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States: "I don't have time at the moment for a lengthy disquisition." Then drops the longest post on the page. Impressive as always.
The Rom Com Thread
- Thread starter MendotoManteo
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- Replies: 125
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- Off-Topic
I was totally overmatched. I did the two post minimum and moved on.Who would have thought that we would have a 6 page thread on rom com on this board? You guys and gals are something else.
superrific
Inconceivable Member
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If you think I'm talking about romantic love, then you should read more closely. In my undergrad years, I wrote a paper about Foucault, Weiss and Rimbaud, titled roughly "Madness, The Clinician, And The Mystical Romantic." I'm well aware of what you mean by romanticism.
I didn't really say that AGAIG "broke the mold." I don't recall that. I said that it defied genre assumptions. You call that genre reflexivity (admittedly, I hadn't heard that term). Fine. I still think it makes the movie interesting and enjoyable. It's one reason I like it more than, say, When Harry Met Sally.
Nor did I say that Brooks made no accidents. I did say that there's nothing accidental about the film, which was a direct response to your claim that the narrative structure was "accidental." In context, that was what I was referring to. The idea that the writer (story wasn't his) accidentally stumbled upon the central conceit of the film, the one that the film painstakingly sets up, explores and then comments on, is preposterous.
I'm not interested in this discussion any more. Go ahead, have the last word. I still don't have any clue why you invited me to a discussion only to insult me for partaking in it. Strikes me as a dick move.
You wrote this:
"Probably the reason that you think my take on film relies on romantic presumptions is that the thread is about romantic comedies. And while I understand you are using romantic as a historical/theoretical term, it's also true that most rom-coms are also romantic in that way. Unless there are surrealist rom-coms I'm not aware of (and no Belle Du Jour does not count, as it is just as modally romantic as any of the films you listed)."
^ Perhaps you're mixing up ideas in the back-and-forth, but it's categorically untrue that Hollywood romcoms are "romantic" in the aesthetic sense that gets translated into film studies as auteur theory. And, on top of that, romanticism is an inadequate theory of art--to apply it to Hollywood filmmaking is to only compound its inadequacies to a breaking point.
You misunderstand the distinction that I'm drawing between AGAIG as a melodrama and as romcom. As a romcom, sure, its screenwriter did all the genre shit to which I've already testified. The "romcom" appelation is public and obvious. We call the film a romcom as consumers; the studio likely thought of it a romcom too, though they'd be loathe to market it as such. Genre tags do not sufficiently differentiate multimillion-dollar products. After all, anyone can make a fucking romcom.
But as a melodrama, the screenwriter's work unfolds in a context about which he's likely unaware. There his variations on a theme are accidental, I'd contend. Put another way, yes, maybe he did come up with a generic variation: sympathy! But in the wider modal context, he's likely unaware of the history of melodrama as a modern way of storytelling that relies on suffering, victimhood, and virtue. Hell, he probably does not know the history of melodrama in American filmmaking. Melodrama was a generic tag placed on virtually every fucking film (western melodrama, crime melodrama, romance melodrama) in film distributor catalogs in the 1910s.
I'm sure your professor loved it, but I do not regard an undergraduate paper on mystical romanticism as evidence that you have any substantive knowledge of romanticism or art more generally.
