Romantic Anticlimaxes

Just watched 27 Dresses last night. It was a nice little story about a woman (Jane) who can’t say “no,” even when her boss (with whom she’s secretly been in love for years) gets engaged to her sister—who has been lying about herself to secure him. Lots of painfully funny situations Jane gets herself into. And then there’s the other guy (Kevin), who drives her crazy by calling her on all her self-deceptions.

For all you cynics who say romantic comedies are predictable because you always know they’ll get together—a little education: the rom-com genre is never about who the protagonist will end up with, or if they’ll get together. In a rom-com, the audience must know that and want that. The suspense and entertainment value is based on how they will overcome all the obstacles in their way to finally get together.

So, Jane and Kevin must get together. I’m watching along as they argue and flirt, wondering when and how Jane will finally realize that Kevin—not her oblivious boss—is really the one for her. And then they get stranded at a bar in a small town. Oh dear. Here we go, I think. They’ll get drunk and then they’ll sleep together and everything will be ruined. I start begging them, “Don’t have sex. Please don’t have sex,” all the while, knowing that they’ll ignore me because, well, it’s a movie and they can’t hear me. And many filmmakers these days are dolts.

I realize many will disagree with me, in a culture raised on Friends and Sex in the City, but I think when a romantic comedy has the main couple sleep together partway through, they destroy any hope for the story to be romantic.

Yes, when they finally get together at the end of the movie, there may still be a mild sense of satisfaction that all has ended as it should. But where’s the romantic thrill? Isn’t that why we watch these movies in the first place? When you jump to the climax (literally) halfway through, all that can be left is anticlimax.

Some will argue with me on this point, telling me to get off my high horse—sex isn’t a big deal. Okay, if sex is so insignificant, why would I care if these two kiss? Why would I watch this movie, if what their bodies do together has the same significance as going out for coffee?

Sex is a big deal. If this were an action movie, you wouldn’t put the scene where the protagonist comes closest to death right in the middle of the movie. No, you save that scene for the end. Here’s to romantic comedies that make us wait for the good stuff.

What do you think?

Sympathetic Vampires and Abused Aliens: a generation with a guilty conscience?

Of the ten films nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this year, two involved little green men…or big blue women, as the case may be…

But what struck me as interesting was that in both cases, the aliens were portrayed sympathetically, and the humans were the bad guys. On the one hand, we have (as my brother pointed out) DANCES WITH WOLVES in space; on the other hand, we have X-FILES meets THE POWER OF ONE. In Avatar, humans are greedy, imperial tree destroyers; in District 9, humans are racist, arms-dealing vivisectionists.

In either case, we come out looking pretty despicable. I might even go so far as to describe our legacy as “inhumane.”

So here’s my question: why do we see ourselves this way?

And might the answer to that question be related to the proliferation of vampires-as-sympathetic-characters stories with which our generation seems obsessed?

I’m no fan of the undead—thus far, I have avoided Blade (half-vampire fights to protect innocent humans from vampire monsters) and Angel (former vampire struggles for redemption) and Twilight (guilt-burdened vampire loved by human girl). But I think I see a pattern emerging. We identify with the bad guys—whether seeking redemption for, or announcing condemnation on ourselves.

Those of us who are about 30 and under have grown up with an increasing awareness of our complicity in the rape of the environment and the exploitation of countless neighbors so we can have cheap shoes and electronics and well-traveled food in any season. We cannot drive a car or buy clothes or eat a banana without withdrawing from a global account that is rapidly disappearing.

Could this burden of guilt—persistently repudiated by our parents, but assumed true by us—be the source of our identification with fiction’s traditional villains?

What do you think?