Same Old Story

I watched another romantic comedy tonight. By myself, as I often do. I am a connoisseur of the form. Not so much a connoisseur, I guess, as a sucker. I give just about all of them a chance. I see some good in even the worst film efforts in the genre, a form older, actually, than cinema. Boy meets girl (Or girl meets boy. Works the same), boy loses girl, boy overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles to find love. Despite Hollywood’s effort to find new twists on the idea, the same basic approach dominates the genre because people keep coming back for more of the same.

Given that my real life has rarely resembled a romantic comedy, that the situations and outcomes that so satisfy me in a film are never realized in real life, why do I keep coming back? Not to learn how to make my romantic life work. It has never worked in the last forty years. If I had learned any useful lessons from seeing all those films in the genre, you’d think it would have resulted in at least some success. Nada.

So why do I fall for the next romantic comedy that rolls of the Hollywood assembly line? They fill a need in me. That’s what stories do. That’s why we like them. We need something from them and when they deliver, we come back again and again. We so need them that when someone is good at giving them to us, we throw money at them we don’t have, shower fame and adoration on them they don’t deserve. What do I need from romantic comedies? I need my hope that I can find love replenished. A life long lived is fertile ground for cynicism, and cynicism chokes out hope and belief in romantic love. Romantic comedies are like Roundup to the cynical weeds in my garden. They don’t keep the weeds down for long, though. I need regular applications.

Stories like these emphasize beginnings. They usually ignore that relationships, as all things, have middles and ends as well. A romantic comedy dabbles in endings, often mixing in fights and breakups, but at last, only the loneliness ends and a couple begins, a flat-out denial of living reality. Romantic comedies defy endings, resist all endings, because their beating heart is the struggle against decay and death. Each of us comes out swinging with our first breath every morning and we throw down with those demons until we slip into the black every night. Low morale is very bad for our fighting spirit, and we need all the fighting spirit we can get with an opponent like Our Inevitable End. Romantic comedies are the propaganda films my soul needs to keep up the battle. They help me believe that someday, someone will have my back. Always.

It’s probably not true, but without romantic comedies, I’d be saying it’s definitely not true. That little hedge, that probably, keeps me waking up each morning. That probably is there in good measure because of Say Anything and When Harry Met Sally and Sweet Home Alabama and High Fidelity and Gross Point Blank and others. That probably keeps me looking for a glance, a giggle, a bit of easy, flirting banter with a woman that lets me know I might not be alone after all. There might not be an end. Only a wait for the next beginning. For boy meets girl.