what are romcoms about?
Romcoms are my favourite film genre.
A lot of people don't like them. And if you're one of those people, it's probably for a simple reason - they're not for you.
Romantic Comedies are a kind of mythology. What kind? Well the name gives us a lot of clues.
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People hear romance and think love. But romance comes from the word romanticism. As in the historical period. The literature genre. Or the languages.
The tl;dr on romanticism is this: for 50 years between 1800 and 1850, a bunch of people started focusing, for the first time, on emotion, individualism, "as well as glorification of the past and nature". Basically, people started giving a fuck about life itself, the internal and the external, being beautiful.
Romanticism gave us (the so-called west) a lot of things. It's the reason we have beaches and national parks. It's the reason it's considered good manners to open the door for other people. It's also the reason most of us believe that you should marry somebody you love.
In fact, romanticism invented the very idea of love as we know it today.
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Then there's the word comedy. When we think of comedy, we most often think of things that make us laugh - or at least try to.
But comedy, in this context, exists as the counterpoint to tragedy.
A tragedy is a story about a fall in fortune of a sympathetic character - most often ending in people dying. And a comedy is the inverse, a story in which somebody's fortunes go from bad to good, and where they end up both alive and better than where they began.
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So if we smash those two words together we get a close approximation of what a romantic comedy actually is - a story focused on emotions in which a person ends in a better place (emotionally) than they began.
Does the opposite - a romantic tragedy - exist? Of course. (See: Blue Valentine). But we don't call it that. For the most part, we just call them dramas. Because if we had to take every movie about love and put it in one pile, we'd have very few movies left to put in the other.
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So, are romantic comedies about love? Yes and no. Because while romcoms (like everything else) centre themselves around love, they're not being in love. They're about falling in love.
Romcoms end where falling in love ends and being in love begins. Which, as anybody who has done both knows, are two dramatically different things.
Romcoms are, for the most part, the origin story of a couple. They are the answer to the question - so often asked of couples - "So how did you two meet?". They start where you would start the story (the meet cute) and end where you would end it (the profession of love or something close to it).
It's not any more complicated than that. People who criticize romcoms for being an inaccurate and unrealistic depiction of being in love are right for all the wrong reasons. Romcoms are actually, in my opinion, a surprisingly /accurate/ depiction of what it's like to /fall/ in love - confusion, conflicts, implausibility and all.
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So, why only focus on the beginning? That's a step down the path to understanding who romcoms are a mythology for. And it's a question I'll dig into tomorrow.