The Ugly Truth about the Beautiful Women of RomCom? I hate them.

Somewhere, in a luxury apartment, located in a big American city, a beautiful woman frantically gets ready for work.  She tries on hundreds of designer outfits, pulled from a massive walk-in closet. She hops up and down while concurrently putting in earrings and putting on shoes. She has an important meeting.  Although she doesn’t look a day over 25 years old, she has already made partner at her law firm.  She is about to give a very big presentation to the CEO of a large Japanese electronics company.  Later, she will go on a luxury shopping trip which is accompanied by a musical montage featuring a song about using credit card, (see Cantrell, Blu).  At some point, she will cry comically.  She has a sassy gay best friend who, like a sycophantic C-3P0, has no life of his own and lives only to comfort her and say really, really sassy things.  Despite her senior position and her implied workaholic lifestyle, she has the vocabulary of a 14 year old and talks only of getting engaged/finding a boyfriend.

I don’t actually know this woman, but I feel like I do. That’s because I watch a lot of romantic comedies.  And in almost every movie, I immensely dislike her. 

Question: What do the RomCom characters all have in common?

Answer: I hate them.

I want them all to die alone in a basement apartment, survived only by their multiple cats. I never, ever root for them. I don’t care if they come around and discover what’s really important. She was shallow and materialistic before, Matthew McConaughey, she’ll be shallow and materialistic again. A leopard doesn’t change its spots, and neither will Katherine Heigl’s hot but unlikable single woman. For the most part, the romantic comedy female protagonists have very few of the qualities shared by the women I admire, and all of the qualities of the women I have met at parties and wish that I hadn’t.

With this in mind, I’ve got two questions: 

1)     Why are these characters so uniform?  Would it blow everyone’s mind if Kate Hudson was cast as a high school teacher in Duluth who occasionally left the house without make-up on?

2)     Why are these movies written for morons?  I’m not asking for a post-modern avant-garde head scratcher here, just something that doesn’t significantly lower my IQ by the time I’ve watched the first makeover scene.  Have you seen the Ugly Truth? It makes Love Actually look like Citizen Cane.

Ironically, the female protagonist in my own life, and for whose benefit I am watching these movies, is the polar opposite of the materialistic marble-heads who populate the genre.  Does my girlfriend like shopping and dressing up and polishing off a bottle of merlot with her girlfriends?  Of course. But, she’s also a PhD candidate who gives much more time and thought to her family, friends, career, interests and current events then the she does the purchase of a handbag.  Does she have sassy gay best friend? Are you kidding? She’s got 5! But she’s actually as interested in their lives as they are in hers.  And come to think of it, some of them aren’t actually that sassy. Now before you throw up in your mouth at my gushing tribute to my beloved and her marginally sassy gay friends, let me say for the record that the above description also fits 95% of the female friends and family that I am proud to know.

A lot has been written about the modern romantic comedy classics of the last 30 years: Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally, Bull Durham. I’ll even spot you Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones’ Diary.  I know I’m forgetting a bunch, and yes there are many exceptions to the rule. But the common thread in all of these films is that they are about likeable, flawed, complex women. We all root for them and hope they get what they want by the end of the film. In the slew of badly written romantic comedies of the past few years, I root only for a power failure.

Geoff Hendry

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