An infuriatingly incorrect chart of "rom coms"
and a thorough enumeration of everything wrong with it
This post is a companion post, meant to be a kind of side car to my recent essay Girls Just Want to Have Fun. In that article, I used this chart, which was created for and posted alongside an article which I was addressing and referencing. This is not going to be written in a formal way. I am, deep down, a hater, and that’s what I’m here to do today.
Since I saw this chart while looking up think pieces on the subject of romcoms, i have been ranting and raving about it to anyone who will listen and I STILL find new problems with it.
The idea behind this chart, the hypothesis it is meant to provide data to support, is that romcoms generally portrayed men in higher positions of power and/or wealth in comparison to their feminine counterpart. I address all the issues with that concept and its implications in the main piece I wrote, but here I’d like to address the content itself. The data points used by the author and the judgements she made in the process.
A whole fuck ton of this is outright wrong, like objectively wrong, so I’ll start there.
Full disclosure, I only have a strong memory of about 70% of these,
shit that is fucking wrong:
In Bring it On Kirsten Dunst’s love interest is NOT her cheating college bf. Her love interest is her friends hot brother who is largely considered a loser and beneath her.
and even if he was, he is not a law student, he is a freshman at a state school on a cheer scholarship
In Sweet Home Alabama, Reese’s love interest is NOT Patrick Dempsey, he is her (almost) exhusband, who is, as far as we know for most of the movie, some white trash loser
The Zenon entry straight up has a typo, and also is not a romcom (though the definition of that and how loosely it’s used here I will get to shortly
In 27 Dresses, he is not so much a journalist as a copywriter from marriage announcements, while she is the direct assistant to a high power CEO
In Legally Blonde, he is not a seasoned attorney by any means, he’s a TA or adjunct who has passed the bar, and seems to pretty quickly discover she’s a better lawyer than him, he never practices law and never treats her like hes her mentor in any capacity
The Devil Wears Prada is not a romcom. I will, again, start to split hairs on the genre definition in a moment, but I am completely certain that The Devil Wears Prada is not one, and if it was (which it isn’t) Adrien Grenier’s character is not even the guy she flirts with, hes her bf at the beginning who breaks up with her and disappears by the third act, he is universally hated.
What is a romcom?
In my opinion a romantic comedy can be defined as a comedy where the main plot is the romantic story line, meaning the conflict, climax, and resolution are directly related to the status of the relationship, if not directly than in almost exact parallel. Strife must come to and/or from the relationship, it cannot be smooth sailing (Legally Blonde, for example, they’re basically fine the entire time). Just because its about a girl who gets a bf by the end of the movie, doesn’t make it a romcom!
What job is actually better? And what language is she using? And, oops, is she being accidentally misogynistic here?
Honestly, what is she getting at here? Men are aspiring lawyers, even as college undergrads (Clueless) but women are law students (Legally Blonde). Law school TAs are “seasoned lawyers.” Men are “reporters” and “journalists,” women are “writers.” Leading with “hooker” just tells me most of what I need to know about the truth of this writer’s bias.
What movies could she have chosen that would better illustrate her point?
What irks me most is that other movies would’ve better illustrated her point, but she neglected to use them for some reason. Love, Actually has a relationship between a renter/lodger and his maid who speaks a different language as well as the prime minister and his office aide. In Two Weeks Notice she’s a lawyer working for him, and she’s been basically demoted to the role of assistant. In Silver Linings Playbook she’s several years his junior, more emotionally vulnerable in many ways, and he is prone to violent or at least scary emotional outbursts. In Confessions of a Shopaholic she works under him, and is in a huge amount of financial debt, relying on him to get her out of a few tough situations.
Anyways, as I remember more stuff I hate about this, I’ll probably add to this lol. Sorry if it’s messy, I just wanted to go off a little bit.