The Sissy Syndome

By Josh Hornbeck I hate romantic comedy. There’s just something about the genre that grates on me – something that irritates me beyond any reasonable expectation. It’s taken me years to understand the aversion and revulsion that wells up within me whenever I see Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks together on screen. At first, I thought it was just because romantic comedies were sappy, saccharine, and trite. Then I thought it might just be the genre’s poor writing that bothered me. But the more I thought about it – having nothing better to do with my time – the more I realized that there was something deeper, something more essential in my frustration with the form, something that goes beyond artistic merit or testosterone bias, something that goes the to very heart and philosophy behind many of the genre’s most popular and successful works. I call it “The Sleepless in Seattle Syndrome” – “The Sissy Syndrome” for short.

In Sleepless in Seattle, one of the first pairings(1) between Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, Ryan plays a young woman – engaged and living with her fiancé – who hears a tale of woe on the radio concerning a man, played by Hanks, whose wife had passed away and was living in depression and loneliness. Ryan’s character begins to fall in love with this total stranger, drawn as she is to his plight and his lonely tenderness. There’s a spark, a magnetic attraction between these two, even though they live on opposite ends of the country and have never met one another. By the end of the film, she has left her incredibly understanding fiancé and we’re supposed to believe that these two crazy kids are going to make a perfect life with one another.

The formula was repeated again in You’ve Got Mail, also starring Hanks and Ryan. This time both of the leads are in serious, committed relationships with other partners. Both are living with their significant others. But both are willing to throw these long-term relationships away when they discover that magical thing we find in Western romantic narratives – the spark, the sizzle, the chemistry.

Both Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail typify what I believe to be the problem with most romantic comedies. In an effort to be light and fluffy, the filmmakers ignore the very real fact that all of our actions have consequences. Meg Ryan is engaged to another man. She’s living with this other man. And this “other man” is just tossed aside. We, the audience, don’t really care because he’s not Tom Hanks and we’ve been taught to believe that Tom and Meg deserve to be together. In real life, however, you don’t just leave your fiancé on a whim, and there is certainly more emotion and upheaval in your life when you break off any engagement. Relationships aren’t things you just get over with no feels of pain or loss. And when sex is added to the equation, the emotional ties are even deeper, the relational issues even more complicated.

Why is it that the romantic comedy is the most acceptable genre in the Christian community? It seems that people who complain about the loose morals and decadence of Hollywood movies all love those light and fluffy romantic comedies. As long as sex is never shown, as long the implications of sexual conduct are kept to a minimum, romantic comedies are given a free pass. In both Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, we never see the characters in any sort of a remotely sensual or overtly sexual situation. Consequently, those in the Christian community adore both films. As long as it isn’t seen, it’s okay. While darker comedies or more weighty dramas may have more explicit content – content that is more immediately offensive to those of us in the church – they also tend to show us the consequence and weight of our actions. Romantic comedy, in the guise of light and fluffy entertainment, communicates a very powerful and very destructive message.

What do these films teach us? What do these films communicate to us? They tell us that our actions have no consequence. They tell us that life should be lived according to whim and according to the tossing and turning of our emotions. They teach us that sex isn’t important, that it doesn’t matter what we do, as long as we follow our heart. And we see the effects of this deeply-rooted belief throughout our culture. Everywhere around us, men and women live their lives as if their actions had no consequence. Couples ignore the commitment of marriage with reckless abandon. The divorce rate keeps climbing as husbands and wives seek to recapture the spark they see characters in the movies finding. No one wants to accept the consequence of their choices. In fact, as a culture, we seem to be quite adept at hiring high-priced lawyers just to avoid those consequences.

One of the other major problems that permeates the romantic comedy is what film critic Roger Ebert refers to as the “idiot plot.” In an idiot plot, characters conveniently lie to one another or just don’t tell the whole truth, only in order to serve the necessities of the film’s plot. All of the movie’s tension is a false tension, created by writers who want to throw complications at the romantic well-being of our heroes. So when characters who are in committed, loving relationships discover something shocking or surprising about their partners, they don’t go to their partner for an explanation (there’s always a benign explanation in these films), they fly off the handle and break off the relationship in an act of rash retaliation. Then, at the end, when they finally talk to their partner and their partner explains what really happened, everyone comes back together for the disingenuous happy ending.

This lack of narrative honesty leaves us feeling like relational idiots when we’re not able to make our problems go away as easily as Tom and Meg do on the big screen. And when our problems aren’t as easily solved as similar problems are solved in the movies, we wonder what’s the point of continuing on. Sure, we may be able to intellectually realize that a movie is a movie and real life is something different, but deep down we want our lives to echo and mirror the romantic fairy tales we see in our local multiplex.

So is the romantic comedy, as a genre and form, completely worthless? Can romantic comedies have something valuable to contribute to society and to the formation of our lives? I think they can, even though most of them are shallow and vacuous. But there are a few prime examples of the romantic comedy, examples that show us the form at its height, using form and convention to communicate deeper truths, to show us the consequences of our actions and choices, to show us real relationships and real emotions.

When it comes to the modern romantic comedy, the template and formula were brilliantly given to us in When Harry Met Sally, one of the greatest modern romantic comedies.(2)Once again, we have Meg Ryan (as Sally), but this time Harry is played by Billy Crystal instead of Tom Hanks. We follow Harry and Sally throughout their incredibly long courtship, from becoming good friends to becoming lovers, from breaking up to getting back together again. Every relationship the characters enter into means something. Every time characters in the film end a relationship there is real pain. One-night stands aren’t just something characters enter into out of momentary lust, only to forget about it and move on in the morning. The characters have to deal with real confusion and hard emotions throughout the course of the film. When Harry and Sally finally do get together, the movie has earned its happy ending. Harry and Sally have suffered through pain and heartbreak, a little wiser now, finally ready to enter into a mature, loving and caring relationship.

Say Anything, directed by Cameron Crowe, is one of the greatest teenage romantic comedies to come out of the late eighties and early nineties. On the surface it has all of the elements of the eighties teen sex comedies or the John Hughes/Molly Ringwald collaborations. However, what it does better than any other film of its type is show us a real relationship between two very real people. We can understand why Lloyd and Diane get together. We can understand why they stay together. And we can understand why their fledgling relationship is in peril. It isn’t because of a simple misunderstanding that could easily be cleared up by having the characters actually talk to one another. When Lloyd and Diane have sex, they become more involved, their relationship becomes more complicated. And it makes the pain of their breakup even more acute.

Perhaps my favorite romantic comedy is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by the brilliant Charlie Kaufman and directed by music video maestro Michel Gondry. The film looks at the strong pull between two people destined to fall in love with one another. It takes a quirky conceit – after a bitter breakup, the two lovers have each other erased from their memories – and finds real emotions, real depth, and real humor in an outrageous situation. The process by which Joel has Clementine erased from his memory works backward, starting with the most recent memory and working back to the first. So we get to see the end of their relationship, the pain and the heartbreak, first and then see why this couple really is good for one another. It has a happy ending, like most romantic comedies, but it knows that life won’t be smooth sailing for this couple, and they know it too, but they are both determined to work through the messiness.

Those three films exemplify what I think is best about the romantic comedy. All deal with real human emotions. All deal with the consequences of their characters’ actions. All three are very funny, but all three have real depth and meaning. For the romantic comedy to live up to its full potential, it needs to take to heart the model supplied by When Harry Met Sally, and not just on a superficial, thematic level. Romantic comedies can and should have happy endings where love triumphs over all. They should be very fun and very funny. But instead of using idiotic misunderstandings to drive their characters apart, only to bring them back together again with an easy laugh; romantic comedies need be about real people dealing with the very real emotions that arise from being in love and being in a relationship. Filmmakers need to remember that our actions have consequences. And while love may triumph over all, sometimes we need to have our hearts broken a little to come to a deeper and more honest understanding of what true love really is.


(1) I believe their first movie together was the wildly eccentric Joe Versus the Volcano, maybe the only time I’ve really liked them together in the same movie.
(2) It’s interesting to me that both Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail were written and directed by Nora Ephron, and that When Harry Met Sally was written by Ephron. It’s fascinating that one of the filmmakers responsible for the heights of the genre was also responsible for its depths.


(Posted 09/12/2006)

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