an encomium for rom-coms.

Besides school shootings and Paris Hilton, America is known for two things:

1) Western movies

2) Romantic comedies

Both westerns and rom-coms are beautiful things. Westerns, especially, have “America” stamped all over them. As Cormac McCarthy has pointed out, wherever you go on this planet, people have heard about and been fascinated by the lore of the West, cowboys and Indians, saloons and shoot-outs.

I’ll save my encomium to westerns for another post. For now, I want to praise the rom-com.

What prompted me to praise rom-coms was watching Crazy, Stupid, Love. Although rom-coms are an American invention (going back to Gone with the Wind, quite frankly, my dear), it’s the British who have mastered the art form. If I were to make a list of the Best Rom-Coms of All Time, British entries would top the list, thanks in no small part to Richard Curtis, the genius behind Love Actually, the sweetest of the sugary sweet rom-coms, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, the once and future king of art house rom-coms.

American rom-coms, while always a lovely diversion, tend to be, well, American rom-coms: utterly predictable. The form is so successful that producers fear to deviate from it. (Not so with the Brits: don’t tell me you knew he’d die in Four Weddings and a Funeral.) However, Crazy, Stupid, Love has single handedly restored my faith in the American rom-com. If you haven’t seen it, go rent it . . . pronto! It is  perhaps the greatest romantic comedy of all time. It “transcends the genre,” as they say. Lush, romantic, funny, daring, transporting . . . if it doesn’t kindle something inside you, you may be experiencing heart failure.

To those who doubt my love of romantic comedies, I will say only this: Try To Write One. There must be a perfect balance of character, story, ambiance, romance and comedy (obviously), and a certain something that I’ll call the remediation of life. Audiences love romantic comedies because they see something of themselves in the characters and the stories. To write a successful rom-com is to tap into the psychology of the Western romantic aesthetic. To write a successful rom-com is to invent that perfect rhetoric of desire and fulfillment (or lack thereof) which girds our romantic tradition, from courtly love to Romeo and Juliet to Jack and Rose. To write a successful rom-com is to transport a million people from a million backgrounds into the sensations of their own (un)requited amores, their own vidas amorosas, and to make those people feel they are not alone in their relational experiences.

This is no small feat. I have the highest respect for the screenwriters and directors who know how to craft a romantic comedy. Here’s to them.

::takes a shot::