tyrannosaurus-trainwreck:

So I was reading through an article by Caroline Siede and the whole weird fucking thing about romcoms clicked.

If you’re not a fan of romcoms, here’s the whole weird fucking thing of which I speak:

Generally, the behavior of one or both romantic leads is frankly appalling and also bears little resemblance to anything a real human being would actually do.  Like, if you gave the film a different score and let the actors hit their cues a little teensy bit differently, you have a horror film or a murder mystery or one of those dramas where somebody dumps his leaves on his neighbor’s lawn one too many times and suddenly you’re in the woods at 3am burying a body but the film’s too busy navel-gazing or commenting about the Human Condition to do anything with that momentum and it fizzles like the child-safe fireworks your buzzkill parents always stuck you with on the 4th of July.

Frequently, the entire premise of the film is rooted in something wildly unethical-to-actually horrific.  It’s a red-letter day in Romcom Land when the plot is driven by something as refreshingly normal as JLo meeting Mr. Right in the first trimester of her sperm-donor pregnancy!  It’s a romcom staple to have the protagonist or her love interest plotting to/succeeding in destroying a pre-existing romantic relationship to clear the way for the narrative’s preferred relationship.

Anyway, that’s the deal.  It’s a weird fucking thing.  Even in films where you love the leads to bits and everybody’s acting their faces off, you’re confronted with this alien hellscape where it’s all in the service of something that bears as little resemblance to plausible behavior from a non-deranged person as those old black and white shorts where they dress chimps up like humans and let them mock us.

But here’s why they’re so fucking weird:

The romantic comedy, as a genre, is about wish fulfillment.  Like, duh.  I don’t know why or how I’d forgotten it, but at some point I did in fact manage to forget it.  Sportsball movies
are wish fulfillment for dudes

with friends, Single Male Actionguy movies are wish fulfillment for dudes with no friends, and romcoms are wish fulfillment for ladies.

And if you’re about to tell me that you’re a lady, and you’ve never once wished for your platonic male friend to wreck your fucking wedding or for your bestie’s boyfriend to make a pass at you or to find true love with your boss/underling in the middle of a radioactive case of hostile work environment, then here’s the fucking thing about that:

Romcoms are wish fulfillment for ladies written, directed, produced, and bankrolled by an industry that fucking hates them.

Even when you get a romcom that’s got a lot of women behind the camera, you can get the studio butting in and demanding changes that reflect what the dudebros in charge are very invested in women wanting.  When it’s dudebros all the way down, with the only ladies involved playing Female Lead and Supportive Best Friend, you get some really fucked up bullshit, and that creeping lack of awareness that it is, in fact, fucked up bullshit.

It’s why you get female characters winding up with dudes who’ve been really goddamned sleazy toward them.  If it’s True Love, the guys writing it go, of course she should forgive him!  He said he was sorry and everything!  See also, female characters of sufficient hotness being forgiven for some horrible behavior.  She’s hot, the guys writing it go, who wouldn’t try to work it out! (These movies rarely end with a marriage or engagement, so the prize is “dating instead of fighting.” Not exactly a huge commitment.)

It’s why:

• female characters’ quirks and “flaws” very rarely get in the way of anyone’s boner
• female characters frequently get humiliated or taken down a couple of pegs for no particularly good reason, but male characters usually don’t suffer more than getting (mildly) called on whatever bullshit they’ve legitimately pulled to facilitate that third-act emotional growth spurt
• the female lead over forty is a rarity, but the male lead can have literally died from old age and they’re still trying to cast his embalmed corpse
• the female lead has to be stupidly gorgeous, and the male lead just has to show up

It’s also why female characters’ behavior frequently makes very, very little sense, viewed through the lens of Things That Real People Might Do.  The guys writing the script and directing the action can’t be bothered to view women as actual people with actual motives for their actions, so the behavior is just whatever’s convenient to create conflict or humor.  Or it’s how the guys writing the script would like women to behave, where they can act atrociously, make the grand gesture of lowering themselves to admitting they might actually love some dumb chick in public like a loser who has feelings or something, and that should be enough to win her back and also make her forget whatever aspirations she had that didn’t involve being their girlfriend.

It’s wish fulfillment for women, scribbled over and warped at every turn by misogynist antagonism toward and discomfort with female desire.  So there we go–that’s why romcoms are frequently so goddamned fucked up.