every hour of the day and night, they never got change in restaurants, and husbands and wives never slept in the same bed. Women went to sleep with their makeup on and woke with it unmussed. I thought to myself, I'm never going to do that.

(Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, p. 33)

That last one amounts to a renunciation of romantic comedy! How can two people be shown to fall in love with each other within the generic outlines of a romantic comedy if they see each other as they really are?!

We're happy to watch a man fall in love with this Katherine Heigl:

Not this one:

A romantic comedy is not about sex, it's about glamour. Woody Allen made this point in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), with a hero who was all glamour, and was everything the real world heroine desired.

every thought is a wave

You are floating in the ocean, wishing to be an anchor. You would like to think of yourself as a buoy, anchored to the ocean floor. But like the rest of us, you are floating untethered.

The ocean is kilometres deep. No one is anchored. The waves move every one of us.

From where you are swimming some people seem not to move. So much so they seem anchored to the ocean floor. But they only seem that stable from where you are swimming. If you could see them from another angle, closer perhaps, you would see that they are rising and falling with the waves just as you are.

From where you are swimming some people are so visible they seem like lighthouses. Their presence in your part of the ocean is so great, that it feels as if you cannot swim for yourself, that you have to swim towards or against them. But they are not lighthouses. They are floating in the ocean just as you are. There are many people swimming who cannot see them at all.

The hunter falls in love with his prey

There is a recurrent theme in romantic comedy for the hunter to fall in love with his prey. Typically, these are the bet films - She's All That, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, 10 Things I Hate About You... In all of them the romantic pursuer (both of them in ...10 Days) has an ulterior motive in pursuing the romantic interest - to win a bet, to further their career, etc., which all have in common a desire to expand their own ego.

This is not a new phenomenon, going back to Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), the romantic engine of which is retold in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). In each case an ambitious female journalist falls in love with her subject.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

In the ruthless pursuit of ambition an egoist trips and gets stuck on a detail, only for that detail to grow into the rest of their lives. In paving a road the weeds broke through the cracks and destroyed the road completely. A sudden crisis of conscience on seeing the consequences of their selfish, ruthless ego expansion - if only multinationals would follow suit.

And this motif recurs in 27 Dresses, when Kevin (Malcolm Doyle) does exactly the same thing to Jane that Jean Arthur did to Gary Cooper in 1936.

27 Dresses (2008) The headline pans down...

... to show Jane at her most vulnerable moment.

Romcom 2.0

Sequels, remakes and references have been a part of cinema ever since the second film ever made. How does one do a sequel of a romantic comedy? Put the leads together again!

Runaway Bride is the sequel to Pretty Woman.

You've Got Mail is the sequel to Sleepless in Seattle.

And Larry Crowne is the lovechild of those two sequels.

Drew and Adam made two films together too (The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates).

But these days you don't even have to put the leads together again. One will do. "It's another Katherine Heigl movie." "That's good enough for me, let's go!"