rom com mindset

Notting Hill, Nora Ephron, Pride and Prejudice, The Green Ray, existential despair

I.

I really love the movie Notting Hill. It is far too self-serious and twee for its own good, and it has an awful soundtrack, but it also has this diffuse alluring quality that I am unable to discount. It is about an everyman who falls in love with a famous actress played by Julia Roberts. She disappears and reappears in his life until finally, pretending to be a journalist, he confesses his love for her at a press conference and they get married and are presumably happy for the rest of their lives.

A lot of people will tell you that the romance genre is escapist for them, as in, romance books and movies are tools that help them escape from their dreary lives for the duration of the fiction. However, something that I’ve noticed during my recent period of watching lots of rom coms is that they’re not just escapist, they’re also about escapism. Love in these films is often marked by artifice or fictionality — there is an unreal sheen that elevates it above the otherwise mundane lives that the protagonists live. We all know that desire and narrative are associated with each other, and to engage with romance is to engage with ‘the marriage plot’, but this, to me, seems like another angle — that love brings some element of artifice into the banal world, and that artifice itself is what redeems this world.

In Notting Hill, Julia Roberts is an actress, someone associated with an elevated, artificial sphere. She moves through the film as if she has a halo, bringing a soft glow to Hugh Grant’s rather unsuccessful life. We never lose awareness of her celebrity, and there is an element of grace to her presence, as if, just by bringing this celebrity into the mundane world, she makes it a little bit more bearable. All of the small and large disappointments which mark the lives of Hugh Grant and his friends are eased by the simple presence of beautiful celebrity Julia Roberts, the entrance of a salvific artifice into their world. If melancholy everyman Hugh Grant is connected to beautiful celebrity Julia Roberts, then he gets to be a part of a story bigger than himself, his life has meaning, and he will be happy for the rest of time. The film implies that this happiness will indeed be the outcome, as the two get married and we see some softly-lit shots of them being in love in a park.

The Nora Ephron films You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle literalize this idea that artifice will save you from mundane life even further.¹ The ‘love stories’ in the two films are honestly pretty flimsy; it’s the artificial that is strong and seductive. Sleepless in Seattle features a frustrated Meg Ryan essentially stalking a man who she heard talking about his love for his ex wife on the radio. She builds up a love story based on this stylized, not-real-life radio clip. In real life, her fiance is allergic to everything and snores. The man on the radio promises romance in that he promises something other than real life: a story. At one point, Meg Ryan’s friend tells her this:

That’s your problem. You don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.

Well, exactly.

The film ends with Meg Ryan and the man on the radio meeting in an extremely contrived situation and falling in love immediately. Hyper-stylized movie love has triumphed over the mundane. You’ve Got Mail has a similar plotline, as two people fall in love through their AOL personae, while hating each other in real life. The dreamy artifice of the online world eventually triumphs over the harsh reality of the two leads’ business rivalry. None of this is about being in love, really: it’s more about being swept away by the tropes of romantic fiction, and finally achieving happiness once this fiction has entirely overcome the unjust banality of everyday life. I found the Ephron movies kind of annoying, but I think, along with Notting Hill, they express a pain that is really too pathetic and mundane to be expressed, and that is that everyday life can be unbearable, in its little indiginities and constant repetition, in the fact that nobody is ever going be able to make any of it ok. In light of that, it can be terribly satisfying to see characters elevated out of daily life, into a stylized world in which artifice reigns and things happen like they do in fiction. They’re like modern day saint narratives. Hugh Grant, after suffering the simple indignities of being alive, is given the grace of getting to live with beautiful celebrity Julia Roberts, who embodies the glow of the movies, forever.

II.

You’ve Got Mail, like many other rom-coms, is a very loose Pride and Prejudice adaptation. Pride and Prejudice has had a long afterlife and could probably be considered one of the founding texts of the romance genre, although it doesn’t really resemble its imitators. People are obsessed with ‘enemies to lovers’ because of Pride and Prejudice.

Pride and Prejudice is relevant to this particular essay because of its stakes. If Elizabeth and Jane do not get married, they will eventually have to live out their lives in genteel poverty. Darcy and Bingley literally save them from the drudgeries of everyday life by attaching them to massive fortunes, beautiful homes, and lives of leisure. It seems to me that this economic crisis that the Bennet sisters face has been hollowed out by later adaptations and repurposed as an existential crisis. The Bennets’ lack of financial security becomes a lack of meaning. Love gains a spiritual quality as it becomes the thing that imposes narrative and meaning onto the lovers’ lives. To live without love is to live like Hugh Grant in the Julia Roberts-less part of Notting Hill — watching the seasons pass, taking the same walk to and from work everyday, enduring as your life and the lives of your loved ones succumb to age and entropy.

There is, however, a kernel of this salvific power of artifice in Pride and Prejudice. When Lizzie sees Pemberley, Darcy’s huge mansion home, her view of him changes decidedly for the better, and she begins to imagine what it would be like to be his wife. We could read this as a purely mercantile impulse — Lizzie wants to be very rich — but I think what this scene really shows is Lizzie’s first encounter with Darcy’s taste. His well-decorated rooms, naturalistic park, and sister, raised lovingly into a respectable young woman by him, all show that Darcy is not, like her own family, painfully crude. By marrying Darcy, Lizzie enters a world of good aesthetics, where she is less exposed to the tiresome and foolish. On a literary level, her family is marked by farce and satire. As Darcy’s wife, she gets to exit the biting farce that is daily life at the Bennets’. Her life is given more dignity, and more meaning.

To be a piece of media that references Pride in Prejudice is to heighten the sense that a meaningful story is playing out in these characters’ lives. I think this is part of the reason why the romance genre is so defined by its tropes, because it’s not the love of the other person that saves the protagonist, it’s the ability to live out the Romance Story, the inherently meaningful story that will dignify their entire life. It’s an inherently self reflexive genre, and at its best, it plays with this. At its worst, it does provide pure escapism, allowing the reader to block out the everyday and imagine, for a moment, that they, too, get to live this inherently meaningful story which has nothing to do with the mundane passage of days.

III.

The true fantasy of this kind of romance is that everything is going to change for you, that you’ll be swept up into the artificial and that everything will be ok. Maybe, like Meg Ryan flying to New York, or Hugh Grant chasing Julia Roberts around London, you can take some kind of meaningful action that will change everything in an instant. Or maybe someone else will be there to take that action for you. What I’ve realized, though, is that willpower is kind of a murky thing. It’s really hard to act a lot of the time. It’s even harder to change. Narrative tends to feature a series of actions and crises that build to a conclusion, but everyday life is marked by repetition and frustration. Often, change involves doing the same thing over and over again, and desperately trying not to do that thing, until something comes along that finally makes it click, finally allows you to make the change that you need to make.

Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray is about this. This is a difficult film to watch. The protagonist, Delphine, is very depressed, and has recently broken up with a boyfriend. She tries multiple times to go on vacation and have a good time, but she ends up crying, or feeling isolated from others, or leaving early. She can’t escape herself, and as the film goes on her frustration with her inability to change her state becomes palpable. She overhears a group of people talking about ‘the green ray’, a line of green light which supposedly appears as the last ray of the sun when it is setting over the ocean on a very clear day. The green ray, someone in the group says, portends love. She meets a young man whom she clearly has chemistry with, and, with a sense of immense intensity, takes him to the beach, where she watches for the green ray and starts to cry. She sees it, shouts in triumph, and the film ends.

The green ray is arbitrary, but it allows Delphine to let go of her isolation and sadness and, we hope, start to connect with people again. We can see in the film how desperate Delphine is to narrativize her life — she knows that bringing in a little bit of artifice will help her act like an agent again, and finally change. I wonder if romance presents the fantasy of entering into an elevated narrative because, in real life, a little bit of artifice can help us convince ourselves to do things differently, or to move on from things that are difficult. I was in Cape Cod recently, visiting my family, and I think I saw the green ray as the sun set over the water. It was barely a flash — if I hadn’t seen the movie, I wouldn’t have noticed anything. I’m half convinced that I made it up. Still, it felt important, and I remembered Delphine’s narrative, and wondered if I might be able to move on from my own frustrations and repetitive self-destructive behaviors. I think that what romance gets right is that artifice can give us a moment of grace, a moment when we might imagine things differently. That moment, however, is only a moment, and where the romance protagonist gets to luxuriate in it forever, for us it departs as soon as the sun goes down.

1. When Harry Met Sally doesn’t do any of this. I really liked that movie — I was so surprised to see the other Nora Ephron movies and realize that they essentially have the opposite ethos!