[I've been asked to write film reviews and articles about the film industry from a girl's perspective.]
Updated 18.05.2011 - Finished article
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Romantic Comedies: Taming the Shrew
As a girl, the romantic comedy is probably one of my least favourite genres of film. Why am I writing about it then, you ask? Well, because as a girl most of them are marketed at me, and I think it's high time we talked about that.
We all know how our basic romantic comedy works. Girl meets boy, girl hates boy, one realises they can't live without the other, and, after a series of hilarious misunderstandings, realise they're meant to be, fall in love, and live happily ever after. They all drink lemonade, the end.
The characters are almost always impossibly dull. The male lead will have been created to appeal to every woman who could possibly be watching; perfect hair, perfect teeth, smart yet clueless. I have a theory that Hollywood keep a warehouse full of these people. Like clones. The lead female will usually be just as bad, if not worse; it seems there's a real cookie cutter mentality in Hollywood, where they have tried to create one single character who can represent all of us, the female hive-mind. She's independent, or tries to be. She takes care of her appearance. She's happily single – she doesn't need a man to prop her up! She's too busy living her easy-breezy life, when she's not at the office vying for that promotion or being set up on blind dates by Dawn on 5th. She's smart and organised at work, fussy and accident-prone everywhere else, and living on a permanent swing-diet of grilled chicken caesar salads and whole tubs of Ben & Jerry's. She isn't just a girl, she is Girl. Most films in which Girl is the lead character involve her being dropped into similarly copy-paste situations and expected to find her way to true happiness and love. Not that she needs love. She's totally independent, you know.
I haven't mentioned a single film yet, but I'm willing to bet you have one in mind.
The truth is, she's not a character in her own right. She's a blank, a canvas for the intended demographic to project themselves onto. It's hoped that we female viewers will be rendered physically unable watch the entire film without exclaiming “Oh, that is so like me!” every five minutes. That we will relate. That we will get it. And in the quest to make her relate-able, Girl ends up in a vague limbo, a two-dimensional hologram, rather than a real, breathing character. Her primary motives may not always be to find romance, but invariably it's obvious that she is not actually satisfied with her life until Love-Clone #5342 steps in at the end of the film and sweeps her off her feet.
It's a formula that is obviously working for mainstream cinema, which is sad, because in my opinion it's seriously stunting the development of female lead characters in films. In particular it's concerning that even the “career women”, portrayed as self-reliant, are so often shown to be either lacking or unhappy with other areas of their life. A popular character type is the unfeeling workaholic who realises that all she needed instead of that promotion was somebody to love (see: every film Sandra Bullock has ever made). It's a pretty damning message to send out to female viewers. “Think you're successful? Good for you! You still need a boyfriend though!”
Personally, watching this is kind of depressing. Not because the message is getting though; quite the opposite. This kind of laziness highlights the indifference of the industry as a whole, and projects that onto its audience. It's the attitude of an industry that doesn't want to acknowledge how outdated it's becoming. It maintains ideals of women who are only satisfied by family commitments. That being successful or having a career is somehow simply not fulfilling for us. Now, I have enough faith in the average person's intelligence to trust that these films alone don't actively change the mindset of the viewer overnight, and that's not really my issue here. My main problem is that a huge percentage of women simply don't identify with these portrayals. And yet we are shown, time and time again, the same tired characters and clichés, the same stories, the same lack of effort. We're given movies aimed almost exclusively at women, in which women are fundamentally flawed, helpless, dependant.
And it's not like good romantic comedies don't exist. Juno, for instance, was a perfect example of a type of romantic comedy in which the main point of the film, really, is watching the personal development of Ellen Page's character. The film doesn't lack its clichés and problems, but it resonated with a younger audience, male and female, because it handled these characters and their situation so very differently from what we've come to expect. Juno's an angry girl with a lot of baggage, and this is explored in depth throughout the film. When compared with Knocked Up, which came out in the same year, the differences are obvious. Katherine Heigl's character is relatively soulless, all negativity and tension. She herself has since stated that she felt Knocked Up “...paints the women as shrews, as humourless and uptight.” Where Knocked Up takes the safe (and unrealistic) happy-family ending, Juno shows us two women who have learned to depend on themselves, neither of them in a perfect situation, but both better off for it. This is what the modern romantic comedy needs more of. Less time spent on grand gestures, empty clichés and textbook endings that have no basis in reality, and more time on developing characters and relationships that a viewer can really, genuinely invest themselves in.
