Peter William Evans & Celestino Deleyto, eds.
Terms of Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and 1990s.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
ISBN: 0 7486 0885 0
220 pp
£11.00
(Review copy supplied by Marston Book Services).
“But romantic comedy refuses to be exclusively sustained by reality principles – however much it is regulated by them – and for all modernity’s anxieties about commitment and the vicissitudes of desire, still seeks perfection” (197). So writes Peter Evans of Sleepless in Seattle (US, 1993). Such an observation is true of practically any contemporary romantic comedy and, arguably, of the contemporary romantic impulse itself.
This collection assumes that a romantic mythos descending from 11th century Provençal contes and ballades via the high Renaissance and Shakespeare, continues to animate contemporary intimate culture, despite its assimilation of fresh discourses. The book’s project is to trace the fortunes of the Hollywood “rom com” amidst the social and cultural forces that have shaped it since Annie Hall (US, 1977). Its optimistic promise is that, despite the fears and misgivings that surround love, this hardy genre had a new lease of life during this period.
Arguably, the romantic comedy faced its most gruelling test over the last two decades. If the 1930s screwball comedy cycle, the 1940s comedies of remarriage, and the “sex comedies” of the 1950s and 1960s signalled conservative re-consolidation before economic upheaval, familial breakdown, and the de-mystification of sex, the 1970s and 1980s found the very roles of men and women being re-thought. In an era in which women’s increasing social empowerment resulted in re-assessment of traditional ideas about masculinity, the romantic comedy provided a nuanced and affecting barometer of fluctuations in the postmodern love match. Each of these essays opens a window on that relationship.
In the summer 1978 issue of Film Quarterly, Brian Henderson asserted that, owing to increasing preoccupation with the self in what sociologist Christopher Lasch has characterized the “Me decade”, romantic comedy is now dead. Yet self-discovery has long been seen as a component of romantic love, and the romantic comedy has learned to factor self-examination into its confections. Responding to post-liberationist soul-searching in the 1970s was the work of Woody Allen, a key figure in the evolution of the romantic comedy. Examined here by Frank Krutnik, Annie Hall became an important moment in the genre, crystallizing masculine insecurity and plotting female trepidation. But providing a foundation for the genre’s subsequent renewal. Annie Hall was the original “nervous romance”, a tagline Krutnik adopted in 1990 to describe the 1970s forebears of what fellow commentator Steve Neale in 1992 would dub the upbeat “new romance” of the 1980s. For Krutnik, the archetypal new romance When Harry met Sally (US, 1989) rewrote Annie Hall: celebrating traditional romance, acknowledging its contrivance, but reaffirming the couple.
The progression from the desultory world of Annie Hall to the pragmatism of When Harry met Sally saw the emergence of a new onscreen status quo. If the songs and movies of the classical decades seem more like enjoyable icing to protagonists of the new romance, there is a new realism around the desires and expectations of men and women. If Annie sings It had to be you whilst feedback sabotages the club microphone, the song becomes decorative punctuation in Harry and Sally’s ongoing rapport. Whilst Alvy and Annie’s relationship fails to survive psychoanalysis, Harry feels able to characterize the self-doubting Sally at one point as not so much “difficult” as (more positively) “challenging.”
Neale dated the appearance of the new romance from around 1987 and releases like Something Wild (US, 1986), Moonstruck and Roxanne (US, both 1987). All the films examined in this collection participate in varying ways in this shift. Something Wild reinforced the link between love and self-awareness for Constanza del Río as their experiences force both Charlie and Lulu to change, even pushing the comedy towards film noir. To Deleyto, Alice (US, 1990) focusses on the woman’s subjectivity and indicts the patriarchal traditionalism that keeps her from realizing her potential. As Deleyto points out, as preoccupied as Allen has been with the neurotic male, his 1980s work contained some of the most sensitive examinations of feminine subjectivity in recent American cinema. Conservative as it may ultimately be, for Chantal Cornut-Gentille Working Girl (US, 1988) still made space for the bonding rituals of single working women. In an interesting re-reading of Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (US, 1991), Isabel Santaolalla finds it conforming to the classical comedy of re-marriage. Yet by re-asserting the claim of this particular marital bond, Lee re-asserts the black community’s stake in America without recourse to exclusively white chattels and privileges. In a nicely argued piece in which Kathleen Rowe Karlyn perceptively marshals genre and mise-en-scène, the US independent Allison Anders’ Gas Food Lodging (US, 1992) is found simultaneously raiding the traditional “woman’s picture”, and reformulating romantic comedy to embrace contemporary American tensions around race and class.
For Peter Evans, Meg Ryan symbolizes the new romance: “for to look at Meg Ryan is to contemplate a world free of demons and terror” (190). Yet it is in her that yearning for old certainties and striving for postmodern accommodation encounters problems. As cute as she may be in Evans’ celebratory prose, Ryan remains for many a conservative embodiment of romantic allure. As Evans points out, she lets slip “complex realities, desires and frustrations of modern women” (12) in an age of ambivalence. The constructedness of the star, her trademark grins and tics, never quite defeat our concern over the gender troubles, squalor, permissiveness, crime and terror which surround us and her. You feel Evans’ ambivalence, that he is hard pushed to characterize Ryan as much more than a fluffy amelioration of treacherous modern singlehood.
Considering Jane Campion’s In the Cut (US/UK, 2003), Sandra Hebron writes of Ryan’s “career-best performance as the tough-talking but vulnerable Frannie” (London Film Festival programme, 8). Consonant with the new image, Ryan turned up at the premiere in a “floor-length black gown by Azzedine Alaia” (AOL Homepage, 24 October 2003). Were we witnessing a key episode in a new reconciliation of innocence and experience? It is to its credit that romantic comedy has more accommodations to make before the realities of contemporary intimacy. Evans and Deleyto’s is nevertheless a provocative and poignant reminder of some salutary nights out.
Richard Armstrong
UK.
Created on: Tuesday, 4 May 2004 | Last Updated: 4-May-04