Towards the end of 2016 on his podcast Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project, Adam begins a discussion where the classic romantic comedy has gone. He asserts that newer films in the genre replace the comedy aspect with drama, rather than actual jokes and comedic plot lines. Now this is a trend that I had subconsciously noticed myself, but once I heard it put into words it really stuck. Nearly all the romantic comedies I as shown while growing up were at least a decade old, and today the box offices seem to be devoid of the genre.
Looking at Rotten Tomatoes list of the top 30 romantic comedies (a selection I find extremely dubious and modern focused) nine were made in this century, and only six in this decade. And many of the ones made recently like The Big Sick, while comedic, do heavily rely on the crutch of drama to add to the story.
But why is this? Why has one of the most beloved and lighthearted genres suddenly fallen off? I propose it is due to pacing. The trend of film almost since its inception has been to become faster and faster. However this trend has really been exacerbated in the past 10 years or so with the rise of extremely fast super hero franchises like Marvel becoming wildly popular. Modern audiences just want to get into the action quickly, and stay in it as long as possible before it becomes too corny. This is why so many super hero films use dialog, or voice-over monologues to convey exposition. It covers the necessary information quickly and efficiently at the expense of being lazy. And this is the reason we find old films so hard to watch today, two and a half hour classics like The Sting or Gone With The Wind were made for a different audience who had longer attention spans for film.
However this formula does not lend itself to a romantic story where, the payoff of the couple together has to happen at the end of the film, and the real meat of the story is all just build up. The idea of just jumping into the good stuff and keeping the viewer engaged is difficult to achieve when so much exposition and ground work is required. This is why drama has begun to creep in. The health scares and lost jobs are another easy layer that writers can use to play at our interests and keep us engaged while the main romantic story unfolds at the necessary slow rate.
I think this trend is a real shame. Not to say that The Big Sick is a bad film because it has adapted to the times, but that as a society we can no longer sit down and enjoy watching a story slowly unfold without simply getting bored. And I do not mean to suggest that I am not included in this modern trend of shorter attention spans and on-demand entertainment, but I still feel that we are losing something, an appreciation for cinema that we will never quite understand at the same level we used to.
One thing that I think has aided the rise of the fast-paced drama (if our Tragedy unit taught me anything) is the catharsis factor, which you didn't mention in the blog post. The expelling of emotion is something the drama allows for in spades, but so does the comedy, albeit in a quieter way. Our reactions upon watching the last minutes of a rom-com may not be as volatile as our reactions to a drama or a thriller flick, but they let us feel a certain amount of satisfaction as the pieces fall into the right places. An example of this is the idea of the "well-made play," like The Importance of Being Earnest. However, I agree with you - the slower pace and unconditionally positive, charming nature of comedies from decades ago is something that I miss, but hey - conventions in drama, art, and literature have changed over time. In the grand scheme of things, film is a very young medium, so these changes are still probably surprising to us.
ReplyDeleteI think this is absolutely true, and while I haven't kept up to date with romantic comedies of nowadays, I think your comments on rom-coms of the past are insightful and interesting. I wonder: where did the romantic comedy genre come from originally -- what did it replace? I'd be interested to see whether this is merely a cyclical fashion -- more dramatic rom-coms outdo their lighthearted predecessors, but eventually the fashion will shift and we'll see a breakout long-building comedy that will inspire a wave in the other direction -- or whether this really is a permanent or generational shift in style. Perhaps it's just a coincidence of which films have done well in the box offic recently?
ReplyDelete