18 - In the Mood For (Something Like) Love
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2020
Summary
Abstract
This essay sets out to define the nature of contemporary romantic comedy in cinema, in both its connections to and differences from so-called classic romantic comedy. In the 2010s, critics and champions of popular culture often ignore romantic comedy in favour of violent, action genres – a clear gender bias. The romantic comedy genre is defined as the popular form closest to ephemeral but no less significant fashions in lifestyle, taste, opinion and behaviour. Analysis of the genre has been hampered by a fetishising of a handful of classic American titles from the 1930s and 1940s, thus ignoring both the numerous international variations on the format, and the many mutations it has undergone in the later 20th and early 21st centuries.
Keywords: Genre, romantic comedy, popular culture, love, sex, Stanley Cavell
Amidst the usual, bureaucratic flood of my university's email, an announcement from the School of Political and Social Inquiry piques my attention: Professor Catherine Waldby of Sydney University will address the topic of “Banking Time: Egg Freezing, Internet Dating, and the Negotiation of Future Romance”. I quickly learn from this email that non-medical egg freezing – also known as social egg freezing – has been around for only, roughly, the past five years. Waldby's field research (“interviews with both clinicians and women who have banked their eggs”) raises “broad issues about the relationship between sexuality, reproduction, and the political economy of everyday life”. In particular, egg freezing seems to offer
a technical solution to a number of different problems women face with regard to the elongation of the life course, the cost of household establishment, and the iterative nature of relationship formation, thematised by the ubiquity of Internet dating among the interviewees.
The sociological lingo of this email announcement may be a little dry, but you can guess what, by now, I am thinking: What a great idea for a contemporary romantic comedy! All the necessary elements for a modern take on this genre are there: women who want to have children, but are hampered by their non-lasting, “iterative” relationships (i.e., one partner after another) begun on the Internet, and who, after weighing up the various emotional and economic factors, opt for a “technical solution” via a new, easily buyable option. Perhaps, in the end, there will be a random, non-virtual encounter with a potentially non-iterative partner. Or perhaps not.
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- Mysteries of CinemaReflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982–2016, pp. 301 - 310Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018