A student of mine recently asked me a challenging question. He looked me in the eyes and asked, “what is the so-called Romantic Comedy, as a genre, predicated on?”
After a long pause I responded as follows:
Hollywood’s romantic comedy, presuming he meant Hollywood, which he did, is predicated on sentimental love. As Erich Fromm so astutely has described it in his The Art of Loving, the essence of sentimental love is experienced only in fantasy and not really in the present, what he calls the “here and now.” In other words sentimental love is sort of a vicarious experience. The average audience of a given romantic comedy, I will call him Bob, knows the outcome of the narrative before even entering the theatre and suspending his disbelief. What’s at stake for Bob is the degree of sentimental love he shall experience as a result of viewing the fictional love story unfolding in the theatre or his living room. He is, in fact, the consumer of prepackaged sentimental love. If he is alienated from his spouse, which, sadly, is the case in far too many modern and postmodern marriages, then he must be harboring many unfulfilled desires for love, union, and organic intimacy. Chances are, that is the case for Bob’s wife too.
So he looks for a satisfying experience in viewing of a romantic comedy. This cathartic experience is not quite satisfying, however. And that is exactly the space where the producers of such generic sentimental love stories want their consumer to be; satisfied but only temporarily. Hollywood wants and conditions return customers, hence the success of the genre cinema. If Bob is incapable of intersubjectivity with his spouse, then he will allow himself to be emotionally manipulated by sentimental love, even if only for two hours at a time, and participate in the happy or sad love story of the likes of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks on the silver screen—or the flat LCD screen!
The interesting and perhaps alarming fact is that for many couples watching a romantic comedy is the closest experience of love they can have. This experience of sentimental love of two other fictional characters is a virtual experience of an idealized love, to be sure. This begs the question, what if the same couple (e.g., Bob and his wife) tried to experience organic love in their relationship? Has the consumer society socialized Bob and his wife to the point of disability in experiencing a concrete love in their relationship? Real love is indeed different than the sentimental stuff one sees as released by the dream factory. Real love requires being in the here and now and dealing with the complexities of intersubjectivity.