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The secret life of romantic comedy

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 The secret life of
romantic comedy
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Celestino Deleyto
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Manchester University Press

Manchester

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 Copyright © Celestino Deleyto 2009

The right of Celestino Deleyto to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 7674 9 hardback

First published 2009

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for
any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does
not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or
appropriate.

Typeset
by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong

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DSLPR.indd v
For Anita

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 Contents
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List of illustrations page ix

Acknowledgements xi
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Introduction 1
1 The theory of romantic comedy 18
Romantic comedy and laughter 19
Happy endings, forgotten middles and the ideology
of romantic comedy 24
The space of romantic comedy 30
The Sydney issue 38
Genres and films 45
2 Comic negotiations 55
I Laughter, love and World War II:
To Be or Not to Be 55
Love and the invasion of Poland 59
A table for three: the love triangle 62
Lubitsch meets screwball royalty 66
That great, great Polish actor 72
Performing love, performing war 75
II Romantic comedy in no man’s land:
Kiss Me, Stupid 81
Romantic comedy in the 1950s 82
Satire and comedy 85
Moral standards and character identification 89
Climaxing in Climax 91
Bang, bang 96
Comic combinations 100

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 viii Contents

3 Romantic comedy on the dark side 103

I The other thrills of Rear Window 103
Look at me 105
Society calling 111
It started with a kiss 118
The neverending story 124
II The space of comedy and beyond:
Crimes and Misdemeanors 128
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Love, faith and the comic space 131

Inside the Statue of Liberty or love in the time of
cholera 134
Splitting genres 139
The fisher king and the future generations 143
4 Contemporary romantic comedy and the discourse
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of independence 148
Love in real time: Before Sunset 157
The realities of love 158
Walking and talking 163
Sex and the city 167

References 177
Index 185

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 List of illustrations
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1 ‘Search me, sheriff’. John Wayne and Angie Dickinson

in Rio Bravo (dir. Howard Hawks, 1959,
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Warner Bros.) page 5

2 ‘There’s always something’: love in the workplace.
Michael Douglas and Annette Bening in The
American President (dir. Rob Reiner, 1995,
Columbia, Universal) 41
3 Love between prima donnas: performing marriage
in To Be or Not to Be, starring Carole Lombard
and Jack Benny (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1942,
United Artists) 70
4 ‘Quite a bomber’: Maria Tura takes the lead in
the performance of desire. Carole Lombard in
To Be or Not to Be (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1942,
United Artists) 79
5 ‘Coming Mrs. Spooner?’: marriage as fantasy
in Kiss Me, Stupid, starring Kim Novak and
Ray Walston (dir. Billy Wilder, 1964, Lopert, MGM) 92
6 ‘Kiss me, stupid’: Zelda’s face and the comic space.
Felicia Farr in Kiss Me, Stupid (dir. Billy Wilder,
1964, Lopert, MGM) 99
7 ‘Is that normal?’: Stella questions Jeff’s masculinity.
Thelma Ritter and James Stewart in Rear Window
(dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, Paramount) 115
8 ‘Anything bothering you?’: Lisa starts her campaign
to subdue the fortress of reluctant 1950s masculinity.
Grace Kelly and James Stewart in Rear Window
(dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, Paramount) 121

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 x List of illustrations

9 The mise en scène of the end of love: Women take

the blame. Woody Allen and Joanna Gleason in
Crimes and Misdemeanors (dir. Woody Allen, 1989,
Orion) 136
10 Alternatives to romance: Jenny widens the space of
romantic comedy. Woody Allen and Jenny Nichols
in Crimes and Misdemeanors (dir. Woody Allen, 1989,
Orion) 146
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11 Love as fantasy and reality: Céline and Jesse

fictionalise their past. Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke
in Before Sunset (dir. Richard Linklater, 2004,
Warner Bros.) 160
12 Will Nina make them stop talking? The open ending
and the future of relationships. Julie Delpy in
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Before Sunset (dir. Richard Linklater, 2004,

Warner Bros.) 174

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 Acknowledgements
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Research towards this book was funded by the Spanish Ministerio

de Educación y Ciencia (research project no. HUM2004-00418)
and the Diputación General de Aragón (re. H12). Part of this
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research was carried out at the libraries of the British Film Institute
and the University of Zaragoza. I would also like to thank the fol-
lowing people for their help at various stages of the process: Peter
W. Evans, for providing the initial inspiration to write about
romantic comedy; Christine Holmlund, for her encouragement and
ideas during our preparation of the panel on genre at the Chicago
SCMS conference; Kelly McWilliam, for sharing with me her
unpublished material on lesbian romantic comedy; Chantal Cornut-
Gentille, for her help, friendship and encouragement and for intro-
ducing me to the basics of chaos theory; and the staff of Manchester
University Press, for always making things easy for me. My thinking
about genre has been shaped through lengthy discussions with my
colleagues in the ‘Cinema, culture and society’ research group and
I am greatly indebted to all of them. My most special thanks go to
Constanza del Río, my most demanding critic, from whose aca-
demic acumen and personal involvement in my work I continue to
benefit shamelessly; Frank Krutnik, whose work I have admired for
years and who generously helped me when I most needed him; and
Marimar Azcona, who has discussed with me the theory of roman-
tic comedy for hours on end and has collaborated in this project as
if it was her own. As usual, I owe most to my wife Anita, for her
constant love and affection, and to my daughters Elena, who keeps
me abreast with the new affective protocols, and Esther, the person
with the clearest notion of what is and is not a romantic comedy.

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 Introduction
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Jack, a bank robber, and Karen, a cop, meet in the boot of a car
when he breaks out of jail. They become attracted to one another
as they discuss Faye Dunaway movies. Their romance develops and
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intensifies as one chases after the other, in more ways than one.
The ambiguous ending suggests that sex may have become more
important than the (federal) law. This is one way of describing the
plot of Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998) and it is a descrip-
tion that makes the film sound very much like a romantic comedy,
whether we take our definition from accounts of the genre’s classi-
cal antecedents in Greek and Roman New Comedy (for example,
Miola, 2002), from Northrop Frye’s theorisation of Shakespearean
green world comedies (1957), or from more recent approaches, like
Steve Neale’s discussion of romantic comedy’s conventions (1992)
or Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s ‘master definition’ of the genre (2007:
9). The meet cute, the wrong partners, the learning process and
other features listed by Neale, or the quest for love, the light-
hearted way and (arguably) the successful conclusion required by
Jeffers McDonald are in place, as are romance, desire, gender dif-
ference and social pressure, all easily identifiable as some of the
genre’s central thematic concerns.
The film was released at a time of maximum popularity of the
genre and, while it can just as accurately be described as a caper
movie, a crime film or a thriller, the cultural importance of romantic
comedy at the end of the 1990s facilitated the genre’s appearance
in this and other unexpected places – films like Scream (1997),
Starship Troopers (1997), Play It to the Bone (1999) or Entrapment
(1999), to name a few. Yet, since it has not been seen as a ‘con-
ventional’ romantic comedy, Out of Sight does not figure in recent
accounts of the genre. Romantic comedy being the most superficial

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 2 The secret life of romantic comedy

of mainstream genres, boundary patrolling on the part of the criti-

cal institution has been necessary to guarantee its purity and to
preserve its superficiality, and Soderbergh’s film has been conven-
iently kept out of the recent canon. Movies like Pretty Woman
(1990), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), The Runaway Bride (1998),
Maid in Manhattan (2002), Love Actually (2003) or The Holiday
(2006) are easier to fit into a remarkably inflexible but critically
successful generic mould than a text directed by a contemporary
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auteur and characterised by generic instability. When Nick James,

in a recent Sight & Sound editorial, describes the most crassly com-
mercial type of product of contemporary cinema as ‘a conviction-
free romantic comedy aimed at the teen market’ (2005: 3), he is
clearly tapping into a critical consensus about the genre and is most
certainly not thinking of a film like Out of Sight. The same critic,
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in an appreciative and very perceptive discussion of Before Sunset

(2004), refers to the centrality of sex, the notion of the ideal
partner, the characters’ talk of love, romance, relationships and
idealism, the discourse of relationship theory and other topics
which generally fi nd their home in the fictional space of romantic
comedy, yet never once mentions romantic comedy, the mere idea
of Richard Linklater’s film belonging to this genre being antithetical
with the critic’s admiration for the movie. For James, Before Sunset,
with its heightened realism, its naturalistic performances, its real-
time chronology and its self-effacing fluid camerawork, is an
example of ‘pure cinema’, belonging to the tradition of Jacques
Rivette and Eric Rohmer (2004: 14–15), a type of film inhabiting a
totally different universe from that of popular film genres.
It is not my intention to argue that films like Out of Sight and
Before Sunset belong to the genre of romantic comedy – that they
are romantic comedies. Rather, I would contend that our under-
standing of these and many other movies would benefit from con-
sidering them in relation to romantic comedy and, conversely, that
any discussion of these and similar films that does not take on board
their generic participation, however imperfect or problematic it
may be, will not do them full justice. I will also be arguing that the
history of the genre is formed not only by those films around whose
generic ascription there is a critical consensus – those that can
comfortably be defined as ‘genre films’ – but also by more prob-
lematic texts like these two, and, further, that it is often films like
these that make the genre evolve in more interesting directions.

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 Introduction 3

Critics’ general reluctance to think along generic parameters in

cases such as these, as well as the problems and hesitations they
face when having to deal with the generic ascription of many other
individual texts, stem from critical allegiance to a traditional concept
of genre which includes both the idea of belonging and the still
powerful and derogatory link between genre and popular culture.
This link has had as a result an ideological and aesthetic determin-
ism in the consideration of genres. Within this climate, romantic
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comedy, more than other genres, has not fared well. A circular
argument has been more or less universally accepted whereby only
those films that include certain conventions and a certain ‘conserva-
tive’ perspective on relationships are romantic comedies and, there-
fore, romantic comedies are the most conventional and conservative
of all genres. If a film threatens to be mildly interesting in cinematic,
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narrative or ideological terms then it cannot possibly be a romantic

comedy. It is a very popular argument and one that manages to
contain the genre within very strict and narrow parameters, which
is, after all, what genre critics have traditionally sought to achieve
(Altman, 1999: 17, 99). In contrast with this line of reasoning, I
suggest that it is partly the proximity of these two films to the
conventions of romantic comedy that makes them interesting and
worthy of cultural analysis and, simultaneously, that the genre’s
history is as much indebted to films like Out of Sight or Before
Sunset as to those more routinely considered as romantic comedies.
My aim in this book is therefore double: on the one hand, as far
as generic theory is concerned, I will be taking issue with the notion
of belonging as the most appropriate way to talk about film genre;
on the other, I will be arguing that there is more to romantic
comedy than meets the eye, that the genre’s presence in films is
richer, more complex and less ideologically determined than it has
generally been taken to be, and that it can often be found in the
most unexpected places. In short, I propose to explore the secret
life of romantic comedy.
Let us consider another example, in this case a more classical
and, apparently, more clearly generic film. In an early scene of
Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1958), Chance (John Wayne) goes
into Feathers’s (Angie Dickinson) bedroom at the hotel where she
is staying in order to arrest her for cheating at cards. She denies his
accusation and, taking advantage of his sexual curiosity, challenges
him to search her for the missing cards. A power relationship is

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 4 The secret life of romantic comedy

established between the two characters, within which Chance’s

social mastery as sheriff over the female adventuress is reversed as
she takes the upper hand in this and ensuing dialogues. Again, it
would appear from my description that this is yet another conven-
tional scene in a romantic comedy. But Rio Bravo is a western, and
not just any western but one of the most celebrated films in the
history of the genre. Since this genre is, to a large extent, defined
by its characteristic mise en scène, even the most cursory look at
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the scene described here will immediately convince the spectator

that it is indeed a western. Yet the romantic comedy-inspired rela-
tionship between the two characters is by no means a negligible
element and similar scenes to this one can be found not only in Rio
Bravo but also in such adventure films directed by Hawks as Only
Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944) or
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Hatari! (1962). A habitual director of romantic comedies, Hawks

often allowed scenarios of the battle of the sexes, heterosexual
desire and male humiliation at the hands of the aggressive female
character to crop up in his ‘non-comic’ films. His ‘comic’ worldview
and his very personal perspective on the ideal heterosexual relation-
ship crucially affected his work in other genres. For a genre criticism
concerned with generic ascription, Rio Bravo then poses a certain
problem of impurity. Is the film a western? Or does Hawks’s autho-
rial intervention in the genre turn it into something else? Is this a
case of a film artist’s subverting the conventions of the genre? Or
would we dare to say that, because of Hawks’s presence as director,
the movie provides an original blend of western and romantic
comedy?
Critics have offered different solutions to this generic problem.
Steve Neale, who does not refer to this film in particular, argues
that the influence of auteur criticism in the formation of most film
genres has done great disservice to genre theory. The dominance of
films like Rio Bravo in the ‘official’ canon of the western distorts
the genre’s history since these are ‘exceptional’ texts which do not
reflect the genre’s functioning as accurately as more mediocre, less
well-known films do (2000: 10–11). Rio Bravo would not be the
most representative of westerns, because of Hawks’s manipulation,
even transcendence, of generic conventions. For John Belton, writing
in The BFI Companion to the Western, the film’s generic ascription
is problematic because it has a ‘non-western’ plot: it abandons the
wide open exteriors of traditional westerns and its story is not

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 Introduction 5
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1 ‘Search me, sheriff’. John Wayne and Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo
(dir. Howard Hawks, 1959, Warner Bros.)
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about conquering the West but about keeping what has been con-
quered. The only thing that he finds western-like about it is the
iconic presence of John Wayne and Walter Brennan (1988: 294).
Robin Wood, using the very approach that Neale criticises, finds
the film both the most traditional of westerns and ‘essential Hawks’.
For this author, the value of generic conventions is that they provide
a firm basis from which the director can build his own perspective,
his own personal approach. Rio Bravo, therefore, presents an
extremely productive tension between background and foreground,
between genre and auteur (1983: 35–40). It goes without saying
that neither these critics nor anybody else has stopped to consider
that the film may be, at least to some extent, also a romantic
comedy.
In his theoretical work on genre, Neale has attempted to shift
the emphasis from the texts themselves to the systems of commu-
nication and expectation within which they operate. Genres are not
only situated in the texts but also, crucially, in the industry that
produces them and markets them and in the audiences that consume
them (2000). Thus, while it may be argued theoretically that Rio
Bravo is not just a western, the industry marketed and continues
to market it as a western, and most spectators would more or less
intuitively consume it as a western. In those important cultural
senses, the movie is indeed a western. However, while the expan-
sion of genre theory beyond the texts, especially by theorists like
Neale and Rick Altman (1999), is a welcome move and such

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 6 The secret life of romantic comedy

resources as promotional material, trade press descriptions of the

films, contemporary reviews, etc., have proved invaluable to under-
stand the workings of film genre, there remains room for considera-
tion of the ways in which the texts themselves function generically.
While acknowledging the importance of what could be described as
the genericity of cinema (the cinema as a system of communication
and as an industry), my main focus here is on the genericity of films
as texts and, consequently, also as cultural products. As a point of
departure, the three accounts of the western and Rio Bravo briefly
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summarised above have one thing in common: the idea of belonging.

Genres are groups of films that share a series of conventions. Generic
films are films which belong to specific genres and these, in some
cases, are inflected in crucial ways by individual directors. The
history of a genre is formed by the movies which critics have agreed
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on as forming part of the canon of that genre. Generically mixed

films pose a minor problem since, in this formulation, they belong
simultaneously to at least two different genres, but they do not
significantly alter the underlying premise of separate spheres for
different genres, even though they may occasionally intersect.
Contemporary critics have adapted quite smoothly to the
proliferation of movies which use conventions from various genres
by arguing that a certain text is a cross between, say, an action film,
a buddy film and a comedy (Play It to the Bone), or a big spectacle
film and a romantic melodrama (Titanic). Film artists who worked
within the genre system, like Hawks, Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli
or Fritz Lang, often subverted the genres, parodied them or took
them in unexpected directions, but, in spite of the relevance of their
films, they were, from a generic viewpoint, no more than exceptions
that confirmed the existence of genres and their essential purity. As
with Renaissance prodigies, these hybrids, crossbreeds and other
monstrosities do nothing but confirm the unchangeable law of the
genre. Rick Altman’s contention that, in Hollywood cinema, most
films are generically mixed, that film producers were not interested in
making films within established genres, but rather constantly sought
novelty by creating new cycles through the transformation of existing
ones, and that studio publicists often tried to sell major films by
associating them with several genres at the same time in order to
appeal to different sectors of the public (1999), has gone largely
unheeded in recent academic genre writing, which is still centrally
concerned with whether a fi lm belongs to a genre or not.

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 Introduction 7

Jeffers McDonald, for example, compares two similarly titled

Kirsten Dunst vehicles and concludes that Get Over It (2001) is a
romantic comedy while Bring It On (2000) is not (2007: 9).
A notable exception is James Naremore’s study of film noir,
which is less interested in providing a list of more or less pure noir
films than in the concept and the history of the term, and with the
light that such an exploration may cast on the films themselves.
Taking his cue from George Lakoff’s cognitive theory of categories
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(1987), Naremore argues that every movie is ‘transgeneric’ and

polyvalent and that movie conventions have always mixed, and sees
genres as social and historical chains rather than groups of films, a
perspective which makes it impossible ever to establish boundaries
or categorical definitions for any given genre (1998: 5–6). Lakoff’s
cognitive theory derives from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s attack on cat-
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egorical thinking. There is no essential feature to any given cate-

gory; only, as Wittgenstein explains, family resemblances. Some
members of a family may share some features with some of its
members but not with others (Lakoff 1987: 16–17). As Wittgenstein
emphatically begs, ‘For if you look at [games] you will not see
something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and
a whole series of them at that. Don’t think, but look’ (1963: 31e).
Hence the concept of ‘chaining’, that is, of categories as chains
which develop historically or sequentially and within which certain
elements are related to those close to them but not to those in
further regions of the chain. It follows that, since the chain con-
stantly acquires new links, genre boundaries are never fixed. At the
very most, we can draw a boundary for a special purpose, but that
does not ensure that such a boundary will remain in place when
our objective changes, or that the boundary drawn by one person
will be accepted by another one with a different agenda (33e–36e).
This approach rejects the existence of an immovable organising
principle for any given category and underlines the constantly
changing nature of the relationships which are established between
any given components at any point in the chain (or in the complex
system).
Lakoff, Naremore and Altman inscribe their approaches within
an intellectual tradition of critique of Aristotelian categorisation
and Newtonian mechanism. According to this tradition, film genres,
like their literary counterparts, are one more system of categories,
a way of explaining the world, which is believed to function like a

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 8 The secret life of romantic comedy

predictable machine that the human being will be able to wholly

control one day. Categories are powerful, if illusory, manifestations
of this desire to control natural and human patterns of behaviour.
Aristotelian philosophy and Newtonian physics have become
some of the main targets of poststructuralist theories, and recent
approaches to film genres should be seen as one more manifestation
of a new intellectual and cultural climate. Within this context,
chaos theory provides an appropriate template for the functioning
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of film genres.
For chaos theorists, human beings, natural phenomena, the phys-
ical world, the financial market or mathematical structures are all
part of chaotic systems, governed by unpredictability and impossi-
ble to control in the long run. These systems, called complex
systems, are governed by an unstable balance between order and
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chaos, always on the edge of chaos, but generating a dynamic evo-

lution out of their instability and spontaneity. Like a river stream,
complex systems are in constant flux and their elements are never
identical to each other or even to themselves. The internal structure
of complex systems is fractal, that is, made up of elements which
recall or resemble in themselves the structure of larger systems
but are, at the same time, endlessly evolving, mutating and estab-
lishing complex relationships with other elements. At any given
point, a series of bifurcation points may lead any one of these
elements to become ‘strange attractors’ and make the structure of
the system converge around them, change its trajectory, create new
systems and, occasionally, threaten to destroy the whole structure,
which then may or may not reorganise itself in a different way
(Briggs and Peat, 1999). This theory describes with striking accu-
racy the way genres function. Against the more linear approach,
according to which genres, like other categories, work in simple,
predictable ways which can be investigated, known, classified and
controlled, the chaotic view of genres underlines their instability,
the impossibility to establish clear lines of demarcation, and the
non-linearity, unpredictability and complexity of their evolution.
As Morson and Emerson argue in their account of Mikhail Bakhtin’s
views on genre, they form not by legislation but by accretion,
resembling a jumbled structure rather than a preconceived design
(1990: 292). Like fractals, individual films, scenes or even shots
often reproduce in themselves the structure and characteristics of
the general system while, at the same time, as in the examples

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 Introduction 9

mentioned above, often existing at the intersection between differ-

ent generic systems. As with attractors, genres are often pulled in
unexpected ways, bifurcate, generate new genres or disappear
(although not necessarily forever) when a combination of circum-
stances (both external and internal) bring about turning points
in their evolution. Ireneusz Opacki’s concept of the ‘royal genre’,
the one that best renders the aspirations of a given period, seems
apt here. The power of attraction of this genre draws towards
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itself all the remaining genres, entering in close relations with them
and transforming them and the general context in which they
operate (2000: 120–2). Genres are not discrete units, or categories,
but are part of a complex system which works chaotically but in
unison and which is constantly mutating through the films them-
selves and other discourses, both internal and external to the
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industry.
Chaos theory, Wittgenstein’s critique of Aristotelian categories
and Lakoff’s cognitive appropriation of it go a long way towards
dismantling traditional film genre criticism: the impossibility to
isolate one essential property which is shared by all the members
of one given class; the idea that the boundaries between classes are
changing all the time; and above all, the fact that genres are not
uniform categories defined by a collection of properties that all the
category members share, but, in Wittgenstein’s formulation, chains
of relationships and similarities (1963: 31e–33e). These are all
empirically observable phenomena that contradict traditional genre
thinking. However, one important aspect of generic functioning
seems to have been overlooked by Lakoff’s theory. For him groups
of texts are unstable, fluid and unrelated to many other members
of the same category, but the idea of membership, or belonging to
a certain category (or, perhaps, several categories) remains safely
in place. The groups are looser and interact with one another in
more intricate ways than before but remain, however vaguely
defined and however provisional, still groups. In this sense, Jacques
Derrida’s theory of genre goes one step further.
In his article ‘La loi du genre/The Law of Genre’, Derrida argues
that genericity is inescapable, that all texts are generic and that they
all bear the imprint of their own genericity. For him genre criticism
has always been concerned with norms to be respected, with lines
of demarcation, with purity. Mixing genres is a dangerous game
because it threatens the purity of the genre and the very concept of

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 10 The secret life of romantic comedy

genre. In his own words, ‘one owes it to oneself not to get mixed
up in mixing genres’ (1980: 204), but even when genres do inter-
mix, the very fact that we speak of ‘mixing’ guarantees the essential
purity of their identity. The law of genre is, therefore, a norm of
purity, a certificate of guarantee, and the occasional transgression
of the law only serves to reinforce its validity. But what, asks
Derrida, if at the heart of the law, were lodged its opposite: ‘a law
of impurity, or a principle of contamination?’ (204). What if it were
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impossible not to mix genres? What if contamination, the necessary

presence of convention mixing, turned out to be as constitutive of
genericity as generic purity? Before going on to discuss at large the
inherent generic self-consciousness of texts, the French philosopher
offers a conclusion of sorts to this conundrum: ‘a text cannot
belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text
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participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there

is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts
to belonging’ (212). His reformulated law of genre is both more
pervasive – all texts are generic, there is no text outside the law of
genre – and more ambiguous than the law of generic purity which
he sets out to deconstruct. The opposite of not belonging to any
genre is not, as one could perhaps expect, belonging to one or
several genres, but rather, a participation which ‘never amounts to
belonging’. In his view, texts participate in genres but do not belong
to them, or rather, they both belong, insofar as they participate,
and do not belong, because they never go beyond participating. The
Derridean law of genre, with, in chaos theory terms, its constitutive
‘fuzziness’, separates itself both from the Aristotelian notion of
categories as groups of elements, from Horatian genre prescriptiv-
ism, according to which the poet should follow previously estab-
lished generic norms, and from the traditional concept of genres as
closed and stable corpora according to which each text belongs to
only one category (with the exception of generic hybrids). Derrida’s
critique of generic purity and his implicit espousing of chaotic fuzzi-
ness follow on from Wittgenstein’s exploration of the contradic-
tions in categorical thinking. Derrida’s insight that genericity – the
necessary existence in all texts of marks of categorical thinking – is
inescapable but that categorisation does not describe accurately
the way genres work solves some of the contradictions found by
Wittgenstein because it changes the point of view from belonging
to participating.

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 Introduction 11

Derrida does not go into the details of the specific nature of this
participation but the relevance of his theory for the study of film
genre cannot be underestimated. Altman’s Derrida-inspired defence
of the constitutive impurity not only of Hollywood fi lms but also
of its genres satisfactorily solves traditional problems of ‘genre
belonging’ – whether Oklahoma! (1955) is a western or a musical,
whether Mildred Pierce (1945) is melodrama or film noir – while
it also emphasises the industrial and internal nature of generic
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evolution. For Altman genres are not only part of an intricate

system of relationships but they also exist simultaneously at various
levels. He describes this as a generic cartography, that is, a series
of maps superimposed on one another. Familiar problems – whether
a fi lm belongs to one genre or another, whether the term genre
should be reserved for comedy and tragedy or be also applied to
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epic, lyrical poetry and drama, or whether film noir is a genre or a

style – are solved in one stroke or cease to be problems since a film
can relate to various genres at the same time because the frame of
reference used to define each one of them is different. Epic, comedy,
the musical or the western are not mutually exclusive since they
represent categories defi ned from different perspectives and can
therefore all coincide in a single text. This does not invalidate the
generic system or its analytical usefulness, but it does reveal that
most film critics assume that they are working with a set of stable,
fi xed terms even though genres, like any other complex systems,
are, in fact, constantly changing, not only due to their intrinsic
evolution but also to the specific interests of those who create them:
the producers, the studios, the directors or the critics themselves
(1999: 117–22). However, Altman’s focus on contextual factors
and on programmatic hypotheses that counteract traditional critical
tenets prevents him from dealing with the specific workings of
generic texts. His account of the film Cocktail (1988) in the chapter
‘The Hollywood Cocktail’ and the inset ‘The Genre Mixing Game’
usefully explain the reasons why genre mixing is not only extremely
easy but practically inevitable in Hollywood fi lms, but the Tom
Cruise film is used here as proof of the pervasiveness of the ‘mixing
game’ rather than as a case study in the textual consequences of
genre mixing (1999: 130–9). Similarly, Steve Neale proposes a
useful theory of generic evolution but his otherwise inflexible list
of genres that are and genres that are not (melodrama, film noir),
of fi lms which belong to genres and fi lms which do not, represents

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 12 The secret life of romantic comedy

one more version of the traditional view of genres as groups of films

(2000). But if we insist on asserting that genres are not groups of
films, not even chains of members, we need to establish the nature
of the relationship between films and genres. How exactly do con-
ventions move from one to the other? Does the movement work in
both directions or only in one?
Thomas Schatz has suggested that film genres can be studied, like
languages, as sign systems, following Ferdinand de Saussure’s dis-
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tinction between langue and parole. A film genre would work like
a system of rules and individual genre films would be specific mani-
festations of those rules (1981: 19). However, the static quality of
Saussure’s concepts does not correspond to the constantly shifting
nature of the generic system, in which genres are in a process of
constant evolution (and, sometimes, dissolution) and filmic texts
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operate within this chaotic system, reshaping it every time, some-

times in crucial ways. In chaos terms, a given film could convert
itself into a positive attractor, exerting a subtle influence which, in
the long run, could affect through self-similar repetition (later films
that resemble it) the trajectory of the whole complex system (in our
case, romantic comedy). Derrida’s insight, therefore, suggests a
more radical relationship of mutual and fluid interdependence than
that proposed by Schatz. Film genres are sets of conventions which
are created, constantly altered and occasionally made to disappear
within texts. Film texts use conventions from different genres, and
combine them in ways which are not only textually but also histori-
cally and culturally specific. Certain combinations, that is, the
impact of certain genres upon others within texts, affect the evolu-
tion of the genres. Films are independent of genres insofar as they
never swear allegiance to any of them, they never belong to any of
them, but are never fully independent from them because they are
always generic: they always use generic conventions and formulae.
Although changing linguistic habits is no easy task, it would
nevertheless not be completely accurate to say that a certain film
belongs to a specific genre, say, that Rio Bravo is a western. Rather,
Rio Bravo uses the conventions of the western in a certain way,
one which is not exactly the same as that employed by other films;
yet its genericity is not exhausted by this usage. Its participation in
the western means that it would not exist as it is without this genre,
and the genre would not be the same without its existence. At the
same time, it does not exist solely as a western. Genres are not

DSLIN.indd 12 11/17/2008 5:16:17 PM

 Introduction 13

groups of films but abstract systems formed by elements taken from

many films. The generic bag contains conventions, structures, nar-
rative patterns, but no films. In a different sense, it is legitimate to
say that Rio Bravo is a western because it participates in the history
of the genre, it is affected by its conventions and it contributes to
its evolution, among other things, by its inclusion of the conven-
tions of romantic comedy in its western scenario and by the influ-
ence of Hawks’s authorial vision. It would equally be reasonable
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to say that Rio Bravo is a romantic comedy because its treatment

of the heterosexual relationship between Chance and Feathers
invokes the conventions of this genre, and by locating this new
version of the battle of the sexes in an unusual filmic setting, that
of the western, it contributes to the evolution of romantic comedy
in the 1950s. In other words, the film’s use of generic conventions
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links it historically as much to The Girl Can’t Help It (1957), Pillow

Talk (1959), Some Like It Hot (1959), or indeed I Was a Male War
Bride (1949), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Hatari! or Man’s
Favorite Sport? (1964), as to The Searchers (1956), Man of the
West (1958) or From Hell to Texas (1956).
Generic analysis should, therefore, concern itself less with issues
of belonging and generic purity (or impurity) and more with the
actual workings of generic elements in films. It should ask itself
some of the questions proposed by Tom Ryall, for whom genres
are also abstractions or ‘overarching concepts’, quite distinct con-
ceptually from individual films: what genre or genres, or sets of
generic conventions, constitute an appropriate context for reading
a particular film?, what type of fictional world is invoked by each
film in order to ensure the spectators’ understanding and enjoy-
ment? (1998: 329, 336). These fictional worlds provide the films
with particular ways of seeing the world and are therefore relevant
not only as specific articulations of generic form but also as recon-
structions of social experience. They are, to use Medvedev’s termi-
nology, drive belts from the history of society to the history of film
(in Morson and Emerson, 1990: 278), or, according to Opacki, the
most appropriate ‘language of translation’ for socio-political phe-
nomena (2000: 120). The history of genres, while dependent on the
internal evolution of forms and industrial practices, is also closely
linked to social and cultural history, with genres competing, at dif-
ferent moments of history, to become the most relevant ways of
visualising given aspects of life (Morson and Emerson 1990: 299).

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 14 The secret life of romantic comedy

In the course of this metaphoric competition, genres interact with

one another in various ways, a crucial factor in their individual
evolution and in that of the genre system in general. The space in
which these encounters are produced is the film text.
Filmic texts are meeting points in which various genres come into
contact with one another, vie for dominance and are transformed.
Whereas in many films one genre is clearly dominant over the rest,
many others register the presence of more than one genre. Genre
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mixing is, therefore, not particularly specific to a tradition of films,

nor to a period of the history of cinema, but something inherent to
the workings of film genre. As Janet Staiger has argued, the alleged
purity of classical or, in her terms, Fordian films, is a recent critical
construction. Hollywood films were never pure (1997: 6 and
passim). This does not mean to say, as both Altman and Neale
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admit, that postmodern generic combinations are not often more

sophisticated than classical ones (Altman, 1999: 141) or that New
Hollywood films are not more self-consciously parodic, hybrid
(Neale, 2000: 250–1) or, in Staiger’s terminology, ‘inbred’ (1997:
17). There may be different degrees of genre mixing but genre
mixing per se is nothing to get nervous or ecstatic about. Asserting
that a given film or group of films ‘mixes’ genres is not saying very
much about the films: it is a premise of genre analysis, not a conclu-
sion. Something similar can be surmised about other favourite
critical terms connected with the study of genre like parody, trans-
gression or subversion. Since genres are not fixed categories and
constantly mutate into new forms, what critics call transgression
or subversion is often nothing more than part of the evolution
inherent to all film genres. There can only be transgression against
a fixed norm. If the norm is flexible and it is part of its nature to
constantly change, change is not particularly transgressive. Indi-
vidual filmmakers may consciously attempt to parody or decon-
struct what they consider to be the conventions of a particular
genre, but the result of that conscious operation is simply to expand
the genre or to take it in a different direction, to make it evolve,
which is not very different from what most films do with genres
anyway.
An introductory chapter is not the most appropriate place to
carry out an in-depth analysis of a film, but, before concluding, I
would like to suggest some ways in which the above theory of genre
could be used for a generic reading of Rio Bravo. For most critics,

DSLIN.indd 14 11/17/2008 5:16:17 PM

 Introduction 15

a reasonable description of the film would be the one provided by

Robin Wood: it is a Hawks western. However, because of the gen-
erally low cultural status of romantic comedy, especially among
those who specialise in such male genres as the western, this genre’s
presence in the film has gone largely unnoticed. Critics generally
prefer to assign the presence of such elements as might be found in
romantic comedies in other genres to Hawks’s particular perspec-
tive on heterosexual relationships, rather than to his use of generic
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conventions. Yet, since this director was perhaps more familiar with
the conventions of romantic comedy than with those of any other
genre, he may be seen as a conduit through which conventions
travel from some films to others, from some genres to others. In
this sense, a useful way of tackling this director’s oeuvre and, more
specifically, his use of romantic comedy, would be to analyse the
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different ways in which this genre becomes transformed depending

on the various combinations with other genres that take place in
each of his films. For the analysis of a film like Rio Bravo it is
therefore useful to concentrate on how the combination of romantic
comedy and western or, to be more accurate, the presence of
romantic comedy in the midst of a western scenario, affects our
understanding or our critical interpretation of the film, and, perhaps
more ambitiously, to explore how the specific way in which Hawks
(and the scriptwriters, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett) mixes
the two genres contributes to the cinematic history of both.
As a western, Rio Bravo is a film about the role of violence in
the consolidation of the new nation, with John Wayne’s iconic
figure representing the country’s ambivalent cultural discourses
about it. In this context, Chance’s evolution as a character and his
education will consist in learning how to behave properly, both
socially and sexually, in front of a woman. This will happen through
a process of apparent male humiliation at the hands of the woman,
a process which in reality is making him a better person. This is a
typical romantic comedy scenario, especially of the screwball
comedy cycle to which Hawks contributed with such films as Twen-
tieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday
(1940), Ball of Fire (1941) and later reformulations like I Was a
Male War Bride, Monkey Business (1952) or Man’s Favorite Sport?
By placing this typically comic situation in the midst of a western,
Hawks is underlining the importance of the process of feminisation
of the western’s tough hero, of the acquisition of a richer, more

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 16 The secret life of romantic comedy

complete masculinity, for the securing of civilisation in the West.

Society is not only constituted by defeating the outlaws and taming
the wilderness but also by taming the excesses of violent masculin-
ity. Rio Bravo suggests that the western, the quintessential male
genre, with its narratives of violence and conquest, is dependent on
the feminine, on the finding of a place for women and also a place
for the feminine in men for this conquest and for the project of
‘America’ as a country to be truly successful, and for the genre’s
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constitutive violence to be overcome and to be replaced by more

positive, more productive values.
As many critics have pointed out, the western as a genre has
traditionally relegated women to the background, to a position
which is often not very relevant even as the love interest of a hero
whose desire is generally directed rather towards homosocial forms
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of relations with other men, be those his buddies, the outlaws or

even his dreaded Other, the Indian. In Rio Bravo, Hawks brings
sexual tensions to the surface by suggesting that, in the hero’s mind,
women are initially more dangerous than the male antagonists
because they bring about the emasculation of men and they are
more unpredictable. The Wayne hero has no difficulty facing his
enemies but cannot cope with the threat posed by women. Although
in a more comic vein, his fear of women is comparable to the
Wayne hero’s fear of miscegenation in The Searchers. The text,
however, sees this irrational fear of women as an impediment not
only to the hero’s humanity but to the future of the country. At
this point romantic comedy, like the Seventh Cavalry, comes to the
rescue, with its vindication of gender equality through desire, a
discourse which is generally alien to the western. But Hawks, in
Rio Bravo, places the western at a critical historical point at which
untrammelled masculinity is no longer sufficient for the consolida-
tion of the frontier. For a director who was particularly at home
with Hollywood’s generic conventions, his way of conveying this
meaning is the significant mixture of the two genres, with John
Wayne, the most forceful filmic icon of a self-sufficient and unas-
sailable masculinity, at the centre of his experiment.
In conclusion, Rio Bravo is original in the particular way in
which it combines its ingredients but not in the fact that it mixes
genres. The Derridean substitution of participation for belonging,
of open shelves for closed bags, in order to make better sense of
the relationships, in our case, between genres and films allows us

DSLIN.indd 16 11/17/2008 5:16:17 PM

 Introduction 17

not only to question several critical commonplaces which do very

little to explain either the history of genres or the specific workings
of films but also to underline the importance of specific texts in the
evolution of genres and of the interplay of generic conventions in
textual analysis. In the remainder of this book I intend to propose
a revised theory of romantic comedy and then test its validity
through the analysis of texts, but these films must not be expected
to fully embody the theory. Rather, the selected texts have seldom,
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if at all, been considered as belonging to the genre, combining as

they do a historically specific use of romantic comedy conventions
with those of other genres which, in most cases, tend to be domi-
nant. Yet, it is my contention that the films do incorporate romantic
comedy in their signifying structures and are all the more interesting
and complex for it. And it is also the underlying assumption of this
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study that these films are not in a minority within the history of
the genre with respect to such critically accepted cycles as the
screwball comedy, sex comedies, nervous romances, new romances
or post-romantic comedies. In fact, the history of the genre would
probably not have been the same without those films that, by
combining the conventions of romantic comedy with those of other
genres, opened new directions which then became consolidated
in more obvious instances of the textual workings of generic
conventions.

DSLIN.indd 17 11/17/2008 5:16:17 PM

 1

The theory of romantic comedy

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Romantic comedy has been described as a narrative of the hetero-

sexual couple with a happy ending in which humour does not nec-
essarily play an important part. In this book I would like to suggest
the limitations of this conceptualisation and propose a change of
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approach in two different but closely linked directions: on the one

hand, a comic perspective is a fundamental ingredient of what we
understand by romantic comedy; on the other, the genre does not
have a specific ideology – a single discourse which upholds the
values of marriage and the stable heterosexual couple – but, more
broadly, it deals with the themes of love and romance, intimacy
and friendship, sexual choice and orientation. This shift from ideol-
ogy to thematic specialisation is part of an attempt to move away
from the Althusserian determinism that still pervades much con-
temporary generic criticism and towards a view of genre as cultur-
ally and historically mediated. In other words, romantic comedy
articulates ideological discourses in the field of affective and sexual
relationships but it does not, as a genre, tell us what to think or
how to behave, even if some of the individual films may do. Rather,
the genre uses humour and a comic perspective in order to convey
ideas which are specific to each individual text and acquire sense
within historical and cultural contexts, both those of the production
and release of the movies and of their reception and consumption
by different audiences.
The comic perspective is a crucial component of the definition
of the genre not only because it generates a certain way of looking
at human relationships but also because it constructs a space which
transforms reality – like all genres do – by protecting the lovers
from the strictures of social conventions and psychological inhibi-
tions. This comic, protective, erotically-charged space is the space
of romantic comedy.

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 The theory of romantic comedy 19

Romantic comedy and laughter

Northrop Frye, one of the most important and influential theorists

of the genre in the twentieth century, distinguishes between two
basic types of comedy: ‘There are two ways of developing the form
of comedy: one is to throw the main emphasis on the blocking
characters; the other is to throw it forward on the scenes of discov-
ery and reconciliation. One is the general tendency of comic irony,
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satire, realism, and studies of manners; the other is the tendency of

Shakespearean and other types of romantic comedy’ (1957: 166–7).
This bifurcated account of the genre has been a constant feature
throughout the history of comic theory, from medieval reformula-
tions of Aristotle and Cicero to film theory’s much more recent
interventions. In a sixteenth-century response to one of the many
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routine puritan attacks on the theatre, Thomas Lodge, author of

the source story for Shakespeare’s As You Like It, starts his defence
by quoting from the late Roman grammarian Aelius Donatus on
the origins of both comedy and tragedy in ritual celebrations in
praise of the gods for a good harvest, and continues with the defini-
tion of the genre attributed to Cicero: ‘imitatio vitae, speculum
consuetidinis, & imago veritatis’ (in Galbraith, 2002: 4). The begin-
ning of his defence relates the genre, through its emphasis on fertil-
ity, regeneration and community, to Frye’s romantic comedy; the
latter part refers to the Aristotelian, satirical tradition, with its
didactic and corrective goals, also famously summarised in Hamlet’s
advice to the travelling players visiting Elsinore castle: ‘to hold as
’twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image’ (Hamlet 3.2.18–19). Within the much shorter
history of film studies, Aristotelian comedy has received compara-
tively little attention, but a classification has emerged from accounts
of U.S. film comedy which can be considered parallel to that pro-
posed by Frye outside cinema: the distinction between comedian
and romantic comedy (Seidman, 1981; Palmer, 1987; Neale and
Krutnik, 1990; Jenkins, 1992; and Karnick and Jenkins, 1995).
Although comedian comedy is not necessarily satirical in mode or
didactic in aim, it shares with satire a feature that differentiates it
from romantic comedy: the centrality of laughter.
Since traditional film criticism had always privileged the narra-
tive tradition and romantic comedy, the authors mentioned
above have endeavoured to reassess the figure of the comedian in

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 20 The secret life of romantic comedy

Hollywood cinema and have convincingly argued that both types

of comedy derive from two different nineteenth-century theatrical
practices, with very few points in common: on the one hand, the
legitimate theatre of the well-made play and the great authors of
the past and, on the other, the popular theatre of the variety show,
the vaudeville and the music hall. In one of the key works of this
critical tendency, Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik distinguish between
comedy and the comic, suggesting that while in the first case the
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emphasis is on the happy ending, in the second the crucial factor

is the generation of laughter, and they continue: ‘[a] happy ending
implies a narrative context; the generation of laughter does not’
(1990: 17). In a similar vein, Deborah Thomas differentiates
between the comic – that which makes us laugh – and the comedic
– a double fantasy of erotic desire and of a ‘magical’ and sheltering
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place. She also downplays any possible interference between the

two when she argues that, although the two modes may overlap,
they are quite different things (1998: 58). Andrew Horton, for his
part, offers two definitions of film comedy: interlocking sequences
of jokes and gags which foreground narrative (and lean towards
the non-comic) or narrative as an excuse for holding together
moments of comic business (1991: 7). The first type would corre-
spond roughly to romantic comedy, the second to comedian comedy.
Karnick and Jenkins insist on the same point when they affirm that
humour in Hollywood romantic comedy is something of a paradox,
since it implies a break in the narrative structure and a constant
threat to narrative logic and continuity. While the narrative strives
to contain comic moments within its structure, gags constitute a
danger for narrative balance and integrity (1995: 80–1). In the same
volume, Karnick affirms that humour is always opposed to narra-
tive. Since the structure of romantic comedy is highly codified,
humour brings in an element of surprise and originality and com-
plicates a story which otherwise would be very similar to all the
rest (1995: 126–30).
As we can see, for Karnick, humour has no contribution to make
to narrative development. Rather, it is like the sugar coating that
helps us swallow the pill, or, in ideological terms, the bait used by
the texts to put forward an ideology based on monogamy, hetero-
sexuality and social integration. In general, for Karnick and the
other critics, not only are laughter and the happy ending respec-
tively the basic defining traits of comedian and romantic comedy

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 The theory of romantic comedy 21

but also, when they do coincide in the same text, they remain sepa-
rate, without impinging on one another. In other words, there are
texts which happen to be romantic comedies, others that are come-
dian comedies and yet others which may contain both forms but
always in isolation from one another. In short, in this formulation,
romantic comedy and comedian comedy are largely incompatible.
The critical tendency to separate humour from narrative in
accounts of comedy has always been very strong. Earlier mythical
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critics, for instance, aimed to minimise the importance of laughter

in comic texts. Benjamin Lehman’s opinion is typical of the comic
theory of the 1950s and 1960s when he affirms that the main effect
of comedy is ‘a delight too deep for laughter, a joy too persuasive
for laughter’. Such delight consists in ‘a felt affirmation about life’
and a ‘deep human desire to be recreated by seeing true humanness
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prevail’ (1981: 111). This emphasis on endurance, procreation and

faith in humanity, related to the origins of the genre in ancient fer-
tility rituals, is what caused the relegation of the comic to a subsidi-
ary position, turning it into a by-product rather than an essential
feature, even though a communal expression of generalised mirth
was an important component of those ancient fertility rituals to
which the genre had been traced back. The rise in the academic
reputation of popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s, inspired in
part by Bakhtin’s theory of carnivalesque laughter and grotesque
realism (1984), gave the study of the ‘comic’ aspects of comedy a
new lease of life, but, as we have seen, the two dimensions of
comedy remained disconnected.
However, for all the critics’ efforts to keep humour and romantic
narrative apart, this separation remains more theoretical than prac-
tical and the student of romantic comedy finds it difficult to match
her/his experience with the available critical theory when it comes
to analysing the films. Existing definitions of humour confirm the
impossibility of such separation. Among them, Freud’s short article
is particularly illuminating. For him, humour entails a specific atti-
tude towards de world: ‘Look! Here is the world, which seems so
dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children – just worth
making a jest about!’ (1985: 432–3). In an extension of this theory,
Neale and Krutnik explain that the apparent distance provided
by humour is only a form of disavowal of identification with the
comic butt (1990: 77–8). Through humour, therefore, we indirectly
acknowledge the humanity that is apparently being ridiculed as

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 22 The secret life of romantic comedy

close to our own. In romantic comedy, this acknowledgement is

crucial to understand our attitude towards the lovers’ predicament
but this predicament is precisely the subject of the narrative. Nar-
rative and humour are, therefore, inextricably linked in the comic
way chosen to present the vicissitudes of love and desire. It is true
that most studies of romantic comedy, presumably still under the
influence of Frye’s structuralist model (1957), tend to focus on nar-
rative structures, but this type of analysis always ignores an impor-
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tant part of our enjoyment and understanding of the films. This

understanding is provided by a humour which, in most cases, far
from subverting narrative development, contributes crucially to it
by providing the perspective from which the narrative actually
makes sense.
A closer look at the quotation that opened this chapter suggests,
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in fact, that Frye is not thinking so much of two different types of

comedy as of one comic ‘form’ which is generally developed in two
different ways. T. G. A. Nelson articulates this insight more explic-
itly when he argues that there are two ways of looking at the genre,
depending on whether we focus on the narrative drive towards
harmony or reconciliation or we pay more attention to laughter,
hilarity, wit and subversion, all effects produced by the comic
action and the dialogues. Yet these do not represent two different
types of comedy but two points of view, two phases, two inspira-
tions, even two ways of reading a comic text, which can and often
do exist simultaneously in the same comic texts. In order to illus-
trate his theory, Nelson uses the example of marriage comedy, one
of the oldest forms of narrative comedy, in which the spectator
finds two types of pleasure: laughter at the frustrations and disasters
of living together and, at the same time, pleasurable anticipation of
the final reconciliation (1990: 1, 4, 183).
Although Nelson does not develop the links between the two
types of pleasure, he points in a promising direction which has been
all but abandoned by contemporary film comedy theory. Neale and
Krutnik argue that laughter and the comic are not an indispensable
element of romantic comedy and that some comedies, like Going
My Way (1944), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) or The Apartment
(1960) are ‘only intermittently funny’ (1990: 11), but the existence
of some exceptions does not invalidate the general principle. Jeffers
McDonald prefers to use the term ‘light-hearted’ to signal the
important presence of tears in the genre as well (2007: 10), but

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 The theory of romantic comedy 23

tears and humour are not incompatible. As Edward Berry has

argued, talking about comic drama, ‘[a]s a dramatic form, comedy
can exist without laughter, but most of the plays that we consider
comedies are engines of laughter, and one of the great pleasures of
comic theatre is the feeling of exhilaration and release that laughter
provides’ (2002: 123). Likewise with the rest of comic texts, includ-
ing those that are described as romantic comedies. Whereas in most
of the theoretical formulations mentioned above laughter appears
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to subvert narrative and even question narrativity, cases in which

it structures the narrative are just as frequent. Humour in romantic
comedy is more often than not dependent on the narrative context
and conversely, and even more crucially, the development of
the narrative is always affected by the comic moments, particularly
in the very important and generally neglected middle section of
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the film text. Gags, jokes and other comic business are not
opposed to narrativity but integral parts of it. Humour and the
comic must, therefore, be ‘re-admitted’ into the theory of romantic
comedy.
On the other hand, the constitution of two types of film comedy
around the ‘opposite’ poles of laughter and the happy ending
responds to the traditional approach to film genres criticised in the
introduction of this book. When critics say that a film cannot be a
romantic comedy if it does not have a happy ending or, conversely,
that the fact that some romantic comedies do not make us laugh
means that laughter is not an element of the genre, they are thinking
of genres as groups of films and of films belonging to either one
genre or another, in this case, comedian or romantic comedy. A
film is a romantic comedy when it tells a love story with a happy
ending, and a comedian comedy when it revolves around the comic
antics of the central comic actor. Although the value of this power-
ful classification is that it has recuperated for academic analysis a
very important comic tradition in the cinema, its downside, as we
have seen, is that it has excluded humour from the theory of roman-
tic comedy against the evidence of empirical research. If we stop
thinking about genres as groups of films and consider them instead
as a constantly shifting langue, abstract systems which are articu-
lated in various ways in the actual texts, which do not belong but
participate in various genres, an immediate consequence is that there
are no specific conventions that a given film must have in order to
participate in a genre, since membership is not necessary. A film

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 24 The secret life of romantic comedy

may contain very few jokes or no jokes at all and still use romantic
comedy as a genre. Or humour can be theorised as integral to the
genre even if there are some films that do not provoke laughter in
the spectator. What is important at this point is to recognise that
humour and the comic constitute an essential ingredient of the way
in which romantic comedy deals with discourses of love, sex, inti-
macy and gender.
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Happy endings, forgotten middles and the ideology of

romantic comedy
There can be little doubt that the happy ending is a recurrent con-
vention of the genre, but excessive concentration on this feature has
tended to obscure the importance of humour. Another consequence
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of this critical emphasis has been the relegation, often virtual dis-
appearance, of the rest of the comic narrative from critical discus-
sion, especially of the middle section. Attention to the middle
section and, specifically, to the way in which the mechanisms of
humour and the comic operate within the representation of the
genre’s discourses, will allow us to explore the flexibility of the
genre and to abandon the ideological determinism mentioned above.
This is not to say that in romantic comedy, as in all narratives, the
ending is not important. As Peter Brooks has argued, the narrative
plot moves the reader forward through the space of the text, in
search of a totalising structure that will be perceived as such only
retrospectively, from the vantage point of the ending. Therefore
narratives only make sense once they have ended, allowing us to
see the whole of what went before in relation to their final moment.
But in order to reach the ending the narrative must go through what
Brooks calls ‘the vacillating play of the middle’, or, elsewhere, ‘the
arabesque of plot’ (1984: 107). It could also be said, therefore, that
the ending only makes sense with respect to the middle, to what
has happened before. There is an inexorable circularity in the domi-
nant argument that condemns romantic comedy as the most medio-
cre and repetitive of genres because, since a romantic comedy is a
love story with a happy ending, all romantic comedies end in the
same way. If we accept that there are other dimensions to the genre
apart from the happy ending then the recognition of much greater
formal and ideological variety will immediately ensue. The ending
of romantic comedy appears to be so highly conventionalised that

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 The theory of romantic comedy 25

it seems critically tendentious to draw so much attention to it,

overlooking what makes the genre rich, varied and, in sum, cultur-
ally important.
This determinism is based on the inextricable link that is almost
invariably established between the happy ending and a certain view
of heterosexual relationships. Although the Aristotelian view that
comedy and tragedy have different subject matters was generally
abandoned by later genre theorists, it seems appropriate to argue
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that romantic comedy has indeed a very specific subject matter. Yet
the Althusserian brand of ideological criticism that dominated film
studies in the 1970s and 1980s and remains strong in genre criti-
cism nowadays has combined this subject matter with a monolithic
ideology: not only is romantic comedy about love and marriage but
it always says the same thing about it, it invariably conveys the
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same conservative message: if the most important convention of the

genre is the happy ending and this happy ending usually consists
in the consolidation (or at least the more or less certain promise of
consolidation) of a monogamous (and hence patriarchal) hetero-
sexual couple, then it follows that the genre as a whole is conserva-
tive because it naturalises, celebrates and reinforces marriage,
monogamy and heterosexuality, even against the hard evidence
found in contemporary western societies where heterosexual
monogamy is in permanent crisis and has become only one option
among many others. This wholesale capitulation on the part of
romantic comedy experts to fashionable critical trends tends to
homogenise the genre and impoverish individual texts. For one
thing, the link between the happy ending and heterosexual monog-
amy is not mandatory in the genre. Numerous contemporary films,
including Splash (1984), Big (1988), White Men Can’t Jump (1992),
My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), The Object of My Affection
(1997) and Splendor (1999), have proved that other options can be
incorporated without drastically bending generic borders. In fact,
such twenty-first-century mainstream movies as In Good Company
(2004), Prime (2005) or The Break-Up (2006) suggest that the final
separation of the lovers is becoming more and more usual as part
of the happy ending. A recent romantic comedy scriptwriting
manual admits as much when it argues that ‘resolution no longer
means that the featured couple will literally remain together’
(Mernit, 2000: 116–17). Therefore, rather than all romantic com-
edies being the same, what we often find is a generalised critical

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 26 The secret life of romantic comedy

blindness to that which differentiates the texts from one another,

both narratively and ideologically, an insistence on imposing apri-
oristic meanings on the films.
Neither is this to say that the ideology of romantic comedy is
irrelevant. On the contrary, even when the genre was born, in the
European Renaissance, there was more ideological struggle, variety
and contradiction than has generally been acknowledged. For some
critics like Mary Beth Rose, romantic comedy flourished in the
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sixteenth century as a genre that celebrated erotic love and marriage

in the context of a new sensibility which viewed marriage as the
spiritual foundation of society and as the repository of personal
happiness (1988: 28). For her, therefore, the origins of the genre
are tied to a commitment to an ideological logic of heterosexuality
and monogamy that feminist critics have openly critiqued as related
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to patriarchy. However, this view seems to suggest that romantic

comedy was born more or less from one day to the next, out of
the blue, as a propagandistic discourse of a certain sector of
Elizabethan culture – the simple story of a new cultural attitude to
love to be found in the works of John Lyly, Robert Greene and
William Shakespeare. The reality was, in fact, much more complex.
As Louise George Clubb has explained, Lyly, Greene, Shakespeare
and other English and non-English European writers found the
inspiration and the sources for their stories in the Italian fiction and
drama of the sixteenth century. The authors of these stories did not
invent them either but constructed them according to the first
premise of Renaissance dramaturgy: ransacking (2002: 32). In imi-
tating the Italian authors, Shakespeare and the others were there-
fore ransacking the ransackers. Not only was the concept of copy
(imitation of the right models) more artistically prestigious than the
more recent, romantic celebration of originality but the Italian
models themselves were as varied in their attitudes towards love
and desire and as disparate in the concepts of love that they used
as the sources from which their authors took their stories. The
Italian dramatists imitated the classical comedies of Plautus and
Terence and adapted some of their plots, but they also found inspi-
ration for their stories in the classical tradition of Ovid’s Metamor-
phoses, the literature of courtly love, the medieval romances and
their later Italian manifestations in the works of Ariosto and Tasso,
fictions from places as distant as Persia or India, and, very centrally,
Boccaccio’s Decameron. The resulting commedia erudita or grave

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 The theory of romantic comedy 27

developed into various dramatic forms, including tragicomedies,

romantic courtship plays, satirical farces of adultery, pastoral plays
and various combinations of them. Clubb singles out the female
Sienese audience’s preference for Decameron tales of resolute and
loyal heroines as one of the strongest influences in the consolidation
of romantic comedy (40). The concept of love that emerges from
the new genre, therefore, is much more difficult to pin down than
has later been argued, and its exclusive connection with the ideol-
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ogy of modern marriage, which can indeed be seen, for example,

in Shakespeare’s plays, is only part of the story, based on partial
readings of the texts. In other words, Shakespeare’s pastoral com-
edies, like those of some of his predecessors, include representations
of various forms of sexual desire and various attitudes to gender
relationships, among which must be mentioned a medieval perspec-
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tive in which women were seen as evil temptresses, love was under-
stood as a destructive passion and sexuality as a powerful,
irrepressible and unpredictable human instinct. Shakespeare con-
stantly acknowledges the magnitude of this passion, making the
spectator marvel at its power, even as he puts marriage forward as
a mechanism to tame and socialise it. At the same time, his plays,
in order to be comprehensible to Elizabethan and Jacobean
audiences, articulated views of love and desire that were part of the
sexual and affective discourses of his age. Since then these concepts
have undergone frequent and very important historical changes
and, as a consequence, so have the artistic texts that have repre-
sented them.
Critics, however, have insisted on the unchanging nature of
romantic comedy conventions and messages. In a recent study of
contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy, Frank Krutnik, while
admitting that the genre has always attempted a negotiation between
the concept of heterosexual monogamy and a historically fluid
intimate culture, still concludes that it routinely continues to cele-
brate love as an immutable, almost mystical force (2002: 130, 138).
This view is extended among romantic comedy’s contemporary
critics and is, again, based on two problematic premises: 1) only
those texts that appear to conform to the idea of love as an immu-
table force are considered romantic comedies, and 2) the happy
ending is the only location of the films’ ideology. I have very briefly
broached the diversity of the attitudes towards love reflected in the
Italian fiction and drama of the sixteenth century and referred to

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 28 The secret life of romantic comedy

some of the conflicting ideologies of love and desire apparent in

Shakespearean comedy, but this complexity extends to later
periods. David Shumway, for example, has argued that, ever since
medieval romances, Western stories of love tend to be triangular in
structure with the reader or spectator often positioned to identify
with the excluded character, and although in the nineteenth
century romance became grafted onto marriage, the stories, while
endorsing the social institution, continued to rely on the
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excitement and adventure of illicit love. From this it follows that

the genre has always had difficulties to tell stories of marriage
(2003: 14–15, 21). Catherine Bates concurs when she defines the
genre as courtship stories because romantic comedies are never
interested in marriage, only in what leads to it (2002: 104–5). This
critical change of emphasis, away from marriage and monogamy,
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cannot be but welcome, even though it still leaves too much out.
Shumway suggests that the discourse of romance, consolidated in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coexists nowadays with
the discourse of intimacy, one which is better equipped to deal
with stories of love after marriage and with the new term –
relationships – that emerged around the 1960s to cover new types
of affective and sexual bonds between individuals (2003: 24–5).
He finds, beginning in the 1970s, a new genre of films that reflect
these changes, which he calls relationship stories (157). As these
and many other examples suggest, the genre of romantic comedy
has undergone as many transformations as the discourses of love,
sexuality and intimacy in the course of the last five centuries.
Northrop Frye has argued that romantic comedy focuses on the
creation of a more adult and complex identity, and the crucial
factor in this is the discovery on the part of the protagonists of a
more profound sexuality (1957). The celebration of marriage may
have been, already in Shakespeare’s times, an ideological aim of the
genre but not the only one. What really characterised these narra-
tives (and still does) was the artistic articulation of current dis-
courses on love, sex and marriage, discourses which then, as now,
were multiple and contradictory. The apparent universality of the
happy ending and its obvious conventionality have led many to
defend an homology between the genre’s narrative structure and a
stern defence of monogamy and heterosexuality, distorting what,
in my view, is its main discursive space: the exploration of love and
human sexuality and its complex and fluid relationships with the

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 The theory of romantic comedy 29

social context. Love may still be the answer to the exasperatingly

complex questions the genre asks (Mernit, 2000: 250), but what
‘love’ means continues to change fast and, anyway, the questions
are certainly as relevant and as essential to the genre as the answers.
As I have pointed out above, some recent romantic comedies have
proved that the happy ending need not be linked to the formation
of the heterosexual couple but, even when it is, the genre’s central
theme is not so much that conventional union as the vicissitudes of
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the emotional and sexual relationships between the characters. This

does not invalidate the importance of the happy ending, or indeed
of any of the other conventions usually associated with the genre.
Rather, it sets them within a more flexible framework and liberates
them from ideological rigidity.
One way of handling the variety described above has been to
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ascribe different generic labels to different comic representations of

these discourses: we do not need to say that romantic comedy deals
with marriage, adultery or the discourse of intimacy if we decide
to use other designations like marriage comedy, remarriage comedy,
comedy of manners or relationship stories, thus restricting the term
romantic comedy to only those cases which deal with courtship – or
we can do away with the term altogether by introducing, as Bates
does, the label courtship comedy. However, while the establishment
of differences between different traditions, perspectives and histori-
cal periods may indeed prove useful to understand the evolution of
the genre, excessive labelling reveals an anxiety to classify, order
and isolate that which in reality – the reality of the functioning of
genres and of social intimate and sexual protocols – is by no means
so systematic. Besides, excessive compartmentalisation will obscure
the importance of the interrelations between the various types of
stories. In my view, an overarching term is needed for all the comic
texts that deal with love, desire, sexuality and their relation
with discourses of identity, masculinity and femininity. Although
the word ‘romantic’ has the conceptual drawback of applying only
to one of the many love discourses that circulate through these texts,
the substitution of a new umbrella term would only complicate
matters. The cultural currency of the designation romantic comedy
recommends its continuing usage as long as the variety of discourses,
approaches and ideologies articulated by the texts is recognised. As
Krutnik argues, the term romantic comedy has often been used to
identify a particular type of love story which is told in a particular

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 30 The secret life of romantic comedy

manner, but it also circulates to ‘designate a bewildering array of

possible combinations of sex and comedy’ (2002: 133). Whether
bewildering or not, it is this second meaning that I am most inter-
ested in. Romantic comedy could, therefore, be defined as the genre
which uses humour, laughter and the comic to tell stories about
interpersonal affective and erotic relationships. In a very simplified
form, then, as the comic writer of the framing narrative in Woody
Allen’s Melinda and Melinda (2004) says, it tells stories that are
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funny and romantic. But humour and love are not enough to under-
stand properly how the genre works. Through its comic perspective
on cultural discourses of love and desire, romantic comedy proposes
an artistic transformation of the everyday reality of human relation-
ships by constructing a special space outside history (but very close
to it): the space of romantic comedy.
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The space of romantic comedy

In order to understand the nature of this comic space, it might be
useful to return once again to the genre’s origins in sixteenth-century
Italian prose fiction and drama. In the favourite source of the Italian
authors, Boccaccio’s Decameron, the framing narrative presents a
group of seven young women and three men who escape from the
plague to a country villa near Naples where they spend ten days
telling each other stories. Most of these are love stories which,
according to the narrator in the introduction, seek to help people
who, like the author in his youth, are affected by the pains inflicted
by love, especially women, who have fewer means at their disposal
to fight the passion. At the end of the ten days, the characters return
to Florence, supposedly having become wiser from their experience
outside society. While it cannot logically be said that Boccaccio’s
opus follows, as a whole, the conventions of a genre which did not
exist yet, most of its hundred stories are comic and often explicitly
erotic. More importantly, its structure coincides with that of the
pastoral plays which, like the other flourishing genres related
to comedy, derived their inspiration, at least partly, from the
Neapolitan author. In this new genre, a change of location is gener-
ally used to represent the inner realities of emotion, psychological
change and supernatural providence. In this pastoral setting the
inexperienced lovers learn to know their own hearts and become
more mature (Clubb, 2002: 37–8). By these early times in the history

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 The theory of romantic comedy 31

of the genre, a magic space of transformation, often associated with

the countryside or nature, seems to be already firmly in place. This
space becomes later on one of the best known features of Shake-
spearean comedy. According to C.L. Barber, the English playwright’s
recurrent use of festive elements responds to an attempt to create
an atmosphere of liberation from unfriendly or abusive social insti-
tutions (1959: 8). The festive elements, on the other hand, relate the
genre to comedy’s general origins in village celebrations. Barber
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links this with a process of identity formation and maturation which

is similar to that found in the theories of Northrop Frye and later
critics like Leo Salingar (1974). For these critics, Shakespearean
comedy traces a circular journey from the characters’ society to the
countryside or foreign city and back to society, in the course of
which, through disguise, masquerade and mistakes of identity,
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including gender identity and sexual orientation, the characters

learn something about themselves that they did not previously know
and, armed with the strength conferred by this new identity, they
return to take up their rightful positions in their social group.
We must not forget, however, that while some of Shakespeare’s
comedies clearly follow this circular structure, others, like Much
Ado about Nothing or Twelfth Night, locate their action wholly
within the foreign city, Messina in the former and Illyria in the
latter. In these comedies, the social space and the magic space of
transformation are superimposed on one another: the social space
becomes symbolically charged with the meanings and functions of
the magic space. In Much Ado, for example, Messina becomes a
comic space for the soldiers who are returning from the war. As
soon as the play starts, the time of war and male heroics, as well
as tensions and homosocial bonding, has apparently come to an
end and, as Richard Levin has explained, the characters must now
realise that the time to marry has arrived in Messina (1985: 93).
The city provides a benevolent context for the characters, especially
the protagonist couple Beatrice and Benedick, to free themselves
progressively of inhibitions and let their desire for each other reign
supreme. At the end, they are still in Messina and it is only those
who have not been able to adapt to the new erotic regime that must
be exiled, like Don John and his friends, or remain on the margins,
like the sexually ambivalent figure of Don Pedro.
Something similar happens in Twelfth Night: Viola and Sebas-
tian are shipwrecked on the shores of Illyria at the beginning of the

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 32 The secret life of romantic comedy

play but the rest of the characters are already there. For them, Illyria
is both social and comic space. At the end the lovers will all stay
on the charmed island, where they again, as in Much Ado, have
found an ideal context for the expression of their sexual identities,
however complex, and their erotic desires. Sebastian articulates the
sense of wonder that accompanies the experience of the genre when,
after noticing how, on their first meeting, Olivia behaves towards
him as if they had been lovers for a long time, he says: ‘This is the
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air, that is the glorious sun,/ This pearl she gave me, I do feel’t, and
see’t,/ And though ’tis wonder that enwraps me thus,/ Yet ’tis not
madness’ (4.3.1–4). In this passage Shakespeare is aware of the
duality of the play’s space and of its centrality in the comic experi-
ence. By this time the other lovers have already been subjected to
the influence of the comic atmosphere. Sebastian, on the other
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hand, is still new to its hypnotic power but immediately realises

that in the same world in which he had been walking and breathing
a few minutes ago, a world which is still perfectly recognisable and
in which the transaction of a pearl from the hands of one character
to those of another is still a physically ascertainable action, a new
sense of wonder has suddenly set in. H.B. Charlton finds this sense
of wonder a crucial element to understand Shakespearean comedy
when he argues that ‘its heroes [. . .] are voyagers in pursuit of a
happiness not yet attained, a brave new world wherein man’s [sic]
life may be fuller, his sensations more exquisite and his joys more
widespread, more lasting, and so more humane’ (1966: 278). In
this brave new world, the play, in this case Twelfth Night, allows
its character, as it had done previously with the rest, to release his
desire, as, more famously, had happened to the young Athenian
characters after being ‘treated’ with Oberon and Puck’s magic
flower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Catherine Bates points out the absence of a journey in Twelfth
Night and notices the presence, instead, of a new ingredient for our
exploration of the genre’s comic atmosphere. For her, the play
places the spectator within the space and the time of carnival
(2002: 120). Twelfth Night is the day of Epiphany, the last day of
the Christmas celebrations but, as Bates reminds us, the play
extends the festive mood indefi nitely (although it simultaneously
criticises this permanent holiday through the character of Sir Toby)
and demands from the characters that they play by carnival’s rules.
This is not exactly the same concept of carnival as that theorised by

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 The theory of romantic comedy 33

Mikhail Bakhtin but it comes close enough to it in so far as, accord-

ing to the Russian critic, the world of carnival and its artistic generic
manifestation – grotesque realism – exist in the real world, along-
side the official institutions of Church and State which govern
individuals, and have the power to bring about a radical change in
our attitude towards the dominant order by breaking hierarchical
impositions, privileges, rules and taboos. Carnivalesque comedy
produces universal laughter, reverses the superiority of the mind
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over the body and releases repressed energies, in order to constitute

an alternative space governed by a democratic principle of com-
munity and humanity in which high and low, heaven and earth,
birth and resurrection share a common, non-hierarchical space
(1984).
Bakhtin, like Barber later on, focuses on a type of comedy which
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evolves from folk festivals and street humour. This literary form is,
like romantic comedy, easily traceable to traditional village celebra-
tions and invocations to the gods. Its main objective is the subver-
sion of the dominant order, whereas romantic comedy has been
theorised as a conservative genre that seeks to perpetuate the status
quo. This may be the reason why not many links have been found
between the two outside Shakespeare. While romantic love as a
historically specific formation has been the only ideological dis-
course to be recognised in the genre, the privileging of sex and the
body in carnivalesque comedy has remained outside the boundaries
of romantic comedy, but once we admit the presence of a multiplic-
ity of discourses about sex within the genre, the links between the
two theoretical formations start to become more visible. The space
of romantic comedy, which the genre appears to inherit from its
various sources, shares a similar potential for the release of repressed
drives and the circumvention of social inhibitions to that of
Bakhtinian carnival.
Medieval carnival, Boccaccio’s erotic liberation and the pastoral
green world constitute, therefore, the historical context of the
magic space of romantic comedy, which becomes consolidated in
Shakespeare’s comedies and has since then remained a central
feature of the genre. Whereas the happy ending affects only a rela-
tively small section of the generic plot, the space of comedy
pervades the whole text and is most often seen at work in the
middle section, where the various discourses of the social space vie
for domination and where the characters appear to be freer from

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 34 The secret life of romantic comedy

social and psychological inhibitions. The comic space generally

affords the characters a franker confrontation with their sexuality
than society had previously allowed them. As a consequence of this,
gender relationships, another discursive area central to a genre
which has often been characterised as narrating the ‘battle of the
sexes’, also become crucially affected by the deployment of the
comic space. As in Boccaccio’s stories, Shakespeare’s plays and
Bakhtin’s theory, humour and the comic constitute the main source
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from which this magic atmosphere emanates. In other words, since

humour is, as we have seen, one of the main ingredients of the
genre, our experience of the space of romantic comedy is inse-
parable from our comic response to its fictional world. This space
is not only benevolent but also funny. In most cases, it is benevolent
because it is funny.
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This is one of the main differences between the concept proposed

here and Deborah Thomas’s recent theory of melodrama, comedy
and romance as the three general categories or ways in which films
are experienced by viewers and which intersect with film genres in
various ways. For Thomas there is a comedic space which in comedy
articulates a fantasy of transformation that differentiates this cate-
gory from the other two. The social space is influenced by a benevo-
lent community which transforms it into something better. This,
however, is a comedic and not a comic space. Although the status
of the comic as a filmic category is not clear in Thomas’s theory,
she sees the comic and the comedic as two different modes, implic-
itly aligning herself with those critics who perceive a drastic differ-
ence between comedian and romantic comedy: the comic is what
makes us laugh, whereas the comedic is a particular sort of trans-
formation of the narrative world. For her laughter is neither a nec-
essary nor a sufficient trait of the comedic (2000: 17–18).
In my view, on the other hand, the presence of humour is one
of the main ingredients of this special atmosphere. In his study of
Shakespearean comedy, Stephen Greenblatt quotes William Harvey
as saying ‘men and women are never more brave, sprightly, blithe,
valiant, pleasant or beautiful than when about to celebrate the act’.
According to Greenblatt, Shakespeare was a pioneer in generating
comic plots that could appropriate and profit from the special
beauty of sexual arousal. Since the direct representation of the
sexual act was out of the question on the Elizabethan stage, the
playwright learnt to replace it by verbal sparring: the erotically

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 The theory of romantic comedy 35

charged battle of wits between the lovers (1988: 89). Comic dia-
logues, therefore, became part of the creation of that special atmos-
phere which, for Greenblatt, was simply a theatrical substitute
for sex. In more general terms, humour (which in the cinema is
not only verbal but also visual) became associated with the creation
of that erotic utopia which romantic comedy proposed, and is
still proposing, as an antidote against the sexual and affective
frustrations of everyday life. Sometimes, the happy ending may
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not even be possible without the presence of humour, as in the

famous final words of Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot – ‘Nobody’s
perfect’ – which may be seen as a subversion of the traditional
happy ending of the genre but which also, I would suggest, under-
line the sexual utopia that the film is proposing through its
comic space. More often, however, the comic is most active in the
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middle section of the narrative, where the comic space is generally

constructed.
Take, for example, one of the most important texts in the history
of the genre, Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), a film that exhibits
a keen awareness of the close cultural link between love and laugh-
ter. Count Leon D’Algout (Melvyn Douglas) has fallen in love with
Ninotchka (Greta Garbo) and is struggling to break the cultural
barrier between them and get her to admit that she is also in love
with him. Conscious of the power of laughter to break down inhibi-
tions he tries several jokes while having lunch with her at a working-
class restaurant in Paris, but Ninotchka does not respond. In
confusion and despair he leans back on his chair and crashes on
the floor to the general hilarity of the café’s patrons. The more
humiliated he feels, the louder everybody laughs. The class context
– workers laughing at a ridiculous aristocrat – turns the comic
moment into a self-conscious manifestation of the Bakhtinian and
Aristotelian power of comedy to upturn hierarchies, and this may
well be the reason why, when Leon (and the spectator) looks again
at Ninotchka, she has heartily joined in the infectious mirth. ‘Garbo
laughs’, announced the film’s publicity, using this scene as the film’s
slogan. Narratively, however, Leon’s fall, and his almost immediate
readiness to join in and laugh at himself, works as a magic potion
of immediate effect and transforms the heroine into the willing
lover of the second half of the film. Garbo had, of course, loved
before on the screen but now she loves because she laughs. Whether
the spectator prefers the serious Ninotchka of the first half of the

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 36 The secret life of romantic comedy

film or the laughing lover of the second is a different matter, but

the film has firmly inscribed itself within the genre’s tradition by
self-consciously creating its comic space around the characters’
sense of humour. The comic is, therefore, not a by-product, a sec-
ondary ingredient of our experience of romantic comedy, but an
integral element in the creation of the comic space and the particu-
lar lens used by the genre to comment on people’s sexual and affec-
tive mores.
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Garbo’s presence in Ninotchka throws some light on the nature

of the comic space precisely because the spectator may be used to
seeing her in non-comic films also dealing with love and desire. For
example, in the earlier Flesh and the Devil (1927), the film that
turned her into a great star, she plays the part of Felicitas, the
married woman who consecutively seduces two childhood friends
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and threatens to destroy their all-important relationship. The final

duel between the two men is prevented in the nick of time when
they both realise that Felicitas had been responsible for their
estrangement all along, a realisation which coincides exactly with
her death. To describe this movie even as a romantic melodrama
would be problematic since the only romance that is promoted in
it is that between the two friends. There is no comic space here but
neither is there any heterosexual love or desire worth protecting.
Love and desire constitute the external threat that must be destroyed
since they bring about not happiness and freedom but hatred
and oppression. In this film’s melodramatic discourse there can only
be happiness in a male friendship which excludes heterosexual
desire.
I have been defining the comic space as a magic space of trans-
formation but it must be pointed out that this transformation does
not necessarily affect the characters in any permanent way but,
rather, the fictional space in which they exist, a fictional space
which represents the social space of cultural discourses on love,
sexuality and intimacy. The comic space allows the spectator to
glimpse a ‘better world’, a world which is not governed by inhibi-
tions and repressions but is instead characterised by a freer, more
optimistic expression of love and desire. In Billy Mernit’s words,
this is ‘a realm, supposedly the world we live in, where true love is
obtainable and overcomes every obstacle’ (2000: 125). This ‘better
world’ is, as I have mentioned above, an empty formal concept,
not an ideologically charged one. Different texts, different cultural

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 The theory of romantic comedy 37

contexts, even different spectatorial perspectives may associate it

with different discourses on love and desire. The genre simply pro-
vides the empty space for the individual text – as well as the indi-
vidual spectator – to fill it with meaning.
Whether or not there is a transformation in the lovers is already
part of the ideology of the individual text or of the spectator/critic’s
interpretation of it. Frye, Barber and Salingar, in their emphasis on
progression and maturation, betray a teleological bias which may
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be more dependent on the critical tradition in which they write than

constitutive of the genre. The view of classical narrative as based
on a journey towards a physical/psychological destination would
seem to favour such a transformation and this may indeed be the
case in many comic texts. Shakespeare’s green world comedies,
for example, seek to transform their characters into better, wiser
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versions of themselves, at least as far as love and desire are con-

cerned. The comic space, however, does not guarantee such a
transformation. If the dominant ideology in the individual film
includes this transformation as part of what it has to say about
relationships, then it will probably take place. If, on the contrary,
the film favours a more contingent view of love and desire, as is
the case of many contemporary texts, including multi-protagonist
comedies, the characters may well end up exactly as they were at
the beginning (Azcona 2007: 275–7). What counts is the generic
transformation of the social space and what this transformation has
to say about the discourses which constitute the social space.
For Thomas, the romantic couple of comedy ‘can aspire to a
state of mutuality and playful improvisation, and, rather than
ending up embattled or under siege, may find a benevolent and
sheltering community to welcome them in its midst’ (2000: 14).
Whereas in the dominant critical paradigm romantic comedy is
always conservative, for this author it appears to be more liberat-
ing, coming closer to Bakhtin’s subversive potential of carnival or
the ideological effect posited for comedian comedy by critics like
Palmer, Jenkins, Krutnik (1995) and others. From my perspective,
however, the genre is neither one nor the other (nor anything in
between). The way to escape from the determinism of current theo-
ries of the genre is not to replace it by another form of determinism,
even if it is one of a different sign. The relationship between form
and content, in art in general and in romantic comedy in particular,
is always fluid and contingent on the historical context and the

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 38 The secret life of romantic comedy

specific circumstances in which the text is created and received. The

conventions of a given genre do not predetermine the ideological
discourses deployed in the individual text. Romantic comedy as a
genre deploys discourses on love, sexuality, gender and identity. Its
special atmosphere allows the intimate, sexual, social and gender
relationships between the characters in each individual text to be
expressed in a less inhibited way; it protects them from social pres-
sure and repression and it may allow them to change their identity
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and mature. However, the nature of these changes is specific to each

text, although obviously affected by cultural and historical deter-
minations. The humour deployed by the genre both shores up the
magic space and channels the ideological discourses of the text, but
it does not homogenise or predetermine them. In sum, romantic
comedy (like any other genre) is neither conservative nor radical,
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although the films that deploy its conventions may be one or the
other, or, very often, both at the same time. The next section briefly
illustrates how a film generally taken as a romantic comedy
(although not only) might be analysed taking into account what I
have described as the main characteristics of the genre.

The Sydney issue

In The American President (1995), the ‘Sydney issue’ is initially not,
as U.S. president Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) hopes when
he hears one of his advisors utter the phrase, some conflict that his
country is having with Australia, but a euphemistic expression
employed by his entourage to refer to his relationship with political
strategist Sydney Wade (Annette Bening) and the problems it may
cause for his presidency and, especially, for his re-election. This
mid-1990s mainstream Hollywood film mixes two genres which
had acquired, for different reasons, a high level of visibility at the
time of its release. Starting with Woody Allen’s nervous romances
of the late 1970s and continuing with the new romances of the
mid-1980s, romantic comedy had become one of the most popular
Hollywood genres – a position that it continues to occupy at the
beginning of the twenty-first century – resulting by the mid-1990s
in a remarkable ‘state of grace’ noticeable, among other things, in
its rising flexibility to blend with other genres. The figure of the
president of the United States, on the other hand, had always
exerted a powerful attraction in U.S. culture, including the cinema,

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 The theory of romantic comedy 39

but Bill Clinton’s term of office brought about a renewed interest

in Hollywood through films like, among others, Dave (1993), The
American President, Mars Attacks! (1996), Independence Day
(1996), Absolute Power (1997), Wag the Dog (1997), Air Force
One (1997), Primary Colors (1998) or Bulworth (1998). While
comedy is not a generic ingredient in all of these films and the type
of comedy activated in them varies from one to the other, it may
be argued that both Dave and The American President tap into the
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optimism of the first years of a president who was at the time seen
as more human and approachable than his predecessors. Later films
like Primary Colors and Bulworth, released after the Monica
Lewinsky scandal, also use comedy, albeit of a different kind, to
explore the darker mood that beset the country as a consequence
of the media appropriation of what could perhaps be described as
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the excesses of Clinton’s humanity.

Specific internal and external historical circumstances, therefore,
make the combination of romantic comedy and U.S.-president
movie possible but, at the same time, this combination produces in
the texts certain results which must also be interpreted individually
within their historical context. From the perspective of the political
movie, the presence of romantic comedy facilitates the articulation
of the film’s liberal message: a president who, in his own words,
has been ‘so busy keeping his job that he forgot to do his job’, is
brought back to the reality of his own political ideas through the
beneficial influence of his romantic attachment with Sydney. In the
film’s climax, in view of the danger of a break-up in the relation-
ship, he announces an aggressive bill calling for a twenty percent
reduction in the emission of fossil fuels, something that, from the
perspective of a decade later, could only happen within the magic
fictional space of romantic comedy. The film mixes the conventions
of the two genres so hopelessly that it stops making sense when, in
the final reunion immediately after the president’s speech, Sydney
assures him that she has not come back to him because of his
change of mind regarding national policy. The spectator knows that
this is precisely why she has come back to him and that the fear of
her leaving him is what has shaken him out of his political inertia.
However, this may not even be counted as a weakness on the film’s
part since from the perspective of romantic comedy the political
plot has become both comic space and metaphor for the representa-
tion of the central relationship. As I shall argue later, it is perhaps

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 40 The secret life of romantic comedy

through this relationship that the film is making its most important
political statement.
Authors like Babington and Evans (1989), Neale (1992), Krutnik
(1990; 2002) and Shumway (2003) have related the rise of romantic
comedy at the end of the last century to changes in social and inti-
mate relationships in contemporary society and have mentioned the
aftermath of the sexual revolution, the new discourses on sexuality
and intimacy and the impact of feminism on gender relationships
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as important factors in the renewed commercial clout of the genre,

whether, as Neale suggests, because it has functioned as a nostalgic
evocation of a safer past in which gender equality was not even
dreamt of, or, as I have argued, because the genre has proved itself
particularly adroit at adapting itself to contemporary intimate dis-
courses (Evans and Deleyto, 1998). The American President offers
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arguments for both interpretive tendencies but grounds its construc-

tion of the central affective relationship on the activation of a comic
space, here distinctively related to the ‘real’ space of the White
House, and on the deployment of humour in order to convey
certain ideological discourses.
After one of her visits to the White House, Sydney returns to her
sister’s apartment, where she is temporarily staying, and explains
that she has kissed the president on the mouth in the china room.
Beth (Nina Siemaszko) asks her: ‘And then what happened?’, to
which Sydney replies, ‘He had to go attack Libya.’ ‘There’s always
something’, her sister concludes. The humour of this exchange lies
in the incongruence between what is taken to be a regular conversa-
tion between two sisters or two friends about their love life and
what is seen as the everyday routine of an exceptional person, the
president of the United States, or in the film’s annoying words, ‘the
leader of the free world’. The American President activates its
liberal credentials, U.S. cultural conventions and the conventions
of the U.S. presidency genre to suggest that in the most perfect
democracy in the world the president is both a unique person
because of the position he occupies and a ‘regular guy’ with the
same personal hopes, dreams and anxieties as anybody else. The
joke employs this almost mythical continuity between the normal
and the exceptional to achieve its effect and argues both that a man
can passionately kiss a woman and then give the order to attack
Libya without missing a beat and that this sequence of events is
funny because of the unlikelihood of it happening to most of us.

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 The theory of romantic comedy 41

Moreover, here as in the rest of the film, Andrew’s position as

president and Sydney’s as professional political campaigner work
as metaphors for the contemporary scenarios in which intimate
relationships take place. Beth’s deadpan reaction – ‘There’s always
something’ – is funny because bombing Tripoli is not just ‘some-
thing’ and because it refers, indirectly, to the difficulties and fears
of commitment between modern men and women. The jobs of the
two lovers are exceptional and the obstacles that these jobs pose to
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the relationship only too obvious, but the film, as a romantic

comedy of the 1990s, suggests that these obstacles are not so dif-
ferent from those experienced by many professional men and
women trying to make their personal and professional lives compat-
ible in an increasingly tough capitalist culture. Given the amount
of time and energy demanded by many people’s professions, one
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does not need to be the president of the United States nowadays to

become involved in various ways with another person at work and
to wish to pursue a relationship of whatever kind in spite of the
pressures and incompatibilities found on the way. The romantic
comedy strives to find a space in which neither the relationship nor
the job will suffer, and one in which, in fact, the two will blend
successfully.
The humour of this moment, and of much of The American
President, highlights a contemporary intimate setting which is not

2 ‘There’s always something’: love in the workplace. Michael

Douglas and Annette Bening in The American President
(dir. Rob Reiner, 1995, Columbia, Universal)

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 42 The secret life of romantic comedy

only attributed to modern working conditions but also to the

growing visibility of women in professional positions. Romantic
comedy had always featured working women as its protagonists
but films of the same period like Broadcast News (1987), Working
Girl (1988), Green Card (1990), Accidental Hero (1992), Sleepless
in Seattle, Groundhog Day (1993), The Truth about Cats and Dogs
(1996), One Fine Day (1996), My Best Friend’s Wedding or You’ve
Got Mail (1998) consistently explore the conflicts and also the
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romantic and sexual possibilities of mostly middle-class white

women’s presence in the workplace, offering different perspectives
and ideological discourses. One of the consequences for many
women of the relative success of second-wave feminism was the
unequal demands placed on them by a contemporary society that
may have grudgingly accepted their social and sexual equality
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but still expected them to continue doing what they were doing
before. This development was denounced by feminists like Susan
Faludi as part of the culture of patriarchal backlash (1992) and,
within mainstream Hollywood, memorably summarised by the
Julianne Moore character in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle
(1992): ‘These days a woman can feel like a failure if she doesn’t
bring in fifty grand a year and still make time for blow jobs and
homemade lasagne.’
Sydney feels some of these pressures and the film suggests that
in the past it is her job that has taken precedence, creating an emo-
tional void which is unacceptable for romantic comedy. Her bril-
liance as a political operative has left her increasingly powerless to
pursue affective relationships or has turned her half-hearted attempts
into a long chain of failures. Yet, The American President does not
suggest that, in order for the protagonist to regain her ability to
engage with another person intimately, she should surrender her
gains within the social sphere. Rather, it proposes a scenario in
which the two can coexist and feed off each other. As her romance
with Andrew develops, Sydney continues to be as tough and relent-
less in her job as she had been in the past and, moreover, uses
her influence to bring back to life the president’s dormant liberal
ideas. Conversely, awareness of their difficult professional relation-
ship makes their desire for each other more urgent and even helps
their sexual imagination along, as when, after their first meeting,
Andrew summarises their rapport to his friend and Chief of Staff,
A.J. (Martin Sheen): ‘We had a nice couple of minutes together.

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 The theory of romantic comedy 43

She threatened me. I patronised her. We didn’t have anything to

eat but I thought there was a connection.’ In general, Sydney
becomes an icon of both female social independence and hetero-
sexual desire. In other words, Reiner’s film presents itself as an
instance of the blend of second-wave feminism and femininity that
Jacinda Read, in her analysis of rape-revenge movies, has found as
characteristic of 1990s popular culture (2000: 249–51 and passim).
Sydney’s political sway on the president and her simultaneous
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engagement in an affective-sexual relationship with him turn her

into an embodiment of what Read has called ‘common-sense under-
standings of feminism’ (103), in which femininity and feminism are
not opposites but compatible. This lived compatibility probably
underscores the more obvious meanings of the comic phrase ‘the
Sydney issue’.
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Before starring in The American President, Michael Douglas had

consolidated a very specific persona of more or less affluent white
masculinity in crisis through a series of films including Fatal Attrac-
tion (1987), The War of the Roses (1989), Basic Instinct (1992),
Falling Down (1993) and Disclosure (1994). Reiner’s film uses this
persona in various ways in order to enrich the verisimilitude of its
sexual scenario. Following the trend set by the protagonists of those
films, Andrew is attracted to Sydney because she is a strong woman,
who has triumphed in a world of men and who, as he discovers
later on, earns more than the White House could afford to pay her.
When a character tells Sydney that ‘men like being insulted by
women; it makes them feel loved; don’t ask me why’, the statement
is easier to understand if we visualise Douglas in, say, Basic Instinct
as the object of that description. The president of the United States
is a very powerful man but, because of Douglas’s performance,
Andrew Shepherd is immediately read by the spectator as far less
imposing than his position portends. The film reverses the story of
male anxiety and failure in front of the powerful woman that the
spectator had become familiar with, but the romantic comedy recu-
perates his masculine weakness to make the equality between the
two protagonists more credible. While the contemporaneous thriller
or the black comedy castigate outmoded male attempts at sexual
supremacy, the romantic comedy can only use a masculinity that is
prepared to accept comic humiliation as part of the sexual game.
This becomes most obvious in the scene in which his lecturing
of Sydney on the reasons why she does not want to pursue their

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 44 The secret life of romantic comedy

relationship is suddenly interrupted by her appearing half naked

before him, ready for their first sexual encounter, and he immedi-
ately turns his condescending attitude into a string of excuses comi-
cally revealing his anxiety about sexual performance. That the sex
is apparently satisfactory on both sides is not so much surprising
given his initial misgivings as a logical consequence of the relative
positions of power mandated by the genre: for the relationship to
work, sexually as much as romantically, not only is some degree of
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equality necessary but also an understanding that a successful het-

erosexual relationship at the end of the twentieth century must be
based on a number of requisites, including male acknowledgement
of the unfairness of patriarchal privilege, female refusal to give up
the social and sexual gains of feminism and a mutual ability to turn
pre-given power positions into a mise en scène of desire.
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Much of the humour of the film, including some of the instances

briefly analysed here, is directly related to the way in which the
White House is presented as both the centre of important political
action – bills against global warming and the free use of personal
guns, swift responses to threats to U.S. supremacy, even the improve-
ment of state education – and a warm and homely environment for
the expression of sexual desire. The film opens with a montage
sequence of detail shots of various objects supposedly housed in the
building which make up a celebratory, brief history of the country,
while Marc Shaiman’s swelling score underlines the symbolic
dimension of the place. The scene culminates with a long shot of
the exterior of the site as the name of the producer and director
concludes the opening credits, suggesting that this space is going to
play a crucial role in the story. The vividly portrayed hectic every-
day activity of the place starts immediately but there is a relaxed
mood in all its inhabitants which, in the film’s romantic utopia,
underscores the importance of interpersonal relationships in the
president’s circle for a smooth operation of the country as a
whole.
At the same time, the president’s initial attitude – which mani-
fests itself in the casualness with which he is ready to compromise
his ideals in order to get re-elected – conventionally suggests that
he is in urgent need of a change. The atmosphere constructed by
the film in the first few minutes, through the friendliness, good
humour and tolerance of all the characters and the exhilarating
realistic detail employed to shore up the basic decency of all

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 The theory of romantic comedy 45

concerned, anticipates to the genre-experienced spectator that this

change is going to be brought about by love and desire, precisely
because it has already been made clear that love and desire will
flourish easily in this benevolent and liberal space. As I have argued
above, Andrew’s position as president works, from the perspective
of the genre, as a metaphor for the contemporary reality of men
and women pursuing affective and sexual relationships in their
workplaces and the difficulties that such a situation entails, both in
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terms of work pressures and power struggles. The mixture of genres

confirms this contemporary reality as a central part of the film’s
construction of a national identity, beyond more familiar and less
palatable descriptions of what the country has become. This could
only happen in a social context in which affective relationships are
considered of the greatest cultural importance and in an industrial
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context in which the genre of romantic comedy reigns as one of

Hollywood’s most proficient ways of talking to audiences around
the world.
What romantic comedy does in a film like The American Presi-
dent is to select culturally relevant intimate situations, such as, in
this case, the predicament of the professional woman, the evolution
of 1990s popular feminism, the visibility of the masculinity crisis
or, more centrally, the unstoppable presence of love and sexual
desire in the workplace, and cast over them the benevolent mantle
of the comic space. While the erotic thriller, for example, visits
similar scenarios and highlights the fears and anxieties that they
may produce in the spectator, romantic comedy takes a more opti-
mistic perspective and suggests that where love and desire are con-
cerned everything is possible, including that a president of the
United States will take active steps towards stopping global warming.
In the meantime, however, the genre keeps on recording similar
anxieties to those found in other genres and looking for ways of
turning them into an opportunity for fun and sexual excitement.

Genres and films

The genre of romantic comedy can, therefore, be described as the
intersection of three, closely interrelated elements: a narrative that
articulates historically and culturally specific views of love, desire,
sexuality and gender relationships; a space of transformation
and fantasy which influences the narrative articulation of those

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 46 The secret life of romantic comedy

discourses; and humour as the specific perspective from which the

fictional characters, their relationships and the spectator’s response
to them are constructed as embodiments of those discourses. Given
the pervasiveness of stories of love and desire in the cinema, espe-
cially in Hollywood, the constant presence of humour in many
filmic narratives, and that films always transform reality in one way
or another, it could be argued that this definition is so inclusive
that most Hollywood films could be seen as romantic comedies.
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This would invalidate the value of the term as an analytical tool.

My argument, however, is not that films that incorporate these
features are romantic comedies. Rather, the genre of romantic
comedy has operated and continues to operate in a great variety of
filmic texts, including many that cannot be defined as romantic
comedies. It is the recurrence of these features in films that are
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routinely described by other generic labels that makes the genre

culturally relevant. Genres are categories used by the industry, the
filmmakers, critics and spectators to communicate with one another
and, consequently, they are also sets of expectations brought to the
films by the spectators. From a textual perspective, these expecta-
tions are turned into abstract systems of conventions. Films are
individual articulations of those conventions and each film carries
out its own selection of conventions from one or several genres.
This means that films as texts are not romantic comedies but,
rather, use the conventions of romantic comedy in specific ways,
and also that the absence from a text which we may consider as
representative of the genre of one or several of these conventions
does not invalidate its participation in the genre as such.
Besides, films are not obliged to deploy genres in homogeneous
or easily predictable ways. While the three characteristics discussed
here would seem to constitute the conceptual core of romantic
comedy, the genre’s presence in a text does not immediately signify
the sustained visibility of these characteristics. The comic space may
be virtually absent from a film like Husbands and Wives (1992) (a
film in which humour also appears in very small doses) in order to
suggest desolation and despair in the realm of intimate relation-
ships. This does not mean that romantic comedy is not important
for the analysis of a film which constructs its precariousness pre-
cisely around the absence of such a space. If we were not aware of
the existence of this space in the genre, we would not be able to
notice its absence from Allen’s film so acutely. Another example:

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 The theory of romantic comedy 47

the celebration of friendship as opposed to love and desire with

which romantic comedy associated itself in numerous films of the
1990s constitutes a comment on the profound crisis of the hetero-
sexual relationships that the genre ‘should’ be dealing with. Perhaps
love and desire hold a thematic exclusivity over the genre but
what better way to articulate a pessimistic view of their effects on
people than by subordinating them to friendship (see Deleyto,
2003). Nevertheless, as a general rule, the simultaneous presence,
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however fragmentary or intermittent, of these three characteristics

in a given text would suggest the centrality of romantic comedy in
its generic makeup.
On the other hand, since genres, like other cultural formations
and like all complex systems, are never static but are in constant
and often unpredictable evolution, none of the characteristics dis-
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cussed here are fixed or permanent. Although when the critic tries
to describe a genre of such longevity as romantic comedy, s/he often
looks for theoretical articulations that can encompass as many of
its historical manifestations as possible, there is no way in which
we can aspire to fix it forever. We cannot predict the directions in
which it will evolve in the future, the mutations that it will undergo,
or the specific ways in which it will continue to be culturally rele-
vant (or not).
If films are the specific manifestations of generic conventions at
work, it is also in the films that genres constantly intersect with one
another and it is, therefore, partly through the films that genres
evolve. But genres are also systems of communication, which involve
industrial decisions and audience reception, and are also, crucially,
cultural discourses. The history of a specific genre is, therefore, also
related to extrinsic factors: in the case of romantic comedy, the
evolution of ideological struggles and the historical realities of love,
sex and intimate relations. These factors, however, stop being
wholly extrinsic when, as in our case, the artistic genre has become
very influential in the way people think about love and sex, and
perform the social protocols related to these affects. If it can safely
be said that romantic comedy has changed drastically in the twen-
tieth century because sexual and affective protocols have evolved
in very rapid and sometimes radical ways, it can also be argued
that the popularity of romantic comedy has affected the way people
have behaved and continue to behave with respect to love and
sex.

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 48 The secret life of romantic comedy

Within the boundaries of Hollywood film history – the imme-

diate concern of this book – cultural, industrial and formal changes
have crystallised in various periods, tendencies or subgenres.
Babington and Evans divide their account of the Hollywood comedy
of the sexes in five chapters, each of which discusses one such ten-
dency or period: the ‘screwball comedy’ of the 1930s, which they
identify as the golden age of Hollywood comedy, the Lubistschean
romantic comedy of the same decade, the sex comedies of the 1950s
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and what they call, writing in the late 1980s, ‘romantic comedy
today’, to which they interestingly add a chapter which deals with
the films of three ‘comedians’, Bob Hope, Mae West and Woody
Allen (1989). Frank Krutnik follows a similar pattern and distin-
guishes three main periods: the screwball comedy of the 1930s, the
sex comedies of the 1950s and the nervous romances of the late
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1970s (1990). To these, Steve Neale adds the ‘new romances’ of

the 1980s (1992) and Charles Musser, using Stanley Cavell’s term
‘comedies of remarriage’, argues that these start not in the 1930s
but much earlier, in the immediate post-World War I era, with Cecil
B. de Mille’s cycle of divorce comedies (1995: 282–5). When authors
write about a specific decade, more subgenres or traditions are
usually found. For example, James Harvey, writing about the 1930s
and 1940s, finds not only the screwball comedy and the Lubitsch
comedy, but, after further distinguishing within Lubitsch’s comic
films between ‘the naughty operetta’ and ‘comedies without music’,
goes on to discuss various other categories, like the classy comedy,
the tough comedy, the Astaire and Rogers musicals and the Preston
Sturges comedies, among others (1998).
Historical categorisations such as these fulfil their main objec-
tive, which is to offer the spectator a much needed general pano-
rama of the evolution of the genre, but they seldom tend to do
justice to the individual texts. More specifically, they have the dis-
advantage of grouping together, for the sake of clarity, films which
might be better understood within not one but several parameters,
and of leaving out texts which, because of their specific character-
istics or their historical placement, cannot be included in any of the
categories. Take, for example, Preston Sturges’s comedies. While
The Lady Eve (1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942) can profit-
ably be seen as screwball comedies, where exactly do we place
Sullivan’s Travels (1941), a film that is clearly indebted to the
screwball tradition but incorporates other traditions as well?, and

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 The theory of romantic comedy 49

what about Christmas in July (1940), less controversially a roman-

tic comedy, but one which perhaps is not as close to the conventions
of screwball as the previous ones? Other films directed by Sturges
in the same period are more clearly not romantic comedies, like
The Great McGinty (1940), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) and
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), but, given the apparent
coherence of Sturges’s oeuvre and the many similarities among all
his films, is it accurate or convenient to separate them in various
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traditions? And where can Unfaithfully Yours (1948) be placed, a

film made when a new era of romantic comedy was beginning but
which seems to have as little to do with Sturges’s earlier comic work
as with the comedies of George Cukor or Howard Hawks which
were, among others, ushering in the new period? Auteur-minded
critics might conclude that the obvious solution is to analyse the
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films of the director as a whole, leaving aside generic traditions, but

this choice underplays the objective importance of such traditions
for the understanding of the individual films.
The main drawback of generic groupings such as those men-
tioned above is that they still envision genres, and different generic
traditions, as groups of films, and therefore need to decide which
group each film best fits in. Within their parameters it is still possi-
ble to include a single film in several groups but this cannot be done
too frequently because it would defeat the purpose of the groupings.
In the case of romantic comedy, this has also meant that only those
films that can unequivocally be considered as romantic comedies
are likely to appear at all within any of the traditions. As a conse-
quence of this, only a very limited number of texts have generally
been considered romantic comedies. Harvey’s approach to classical
romantic comedy is more flexible, as he manages to incorporate in
his study groups like the tough newspaper comedies or even the
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers RKO musicals, which are not often
considered within the canon of the genre, yet this is done at the
expense of a gradual waning of the genre from a book which seems
to end up as an account of the author’s favourite films and directors
of the period, but has relatively little to say about romantic comedy
as a genre. Nevertheless, his book provides numerous examples of
films which are not romantic comedies while remaining essential to
understand the history of the genre in those crucial decades.
Therefore, in order to understand the evolution of romantic
comedy in U.S. cinema following the perspective proposed in this

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 50 The secret life of romantic comedy

chapter, we need to take into account not only films like Bringing
Up Baby, Pillow Talk or Pretty Woman, but also many other films
which would not be immediately recognisable as romantic comedies
and yet both use the conventions of the genre and contribute to its
historical change. Films like Out of Sight, Before Sunset or Rio
Bravo, mentioned in the introduction, would be examples of this,
as would Sullivan’s Travels, a film that combines several types of
comedy, along with other non-comic genres. Since Sturges’s film is
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not clearly a romantic comedy, critical analyses tend to ignore the

genre’s contribution to its overall meanings even though it is easy
to perceive that it is partly the film’s generic impurity that makes
it what it is. In terms of the history of the genre, romantic comedy
may not have changed significantly after Sturges’s film. Yet the
ways in which the genre’s conventions interacted within its textual
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structure with other generic conventions announced the end of

screwball comedy and anticipated that a different kind of generic
combinations would characterise the history of the genre in the
following years. Or, by looking at the immediate past of the country,
the movie reflected an awareness of the historical changes that were
about to take place. Of course, this was a phenomenon that could
be perceived in Sullivan’s Travels and also in other films of the same
period.
In general, the history of U.S. cinema, like that of other national
cinemas, abounds in such examples. The ideologically and formally
rigid conceptualisations that have been described here are both
cause and consequence of the critical tendency to overlook these
films. To look only at the contemporary situation, the last two
decades have witnessed a rebirth of the genre which was not only
brought about by the films of Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, Meg
Ryan, Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Lopez or Nora Ephron. Films like
Big, Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail or Maid
in Manhattan are important to understand the genre’s evolution.
Such labels as ‘the new romance’ or ‘romantic fabrication’ (Krutnik
1998: 15) accurately describe some of these films’ incorporation of
cultural changes in the realm of love, romance and desire into the
conventions of the genre. Yet romantic comedy has appeared in
many other places and in very different forms. It is significant that
independent cinema is never included in studies of romantic comedy,
and yet it could be argued that it was in that field that the evolution
of the genre became more invigorating, as the final chapter of this

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 The theory of romantic comedy 51

book will try to prove. The films of Woody Allen were instrumental
in bringing about the rebirth of the genre in the late 1970s and yet,
since then, even though the New York director continued to make
(and still does) one film every year, his movies have virtually dis-
appeared from discussions of 1980s and 1990s romantic comedy.
The action-adventure film and the buddy movie have dominated
New Hollywood production, particularly through the preference of
contemporary blockbusters for this generic configuration. However,
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the cultural confrontation between homosocial and heterosexual

desire (Sedgwick, 1985) and its complex re-emergence as a conse-
quence of the second wave of feminism would suggest that textual
combinations of romantic comedy and action-adventure would be
frequent. Yet, the presence of romantic comedy in films like Speed
(1994), Out of Sight or Entrapment (1999) has gone unnoticed,
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even though it appears to be fundamental to an understanding of

the social/sexual dynamics of the plot.
The ostensible reason for this neglect is that ‘independent’ com-
edies, Woody Allen’s films or action-adventure spectacles cannot
be made to fit the formally constraining and ideologically determin-
istic definitions of the genre that have dominated generic theory
and analysis. Scriptwriter and studio analyst Billy Mernit’s conten-
tion that the most successful contemporary romantic comedies are
often cross-breeds (2000: xi) seems to have gone largely unheeded
by the critical institution. This situation is by no means specific to
the last two decades but appears time and again wherever we look
in the history of U.S. cinema and, although it falls outside the scope
of this book, in other national cinemas. Romantic comedy has
had a rich secret life underneath the canonical texts and the tradi-
tional classifications. Satirical comedy, marriage comedy, comedian
comedy, metacinematic comedy, parody, gross-out comedy, slap-
stick and comedy of regression have repeatedly combined with
romantic comedy in individual films, often producing permutations
that have sent the genre in new directions. Outside comedy, the
genre has appeared in combination with many other genres, on
equal footing or in subsidiary form, and many of these films have
cast new light on romantic comedy’s conventions. Romantic comedy
has appeared in mainstream Hollywood cinema but also in the
independent sector or on the periphery of the big studios. And this
is only in the United States. The array may be bewildering but the
variety and complexity of the combinations of love, sex and comedy

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 52 The secret life of romantic comedy

and the multiplicity of ideological uses to which the genre’s trans-

formative space has been put, make it imperative that we begin to
come to terms with the secret life of romantic comedy. Following
Derrida’s generic law, Wittgenstein’s and Lakoff’s views of catego-
ries, Rick Altman’s critique of traditional film genre theory and the
chaos theory concept of the fractal, I visualise the genre of romantic
comedy as a huge pan-historical virtual multi-protagonist film. In
this macro-text culturally specific discourses on love and sexuality
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are narrativised from a comic perspective and within a benevolent

comic space. Actual individual films repeatedly ‘plagiarise’ or
‘exploit’ the genre for ideas and, in so doing, contribute to its per-
manent transformation.

Although, as has become clear from the above discussion, film genre
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always exists in history, my approach in this book is more generic

than historical, more textual than contextual. At the current point
in the development of Film Studies as an academic discipline, there
is no arguing against the importance of the industrial, cultural and
historical context for the accurate understanding of film texts and
film history, but it is often the case that, in the midst of contextual
arguments, the texts have tended to disappear, as if there was only
the outside and the inside was empty, or not worth looking at any
more, or as if everything that could be said about the texts had
already been said. For this reason, this book proposes a return to
textual analysis, and an acknowledgement of the complexity of
texts, even though the context will necessarily be present. No
textual analysis can be blind to the text’s existence in history and
society, nor can it ignore its evolution from the time of its release.
And, while textual analysis may carry its own ideology, the apri-
oristic ideological overgeneralisations of classical ideological generic
criticism can, as has already been argued, often be easily countered
with the ‘realities’ of the texts themselves. My main focus of analy-
sis is not historical but generic, that is, I concentrate on the ways
in which the selected films employ the genre of romantic comedy
in order to produce meaning and, crucially, on the ways in which
that meaning is also produced through the intersection with the
conventions of other genres.
Therefore, the book is not primarily concerned with the changing
shape of the virtual multi-protagonist movie mentioned above
but with the specific narrative and cultural mechanisms used by a

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 The theory of romantic comedy 53

selection of individual films to actualise some of its multiple stories

and discourses. My aim is not to offer a new history of romantic
comedy but, less ambitiously, to ascertain whether such a project
is at all feasible and to suggest some of the possible directions that
such a history might take. For this reason, the films analysed here
have never been considered as part of the genre’s canon before. On
the other hand, all of the chosen films, with the partial exception
of Before Sunset, are more or less canonical texts directed by estab-
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lished auteurs. This does not mean that only ‘great works of art’
are amenable to this type of generic analysis, or that only important
artists can transcend generic purity in interesting ways. Impurity is
consubstantial to generic working and does not depend on the
individual filmmaker. The specificities of the various directors’
work with romantic comedy are necessarily taken into account here
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but my approach is by no means auteurist. Rather, I have chosen

relatively well-known texts in order to underline the visibility and
the crucial role played by romantic comedy outside the very
restricted dominant canon.
Chapter 2 is devoted to two films directed by two of the most
prestigious figures in the history of Hollywood comedy: Ernst
Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Neither To Be or Not to Be (1942) nor
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), however, have been previously thought of
within the context of romantic comedy. Because both movies
combine different comic traditions or conventions from different
comic subgenres, their romantic comedy allegiances have often been
overlooked. And yet, I would argue, their study from the point of
view of romantic comedy would help to change dominant views of
what the genre has been or should be, and of the ideological dis-
courses that it has allowed within its boundaries. This chapter is,
therefore, devoted to cases of texts in which romantic comedy
interacts with other comic subgenres, such as marriage comedy,
satire, comedian comedy, parody or metacomedy.
Chapter 3 attempts to move beyond the borders of comedy and
examine what happens when romantic comedy is combined with a
non-comic genre such as the thriller. The aim here is to give an idea
of the intricate paths along which the secret life of the genre has
developed and to suggest ways in which the analysis of the proxim-
ity between apparently incompatible genres can alter our perception
of films and our interpretation of the cultural discourses which
they articulate. Although Ed Sikov has insightfully included Alfred

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 54 The secret life of romantic comedy

Hitchcock within his study of 1950s U.S. comedy (1994), the British
director is certainly not one that springs to mind when we think of
romantic comedy, and Rear Window (1954) has never, to my
knowledge, been analysed as a romantic comedy although it is one
of the texts most often discussed in the history of cinema. Not that
I will be arguing that the film is indeed a romantic comedy – no
film is strictly a romantic comedy from the perspective proposed
here – but our understanding of its meanings, especially its sexual
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and affective discourses, changes significantly when we take on

board the crucial presence of this genre in its narrative structure.
Whereas Hitchcock has never been seen as a romantic comedy
director, Woody Allen has oddly disappeared from discussions of
the genre in contemporary cinema. Crimes and Misdemeanors
(1989) is perhaps not the most comic text in his oeuvre but its
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position on the margins of the genre, or even beyond its borders,

can powerfully explain generic mechanisms, as well as provide
useful insights into a specific cultural moment in the evolution of
the genre. Allen’s career illustrates in itself the variety of meanings
and discourses, together with the formal experimentation, that
contemporary romantic comedy encompasses, against dominant
views of the genre’s recent history. The final chapter suggests some
of the possible directions that the genre’s secret life might take in
the twenty-first century and focuses on a film, Before Sunset, which,
again, makes abundant use of the genre’s conventions but has not
been primarily seen, perhaps surprisingly, as a romantic comedy,
probably in this case because of its allegiance to the aesthetic forms
and conventions of independent cinema.

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 2

Comic negotiations
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I. Laughter, love and World War II: To Be or Not to Be

There can be little doubt about the importance of history for a
proper understanding of To Be or Not to Be. When the film started
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production on 6 November 1941, the United States was a neutral

nation in the war that was raging in Europe and was rapidly extend-
ing to other parts of the world. Before production ended, on 23
December, Pearl Harbor had been bombed and the country had
entered World War II. In 1940 Charles Chaplin had forcefully put
forward the anti-isolationist perspective in his war comedy The
Great Dictator (1940), and a year later Howard Hawks had marked
the path for his country’s inevitable involvement with Sergeant
York (1941). Now events begin to develop very fast. Famous
Hollywood names, connected in the 1930s with the genre of
comedy, are joining the armed forces left, right and centre. Frank
Capra, who had just finished his post-Depression comedy Meet
John Doe (1941) – the last of his social-problem comedies –, becomes
now Major Frank Capra, on active duty in the Army Signal Corps,
while Corporal James Stewart is promoted to Second Lieutenant,
a rank in which he is joined by Ronald Reagan. Clark Gable shaves
off his moustache and enters the army, soon to become also a
Second Lieutenant, while Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power enlist in
the Navy and the Marines, respectively, and even Cary Grant
becomes a U.S. citizen. In 1942 patriotism is running high: Bob
Hope completes his first tour of army camps in June, the movies
are declared an essential activity in the war effort and the new
Hollywood Office of the Office of War Information Motion Picture
Bureau proclaims its famous slogan: ‘Will this picture help win the
war?’ One of the most popular films released that year, James
Cagney’s Yankee Doodle Dandy, donates the $6 million worth of

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 56 The secret life of romantic comedy

admission tickets of its New York premiere to the war effort. Two
months before the release of To Be or Not to Be, on 6 March 1942,
its female star Carole Lombard is killed in a plane crash near Las
Vegas when returning to her home in California from a war bond
rally in Indianapolis. In the meantime, the extermination of the
Jews as the Final Solution is being discussed by Nazi high-rank
officers and, even as the film is being released, Jews are being
deported to Auschwitz. As Peter Barnes emphatically puts it, ‘every-
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thing is Poland’ (2002: 7). The time is rife for war rhetoric, heroism
and grand gestures. The time is wrong for laughter and comedy.
In this extremely charged atmosphere, a film that treats the inva-
sion of Poland as a farce is bound to be controversial. The great
Academy Award winner of the year is William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver,
a war-time hybrid of marriage comedy and melodrama with its
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heart in the right place which never takes its theme lightly. A few
months later, in November of the same year, the most popular
World War II film, Casablanca, is also released to general acclaim.
As complex a generic hybrid as To Be or Not to Be – romantic
melodrama, exotic adventure, war movie, antifascist and anti-
isolationist propaganda film – Curtiz’s film, like Mrs. Miniver,
strikes the right note by tracing through the character of Rick Blaine
(Humphrey Bogart) the progress of the U.S. attitude towards the
War in Europe and ending with his reluctant compromise with the
Allied cause. Like Lubitsch’s film, it also features at its core a love
triangle. Yet, while the triangle in Casablanca transcended its
immediate context and went on to become paradigmatic of con-
temporary Western discourses on love, desire and marriage, that of
To Be or Not to Be remained almost invisible next to the promi-
nence of the film’s more ‘serious’ concerns and the controversial
nature of its comic perspective – oddly, if we consider that Casa-
blanca gave people the kind of patriotic discourse they wanted to
hear at the time, which should have made the love plot secondary,
while Lubitsch’s movie wore its tongue impertinently in its cheek,
which could have driven spectators to ignore its Nazi plot and
concentrate on its love story.
Yet, right or wrong, politically correct or not, the film was a
comedy and as such it became part of film history. If the histori-
cal context and the war-time industrial rearrangements that
Hollywood was undergoing during the film’s production and
first run are relevant, equally relevant is its pivotal position,

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 Comic negotiations 57

simultaneously central and marginal, in the history of Hollywood

comedy. Although Lubitsch would still make two more comedies
– Heaven Can Wait (1943) and Cluny Brown (1946) –, To Be or
Not to Be represents one of the closing stages of a brand of comedy
of love and desire which, running for over twenty years, constitutes
a unique phenomenon: a one-director comic tradition. Although ‘a
Lubitschean comedy’ is a label generally used to refer to a specific
type of comedy, it is also almost invariably a comedy directed by
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Lubitsch. He is not just the central figure of the cycle – he is the

whole cycle. Connected at its outset with Cecil B. de Mille’s silent
marriage comedies and with Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923),
and, in the early 1930s, vaguely reminiscent of what James Harvey
has called ‘the classy comedy’ (1998: 61), the films’ closest relatives
must otherwise be found in other comic love narratives: the German
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director’s musicals of the same period and the turn-of-the-century

European tradition of plays and operettas on which the movies
were often based. This film’s inclusion of a love plot seems to many
an almost unnecessary and frivolous distraction from its central
theme but this generalised opinion says more about the inferior
cultural status of intimate matters in both Lubitsch’s times and our
own than about the structure of the film itself. The secondary posi-
tion that these matters occupy in the critical discourse on the film
represents a repeatedly missed chance to contextualise it within the
Lubitschean comedy of the sexes and to explore both its links with
the main body of his films and its marginality with respect to
them.
Traditional accounts of the history of romantic comedy tend to
agree that the war puts a sudden end to the strong comic output
of Hollywood in the 1930s, and nowhere is this more visible than
in the abrupt disappearance of its most brilliant cycle, screwball
comedy. 1942 is for many already too late a date for screwball, but
a closer look suggests the inaccuracy of this assessment. This is, for
example, the time of greatest effervescence in Preston Sturges’s
short career as a director. Although his movies are often felt to be
too idiosyncratic to be safely lodged within a generic label, consid-
erations of this type are based on the traditional attitude to genres
as corpora questioned in this book. If a genre is seen as an abstract
system that evolves historically rather than as a group of texts, then
the importance of Sturges’s contribution to screwball becomes
immediately obvious. Both The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels

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 58 The secret life of romantic comedy

had been released in 1941 and The Palm Beach Story would appear
in 1942.
Apart from Sturges’s films, there were also screwball ingredients
in Meet John Doe and certainly in Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire,
which, also released in 1941, evokes in retrospect, both in its story
and mise en scène, the impending onset of film noir (The Maltese
Falcon also appears in 1941, This Gun for Hire in 1942). 1942 is
also the year of Take a Letter, Darling, a ‘minor’ screwball gener-
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ally overlooked because of its late date, which, directed by Mitchell

Leisen, does suggest the end of a road in the genre’s sexual politics:
the strong, powerful, fully screwball heroine played by Rosalind
Russell happily but incongruously submits to the unearned and
inexplicable supremacy of her mediocre employee-lover, played by
Fred McMurray. The film’s disappointing ending, perhaps not so
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drastically different from those of earlier, more famous screwball

texts (think of another late example, The Philadelphia Story (1940)),
does suggest an uneasiness with the New Woman discourses that
had found its Hollywood home in the cycle in the second half
of the 1930s, and looks forward to later cultural debates on the
place of women with respect to the home/labour force dichotomy.
To Be or Not to Be, on the other hand, uses the Lubitschean love
triangle and the screwball persona of Carole Lombard to a drasti-
cally different effect, and its gender politics are revealed, as will
be discussed later on, as an ideal combination of egalitarian ideo-
logical discourses stemming from the two comic traditions of the
1930s.
Lubitsch’s film, then, stands, together with The Palm Beach
Story, at the end of an era of comedy, but, unlike Sturges’s movie,
its hybrid use of comic genres places it on the margins of both the
screwball and the Lubitsch mainstream, underscoring perhaps the
impossibility of a future for both cycles. Film Noir is not the only
new genre that is being gestated while To Be or Not to Be is pro-
duced and released. Hitchcock, who in 1941 had unexpectedly
made his one contribution to screwball, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, spe-
cialises now in contemporary spy thrillers like Foreign Correspon-
dent or Saboteur (both released in 1942) and also inaugurates what
feminist critics would later label the paranoid woman’s film with
Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), while Val Lewton and
Jacques Tourneur release their influential ‘B’ horror Cat People
(1942).

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 Comic negotiations 59

In spite of the growing visibility of these new genres, which

undoubtedly reflected a changing mood in the country, comedy was
far from dead. 1942 was the year of The Woman of the Year, the
first of the nine Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy popular roman-
tic comedies which would span the 1940s and early 1950s, and it
was also the year of The Road to Morocco, the third instalment of
a series which would continue to turn out new instalments in the
following years. Its two male stars, Bing Crosby and, especially,
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Bob Hope represent the prominence of comedian comedy in the

1940s. At the same time, the relevant narrative roles played by
female stars like Dorothy Lamour in the Road to series, Virginia
Mayo in Hope’s The Princess and the Pirate (1944), or Jane Russell
in The Paleface (1948) and Son of Paleface (1952) guarantee
the importance of sexual discourses in the comedian comedies of
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the decade, even if these discourses are different from those of the
1930s comedies and from the sexual politics of the Hepburn and
Tracy vehicles. In this respect, To Be or Not to Be also occupies a
historical middle-of-the-road position between the comic actor-
based screwball of the 1930s and the comedian comedy of the
1940s: while Carole Lombard was the most glamorous screwball
star, Jack Benny, who did not make many films, was a comedian
and, perhaps for reasons not unrelated to Bob Hope’s popularity,
he brings into the film conventions, meanings and structures related
to this type of comedy. As we shall see later on, this combination
is also crucial to understand the movie’s comic meanings.
In sum, To Be or Not to Be may not be as central to the Lubitsch
comedy as Trouble in Paradise (1932) or Design for Living (1933)
or to such screwball comedy as It Happened One Night (1934),
The Awful Truth (1937) or Bringing Up Baby (1938), but its his-
torical location as a kind of epitaph to both cycles, its almost unique
generic combination of the two, its position as a meeting point
between the romantic comedy of the 1930s and that of the 1940s
and its intersection with other comic traditions grant it an interest
which ‘purer’ films within their respective traditions, like Trouble
in Paradise, Bringing Up Baby or The Paleface, lack.

Love and the invasion of Poland

Lubitsch’s film is as good an example as any in the history of
cinema of the critics’ self-appointed role as the guardians of generic
purity. Although, as William Paul reminds us, not all contemporary

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 60 The secret life of romantic comedy

reactions were equally negative (1983: 281), the movie’s blend of

the dramatic and the comic offended many of the reviewers. While
the British critical establishment congratulated itself on the cer-
tainty that Britain could not possibly produce such nasty little films
(Barnes 2002: 46–8), Bosley Crowther led U.S. attacks on the
German director for engendering a cinematic monster, a ‘shocking
confusion of realism and romance’ (in Eyman 1993: 301). The
general view was that the director had struck a hopelessly false note
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in mixing the real, contemporary suffering of Polish people under

the Nazi invasion with a frivolous comic perspective, that he was
laughing at things that should not be approached comically. The
Great Dictator had done something superficially similar but
Chaplin’s more sentimental brand of comedy had been felt to be
more acceptable and the film had achieved redemption by taking
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itself seriously in its final reel. Lubitsch was less accommodating

and, as a consequence, broke the Derridean law of genre. In the
French philosopher’s terms, he played the dangerous game of mixing
genres and dramatically failed to obtain the certificate of guarantee.
Or, in the phrase of another egregious genre mixer, Charles Dickens,
echoed in Peter Barnes’s recent appreciation of the film, he pro-
duced a piece of ‘streaky bacon’, a smooth mix of melodrama,
documentary, slapstick, farce and high comedy (2002: 55).
There are two types of intergeneric encounters in the movie. On
the one hand, there is the intersection between what could be
termed adventure drama or spy thriller, and comedy. On the other,
at least two types of comedy, corresponding to the two interwoven
plots, are joined together by the narrative: satire or black comedy,
and romantic comedy. Notice that the quotation from Crowther
refers to realism and romance as two incommensurable genres. If
we take the famous U.S. critic as representative of a more gener-
alised opinion, what offended was not only that he mixed the
serious and the comic, or the dramatic and the comic, but, more
specifically, realism and romance, implying, therefore, that romance
is not realistic or that reality, in times of war, does not include
romance. There was not only the accusation of bad taste in tackling
such a delicate and pressing issue as the invasion of Poland but also
that of inserting a frivolous topic like the love triangle in the middle
of a serious plot about the defeat of Nazi rule. Small wonder, then,
that when the film was elevated to the status of masterpiece, the
love triangle practically disappeared from critical discussion.

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 Comic negotiations 61

Among scholarly accounts of the film, William Paul most usefully

engages with what he calls the genre conflict between the two plots.
Placing himself on the camp of the defenders of comedy as a sub-
versive genre, he explains the negative reactions in a predictable
way: ‘the anarchic side of comedy might always seem an affront to
good taste, an attempt through laughter to purge bad taste’ (1983:
230). Paul brilliantly relates comedy, theatricality (the favourite
subject of most criticism of the film) and politics, but seems to tread
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on much shakier ground when he tackles the romantic side of the

film’s comedy: because of the casting of Jack Benny as the protago-
nist Josef Tura, he argues, ‘love has been displaced from the center
of this film so that any romantic feeling between these two charac-
ters functions simply as a given of the narrative’ (232). Benny could
never be fully at home in romantic comedy. There is romantic
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comedy in the film but not as far as the comic star is concerned.
Later on he affirms that due to the age discrepancy between Maria
Tura (Carole Lombard) and her admirer, Lieutenant Sobinski
(Robert Stack), the love scenes between these two are more comic
than romantic, and therefore there is no romantic comedy here,
either. Where, then, is the romantic comedy? Paul does not seem
able to find it anywhere and, as a consequence, ends up dismissing
the love plot and concentrating on the deception scenario.
Here I would like to continue the generic analysis initiated by
Paul by concentrating on the interaction between the two comic
plots and on the relationship between the use of romantic comedy
and black comedy, between the comic treatment of love – through
the intersection of the Lubitschean love triangle narrative and
screwball comedy – and the comic treatment of the Nazis. Satire
and romance may be seen to exist in very distant worlds from one
another but within the generic space of comedy they can and often
do intersect. As has been seen, satirical or Aristotelian comedy
exposes and ridicules vices and human folly with a corrective aim.
As Jonathan Swift says about his own poetry, ‘His satire points at
no defect, / But what all mortals may correct.’ Since the folly related
to love, desire and marriage is one of the most frequent types of
folly to be satirised in literature, theatre and film, especially in such
generic configurations as farce, comedy of manners and marital or
divorce comedy, satire often coexists with romantic comedy, which
is also centrally concerned with love, desire and marriage even if
its comic atmosphere may, in principle, exclude satire. In the same

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 62 The secret life of romantic comedy

way as authors like Neale and Krutnik (1990: 13–14, 23–5), Rowe
(1995: 110–14) or Thomas (2000: 21–2 and passim) affirm that
melodrama is often very close to romantic comedy, the other side
of the same coin, or constantly knocking at the door and demand-
ing to be admitted inside, it could be argued that satire is similarly
near, its ridiculing impulse often struggling with the protecting
vocation of the beneficent comic space of romantic comedy.
There are, therefore, two types of intersections that demand our
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attention in the generic analysis of To Be or Not to Be: on the one

hand, the consequences of the simultaneity of the love plot and the
Nazi plot and of the interferences existing between them; on the
other, the mixture of satire and romantic comedy in the articulation
of the love plot and, more specifically, of the love triangle. What
does the love plot contribute to our understanding of the Nazi plot,
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and, conversely, how does the Nazi plot affect the representation
of intimate relationships? What does the interaction between satire
and romantic comedy say about the film’s representation of love
and desire, sexuality and identity? Finally, in more historical terms,
what is love doing in the middle of the invasion of Poland, and
what discourses on love and desire can be articulated in such a
historical context?

A table for three: the love triangle

The film’s title, through its reference to Hamlet’s monologue, used
as a central event in the love plot, links identity and sexuality: Josef
Tura’s theatrical rendering of the Shakespearean character’s inter-
nal journey becomes the repeated excuse for Sobinski’s clandestine
visits to Maria Tura’s dressing room. Maria and Sobinski’s relation-
ship, based on his adolescent admiration and growing love for her
and on her undisguised lustful attraction towards him, soon becomes
part of the film’s erotic landscape and remains in place while Maria
flirts with the various German officers and Tura impersonates them
to save their country. At the same time, whatever her feelings for
the young Lieutenant are, these prove to be compatible with her
love for her husband. As Paul says, ‘there is a mutuality of character
that binds [Maria and Josef] together and [cannot] be threatened
by Stanislav’s foolishly serious intentions’ (1983: 237). Benny plays
a variation on the classical senex, the cuckolded husband who, at
least in Maria’s terms, is never really betrayed. His jealousy grows
from scene to scene, climaxing in his discovery of his rival in his

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 Comic negotiations 63

bed, but then it seems to subside somewhat when he allows the

aviator to say goodbye to his wife under his close supervision before
they leave on their final theatrical mission. The last scene finds
Sobinski as a permanent fixture, a kind of accompanying fan, of
the theatrical troupe during their stay in Britain. He finally joins
Tura in his angered shock when a younger Navy officer leaves the
second row as the actor again intones the Hamlet monologue.
Although his role in the new scenario is not spelled out, it seems
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clear that Sobinski has become part of a family which, by the look
of it, seems elastic enough to admit more members in the future.
The brilliant contrivance of the Nazi deception plot, which has
just reached its dénouement, may prevent some spectators from
considering the consequences of this final intimate/erotic arrange-
ment seriously, and yet, from the perspective of romantic comedy,
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this is a crucial moment. Historically, the narrativisation of the

love triangle in To Be or Not to Be comes at the end of a long
and memorable series of explorations of marriage and desire in
Lubitsch’s film career. Although the love triangle was his favourite
narrative configuration, that in intimate matters he did not particu-
larly fetishise the number three is proved by his silent masterpiece,
The Marriage Circle (1924), a continuation of the marital farces he
had directed in Germany, in which marriage and desire link not
just three but four or even five characters. This exploration con-
tinued in his adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan
(1925), Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living and Angel (1937),
among others. Of these, only Design for Living ends, like To Be or
Not to Be, with a triangle still in place, the three characters striving
to work out an arrangement outside the established social order
which can accommodate their emotional situation (although
without sex). Design for Living concentrates intensely on the rela-
tionships between the three lovers and minutely spells out the terms
of and the reasons for their pact.
To Be or Not to Be, on the other hand, does not go into such
detailed explanations and simply suggests that the status quo
reached at the end of the film is feasible. Similarly, the split between
affection and comradeship on the one hand and romance and desire
on the other is not very different here from the situation in which
Angel/Lady Maria Barker finds herself in Angel and is therefore
also familiar to Lubitsch-knowledgeable spectators. In 1942, there-
fore, these emotional patterns can be seen as a continuation of those

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 64 The secret life of romantic comedy

already displayed in earlier Lubitsch films. In a sense, the film does

not need to explain any more because the plots of the earlier films
provide enough explanation. Since those films do not just constitute
the oeuvre of a director, but can be seen as an important tradition
of the genre, To Be or Not to Be ought to be considered within
that tradition, and failure to do so brings as a consequence the
omission from critical discourse of an important part of its plot.
This is not so much a return to auteur criticism as an understanding
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of filmic texts within the history of genre, in this case, the history
of romantic comedy.
Eve Sedgwick has suggested that the typical form of the love tri-
angle, with two men and a woman as their common object of
desire, reflects the cultural superiority of male homosocial desire
over heterosexual desire in Western patriarchal society, the woman
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being the silent object of exchange between the two men (1985:
21–7). This theory has become a potent ideological template to
explain many Western narratives, including many movies, but it
feels rather inaccurate in the case of Lubitsch’s films in general and
of To Be or Not to Be in particular. Lubitsch is centrally concerned
with the exploration of heterosexual desire and in his films homo-
social bonding clearly recedes into the background: men are not
really all that interested in one another. This is not to say that
society, with its rules and conventions, its repressions and its limita-
tions, does not play a crucial part in Lubitsch’s erotic scenarios in
other respects, as both Paul and Babington and Evans, in their book
on the Hollywood comedy of the sexes, have pointed out. In terms
of the representation of desire, society is a crucial factor and not
necessarily a negative or repressive one. Babington and Evans assert,
referring to the famous ‘no sex’ clause of the ménage à trois with
which Design for Living ends, that ‘the ending preserves a realism
about the power of sexual ideologies and even, it may be, from the
anthropological perspective, the power of pairing as the basis of all
known social life, while wondering if some other kind of arrange-
ment is possible’ (1989: 72). For these authors, Lubitsch separates
himself from screwball comedy by preferring mature love over the
youthful innocence and energy of first love.
Love after marriage is also at the core of the cycle of screwball
comedies labelled by Stanley Cavell as ‘comedies of remarriage’
(1981). Yet, with their emphasis on fun and games and their unre-
pentant optimism, these films project a sense of the erotic as untainted

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 Comic negotiations 65

by the sufferings, disappointments and precariousness of experience,

and are thus closer to screwball than to the typical Lubitschean
comedy. Marriage in Lubitsch is, on the other hand, ‘the object of
romantic desire (perfect union), its regulator (since, having found
the perfect object, desire should cease, except for that object) and,
inevitably, its ironiser (desire, sadly, fades, the overestimation of
the love-object [. . .] lessens as the object is possessed, and desire
for a different object springs to life)’ (Babington and Evans 1989:
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60). From this perspective, marriage immediately and inevitably

calls forth its logical complement, the third element, and therefore
the triangle appears both as a catalyst for the renewal of a dead
marriage and as an expression of the hope in the existence of better
modes of organising sexuality, while still emphasising conflict and
fragility (61–2). The triangle, therefore, is not used, or at least not
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used primarily, to negotiate different types of relationships between

men, but, rather, to suggest the unstoppable power and simultane-
ous volatility of desire, the fragility of love and the repressive yet
occasionally also productive role played by society in the expression
and fulfilment of desire.
The Marriage Circle, without using the triangle, encapsulates the
Lubitschean perspective on love and desire. In this film, the four
married people are shown to truly love their spouses at least at
some point, while three of them – the fourth one, Professor Josef
Stock (Adolphe Menjou), is an early, grimmer version of Josef Tura
who is more jealous than desiring – feel attracted to somebody else.
Extramarital desire is never fulfilled but neither is it denied or
rejected. Within the boundaries posed by social conventions, marital
love and extramarital desire appear to be compatible. However, as
in later films, there is no true happy ending for these lovers: one
married couple remains married but their desire for others has not
been placated and their future together seems at best uncertain; the
man who wanted a divorce from the beginning gets what he wanted
but he is none the happier for it; his wife may find some temporary
consolation in her best friend’s rejected lover but her excessive
desire seems to have led her to an emotional dead end. As Harvey
argues, what for others may be a tragedy for Lubitsch is the richest
joke. In his films, ‘to feel strongly and passionately about anything,
even in love, is to be alone’ (1998: 43). However, the Lubitschean
response to this is not despair but, rather, quiet acceptance and
simultaneous amusement at human frailty.

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 66 The secret life of romantic comedy

In To Be or Not to Be similar affective structures are repeated

although the film nurses, paradoxically, a stronger Utopian vision,
closer in its optimism to films like Ninotchka or The Shop around
the Corner (1940). If we had been given time to plumb the psycho-
logical depths of desire maybe the conclusion would have been
analogous to earlier films, but the characters, while never rejecting
the dictates of their passions and affects, also have other things in
mind, i.e. the defeat of the Nazis, and do not have much time for
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ruminating. Rather than the psychology of desire, Lubitsch’s con-

cerns here appear to be more social, even more political: the over-
coming of peace-time morality in exceptional moments and the
carving out of a space for a different morality in Western society
as a consequence of the profound social changes that are beginning
to take place. Earlier films by Lubitsch, as well as the whole tradi-
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tion of the erotic triangle, had seen this geometrical figure as the
correlative of obsession, frustration and ultimate loneliness. Here,
by bringing it into contact with the Nazis, Lubitsch is airing it,
breathing some new energy into it and turning it into the liberating
representative of a new Utopian order in which the all-important
link between love and desire can be articulated in new inventive
ways. Paul has noticed that, since Ninotchka, Lubitsch’s films had
become more openly political and had moved from the individual
to the social (1983: 331). This is because, he argues, the historical
and industrial contexts forced him to move away from his hitherto
almost exclusive focus on love and sex. Yet, the mixture of comic
modes in To Be or Not to Be (as in all the rest of his last films)
points in a different direction: it is not so much that individual
desire gives way to social concerns; rather, the perspective on desire
is made to shift – from psychology to social Utopia. That this
Utopia should be located in a historically tragic moment, in the
midst of social anxiety and massive personal suffering, may have
been partly to blame for the negative reception of the film in some
quarters. That the liberal sexual discourse was conveniently ‘hidden’
behind a satire of Nazi totalitarianism and tyranny may explain
why the outrage was not greater.

Lubitsch meets screwball royalty

Jack Benny brings comedian comedy into To Be or Not to Be and
his star clout contributes an important variation on the senex tradi-
tion and on the Lubitsch brand of comedy by bringing the jealous

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 Comic negotiations 67

husband to the fore and turning him into the romantic protagonist.
This generic shift humanises the stereotype: Josef is still a laughable,
gullible fool but he is also a hero and Benny’s presence ensures that,
even at his most ridiculous, the spectator is never too far from
sympathising with him. Carole Lombard is a different matter. While
films like Design for Living or Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) may
occasionally come close to the conventions and ideological concerns
of screwball comedy, Lubitsch’s oeuvre, as has been argued before,
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remained clearly distinct from the more native U.S. tradition

while running parallel to it throughout the 1930s and early 1940s.
Claudette Colbert, who had featured in one of the first instances
of screwball, It Happened One Night, proved to be adaptable
enough and became an almost completely Lubitschean heroine in
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. Perhaps, in spite of her iconic presence in
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the Capra film, Colbert never was as characteristic of screwball as

Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant or Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy or
William Powell. Although it is always risky to associate film stars
with specific genres, it seems difficult in retrospect to imagine any
of these performers in a Lubitsch film. I am even doubtful that
Edward Everett Horton and Ralph Bellamy would be interchange-
able as the wrong partners of both traditions. Without To Be or
Not to Be the same would have been true of Carole Lombard. She,
more than Benny, crucially contributes to the film’s uniqueness.
Apart from other generic considerations, therefore, Lubitsch’s
direction and Lombard’s star performance manage to achieve a
fusion between the two main 1930s romantic comedy traditions.
It could almost be said that Lombard invented screwball comedy.
Screwball was a publicist’s term, originally taken from baseball
slang and first applied to her performance in My Man Godfrey
(1936) to convey the blend of madcap dizziness, liberation and
romantic exaltation that the genre came to represent (Harvey 1998:
xi). Although, apart from that film, she only appeared in another
three which are regularly associated with the genre, Hands across
the Table (1935), Nothing Sacred (1937) and Mr. and Mrs. Smith
(a film that is just as often ignored in accounts of romantic comedy
because of the unlikeliness of a ‘marriage’ between Hitchcock and
this particular genre), Lombard is justly regarded as the ‘queen of
screwball’ (Harvey 1998: 201). At the risk of overgeneralising, it
could be argued that while Lubitsch’s comedy is centrally concerned
with the vicissitudes of desire and can therefore be related to the

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 68 The secret life of romantic comedy

growing centrality of sexuality in Western cultural discourses,

screwball deals with desire in famously more indirect ways (the
walls of Jericho in It Happened One Night, the protagonists march-
ing out of the Ritz restaurant ‘stuck’ to each other in Bringing Up
Baby, the sudden change in the direction of the walk of the male
doll in the cuckoo clock at the end of The Awful Truth, the snake
in The Lady Eve) and appears to be more interested in social
exchanges between men and women.
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As Tina Olsin Lent has shown, screwball was instrumental in

adapting the cultural visibility of the ‘New Woman’ of the 1920s
to the cinema. For Lent the films appear as a result of the recon-
ceptualisation of gender relationships brought about by the first
wave of feminism, consequent changes in people’s attitudes towards
the institution of marriage and the ensuing increase in divorce
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rates (1995: 314–17). Although many instances of the genre still

end up with women being subjected, often after very unlikely plot
turns, to their male counterparts for the sake of love, the general
impression left by these films is one of strong women who either
take the leading role in their heterosexual relationships or who,
at least, struggle bravely to achieve equality, as in the case of His
Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story, in a relationship which is
not only about fun and games but also very clearly about power.
Conversely, many of the heroes played by Cary Grant, William
Powell, Joel McCrea or Henry Fonda become attractive to women
and to spectators in general for their capacity to accept a certain
degree of well-deserved humiliation at the hands of women and
to engage happily in scenarios of social and (indirectly) sexual
subjection.
In this sense, Maria Tura is a perfect blend of Lubitsch and
screwball: as driven by desire as the heroines of The Marriage
Circle, Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living or Angel, she brings
to the Lubitschean paradigm the strength of character, the giddy
capacity for manipulation, and the degrees of mastery and control
of the screwball heroine. These are all features which openly sepa-
rate her from the characters played by Margaret Sullavan in The
Shop around the Corner, Jennifer Jones in Cluny Brown or even
Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, at least after the protagonist of the
latter falls in love with Leon. Thus Maria becomes the powerful,
openly sexualised woman who is very rare in romantic comedy but
easier to find in film noir, and can be seen, therefore, as a link with

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 Comic negotiations 69

a genre which was then about to irrupt in the Hollywood scene.

She can in fact be seen as part of a transition between two genres
with several cultural and historical links which can also be appreci-
ated in such contemporary Howard Hawks films as Ball of Fire and
The Big Sleep (1946). It may be argued that the almost humiliating
superiority she shows with respect to all the men around her and
her sexual forwardness can only be culturally readable in the state
of uncertainty provoked by the war and representable through an
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unlikely blend of, on the one hand, romantic comedy and satire
and, on the other, Lubitsch and screwball. Through this generic
complexity the film anticipates the temporary liberation and rise in
social visibility of women in countries like the U.S. or Great Britain
during World War II. Maria is, therefore, a fantastic filmic con-
struction which, through a very specific blend of comic genres,
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becomes a powerful representation if not of the realities at least of

some of the aspirations of her female contemporaries.
Maria’s first appearance in the film, wearing her spectacular
evening dress for a concentration camp scene of the Gestapo play,
sets the standard of her part and becomes the first indelible instance
of her performance. Lombard’s usual self in her mixture of star
glamour and ironic distance, the character uses the star’s beauty to
express her disregard of conventions, in this case theatrical conven-
tions, in order to assert her right to be herself, no matter what the
demands of the context may be. She starts off as an amusing
mixture of conventional femininity, diva vanity and aloofness. The
moment, however, is not only important in itself but as an introduc-
tion to her first dialogue with her husband, in the course of which
she accuses him of always putting himself in front of her. His jeal-
ousy and his insecurity as an actor are introduced and his total
dependence on his wife revealed. We soon learn that she uses this
dependence of his as a weapon to assert her right to be a desiring
subject even outside marriage. In this dialogue with Tura, Maria
expresses her wish to be treated on equal terms and her right to be
as vain and as powerful professionally as her husband, since she is
at least as good as him as an actor.
The dialogue is also the preamble to her first encounter with her
young admirer. The interval between her husband’s exit from her
dressing room (once she has reassured him that she loves only him
in spite of the flowers she keeps receiving) and the aviator’s arrival
takes the form of a dialogue with Anna (Maude Eburne) which

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 70 The secret life of romantic comedy
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3 Love between prima donnas: performing marriage in

To Be or Not to Be, starring Carole Lombard and Jack Benny
(dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1942, United Artists)
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works as a confession. In this scene the spectator has unmediated

access to the character’s ‘true self’, or, rather, our access is mediated
by the comments and facial expressions of the maid, clearly a
deadpan realistic representative of the text’s ideology in her amusing
blend of sexual tolerance and awareness of social conventions.
Maria rejoices here in both her power over men and her right to
be a desiring subject, and Anna’s guarded approval becomes the
spectator’s own. When the lieutenant comes in, Maria shows how
smoothly she can extend the power she exerts over her husband to
other men. Ever since Shakespeare, romantic comedy has expressed
both sexual friction and the war of the sexes through verbal spar-
ring – as Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out, the greater the fric-
tion, the more powerful the sexual charge (1988: 89–90). There is
not as much friction here as in the scenes with her husband because
these two partners are so unequal, but Maria’s suffocating superior-
ity is also expressed through her verbal brilliance. When she engages
in a sexual innuendo of which Sobinski is not even remotely aware,
evoking now the Restoration comedies of Etherege and Wycherley,
the film confirms the result of the combination of Lubitschean
comedy, screwball and satire: Maria is both the strong contem-
porary woman of screwball and the desiring subject in whose
hands young men become mere sexual toys, reversing patriarchal
conventions and expectations, and reasserting the film’s utopian
dimension.

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 Comic negotiations 71

These initial scenes, in which the scenarios of power and desire

are played out within the space of a marital comedy which focuses
not so much on the husband’s inferiority as on the woman’s right
to have it both ways, display the importance of humour in romantic
comedy. The first verbal exchange between husband and wife intro-
duces the excessive mixture of vanity and jealousy that defines Tura
as a character through a joke in which Maria accuses him of always
grabbing attention: ‘Whenever I start to tell a story you finish it, if
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I go on a diet you lose the weight, if I have a cold you cough, and
if we should ever have a baby I’m not so sure I would be the
mother’, to which he replies: ‘I’m satisfied to be the father.’ Later,
Anna encourages Maria through such gnomic observations as ‘what
a husband doesn’t know won’t hurt his wife’, recommending a
combination of sexual freedom and caution. In the next scene,
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Maria shows her overawed excitement at Sobinski’s strength as a

bomber. The comic perspective of this section culminates in the
brief dialogue that takes place when, just after the lieutenant has
left the dressing room, Josef comes in distraught because somebody
(Sobinski) has just walked out on him during the soliloquy. The
protagonist is unwittingly right to ask his wife: ‘Tell me, Maria, am
I losing my grip?’, the implication being that the grip he is losing
is not as an actor but as a husband and, more specifically, as a
sexual partner – Sobinski walked out not because he disliked Josef’s
performance but because he had been given a rendez-vous by an
apparently unsatisfied (but not complaining) Maria. The blindness
of his limitless vanity overpowers jealousy and certainly love, which
makes it not only easier but also reasonable for his wife to be
unfaithful. Comically, Maria replies that he is not losing his grip
and that she is really sorry, both admitting and hiding her part in
her husband’s humiliation. She offers her consolation genuinely and
heartily because, as she will soon tell an impetuous Sobinski, she
loves only her husband but prefers to look elsewhere for sex: Tura’s
implied impotence is not something his wife is overly worried
about, as will be proven later on when the young lieutenant ends
up occupying Tura’s place in his bed.
The utopia of desire that the optimistic future of the triangle
portends is linked to the female utopia, where the ‘queen of screw-
ball’ reigns supreme in a fantasy world in which women not only
come into their own in terms of gender politics, as they had done
intermittently in screwball, but also sexually. Lombard’s screwball

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 72 The secret life of romantic comedy

pedigree allows her to join the gallery of Lubitschean desiring

women but with a superior intelligence and flair for domination to
overcome their anxieties and fear of loneliness. That the exceptional
circumstances provided by the war have a lot to do with this Utopia
is proved by the fact that when Maria begins to have difficulties to
explain to Sobinski that she is not planning to divorce her husband
but that he is, more or less, welcome to the family, the war breaks
out, the lieutenant has to leave immediately and she can freely and,
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again, genuinely, embrace him and give him something to come

back home to. Just when, following the logic of romantic conven-
tions, she was beginning to feel the pressure of having to choose,
the film arrests that logic and substitutes a provisional scenario in
which a different logic applies, one in which the female character
will not be forced to choose.
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We will return to this scene in connection with the issue of per-

formance but, in generic terms, it looks as if Lubitsch had been
waiting to meet screwball comedy, which had been his neighbour
and rival for almost a decade, until an exceptional event took place,
an event which, sadly, would bring both comic traditions to an end.
When the situation is finally favourable, he metaphorically invites
screwball to his house in the form of its most iconic representative,
and the visit not only changes both his house and the visitor but
also produces an exceptional comic text which can be seen as a
culmination of sorts of both traditions without fully belonging to
either of them.

That great, great Polish actor

Sobinsnki’s repeated walks out of the stalls take a heavy toll on
both Tura and Shakespeare. The famous soliloquy passes as one of
the English dramatist’s profoundest explorations of human identity,
a philosophical debate on the nature of true living as opposed to a
life of self-betrayal, with death as a corollary for both, probably a
forerunner of twentieth-century existentialism and certainly one of
many reasons why the bard has remained the most relevant literary
figure through the centuries. For Josef Tura, the soliloquy is also
a marker of his identity as an actor and the sublimity of the lines
just an excuse for the really important sublimity – that of his
performance every evening in front of an enraptured audience.
Maria, with her apparently innocent (and, in Anna’s words, safe)
decision to ask the lieutenant to visit her at this point, is deriding

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 Comic negotiations 73

her husband’s elevated sense of self-importance and, by extension,

also Shakespeare, by suggesting that from a female perspective there
are more important things in life than Hamlet’s tragic and desperate
search for identity. Paradoxically, she is doing something that
Shakespeare’s comic characters would also have done: for the play-
wright human identity was to be found not only in the tragic con-
frontation between life and death but also in the scenarios of love
and desire for another (or for several others) of his comedies, and
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to him, in spite of the tenor of most traditional criticism, both types

of exploration were equally significant. So, perhaps, in getting
Sobinski to disrupt the famous soliloquy, Maria, and Lubitsch
through her, is also asking the spectator to look at Shakespeare
differently, to look at Hamlet comically – as Hamlet himself occa-
sionally does, too, as when he tells her uncle that the dead Polonius
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is at dinner –, not so much bringing the playwright down as demand-

ing, like the secondary actors of the troupe, that his plays be seen
also as an occasion for laughter and/or joy.
Shakespeare can then take the repeated spite better than Tura.
When the aviator leaves his seat for the second time, Tura calls it a
foul conspiracy, which makes the other actors think that he is refer-
ring to the outbreak of war. The film cuts to another scene before
we have the chance to ascertain which of the two crimes – the inter-
ruption of his performance or the Nazi invasion of Poland – is more
important to him but, given his record, we are entitled to entertain
doubts. In any case, as with the budding affair between Maria and
Sobinski, the war puts Tura’s acting crisis on hold, and yet, as with
the love affair, the war situation which takes over the rest of the
film does not make it disappear but, rather, manages to present it
more obliquely. We have seen that the film links the protagonist’s
growing doubts about his own acting abilities with his sexual impo-
tence. He is losing his grip in more than one sense, and more than
one type of performance is being questioned. In the rest of the nar-
rative, Tura will be called upon to perform a part several times and
on every occasion there is a moment when his brilliant and convinc-
ing performance turns into overacting and threatens to expose him
for the ham he really is. On these occasions, his anxiety about the-
atrical performance recalls his marital anxieties, which the Nazi
invasion has temporarily shelved. His humiliation is most comically
articulated through the repeated gag that has the Germans keep
failing to recognise his name as that of a famous actor.

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 74 The secret life of romantic comedy

This is the context in which the joke that the film was widely
criticised for, even among those closest to Lubitsch (see Eyman
1993: 289–305), takes place. Josef, disguised as Professor Siletsky,
asks Colonel Ehrhardt (Sig Ruman) whether he has heard of that
great, great Polish actor, Josef Tura. Ehrhardt, unlike those who
have preceded him, unexpectedly replies that he has seen him once
on the stage and gives his famous opinion of Tura’s performance:
‘what he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland.’ At the
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beginning of the twenty-first century, comedy continues to be taboo

for certain social groups and it is consequently at least under-
standable that many people could be offended by this joke in 1942.
What is perhaps more surprising is that it was this particular line
that was considered offensive, instead of being perceived as the
bold attack on Nazism that it really was. In any case, the joke does
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not only envisage Hitler’s dreams of grandeur as a poor perfor-

mance but it also contributes to the escalation in the humiliation
of the protagonist as an actor, his ‘devastation’ of Shakespeare
being as tragic as the German destruction of Poland. More interest-
ing, however, is Maria’s part in the effect of this joke on the
spectator.
As we have seen, the film has already prepared the spectator to
link Tura’s limitations at both types of performance: theatrical
performance and sexual performance. It is inevitable that we link
the two again in Ehrhardt’s reply, especially since the sexual con-
notations of the destructive power of dynamite as released from a
plane over an enemy city, something comparable to the German
military campaign in Poland, had already been highlighted in
Maria’s first interview with Sobinski. The devastating power of
Sobinski’s dynamite is totally opposed to that of Tura’s perfor-
mance, which makes both curiously compatible: in sexual terms,
the lieutenant’s excess of sexual potency (in Maria’s fantasy) con-
trasts with the actor’s overblown sense of himself and consequent
inability to give himself sexually to his wife. In other words, through
the Nazi colonel’s words, the film is, without apparently alluding
to it, confirming Tura’s sexual impotence. In his analysis of the
joke, William Paul argues that the complexity of the laughter at
this point stems from the fact that it is directed against both the
speaker and the listener (1983: 230), that is, against Nazi horror
and, in the reading proposed here, Tura’s serious limitations as a
lover. These limitations are behind Maria’s sexual voracity (in

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 Comic negotiations 75

intention if not in fact) and facilitate the power she holds over her
husband. In a sense, therefore, Ehrhardt’s reply is equating Hitler’s
military mastery over Europe both with the husband’s poor acting
and with the wife’s sexual power. Acting works not only as a meta-
phor for the horrors of military invasion but also as a mediator
between war and sex. It may not be too far-fetched to affirm that
the joke offended not only because it treated acute suffering frivo-
lously but also because it indirectly equated two types of perfor-
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mance (another black comedy about war, Dr. Strangelove [1963],

would do it more openly twenty-one years later) and unconsciously
evoked the ghost of a sexual regime dominated by women.

Performing love, performing war

The extremely mixed comedy of To Be or Not to Be places its
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characters in a comic space which protects them from the dangers

and threats of the social space. In a movie like this, the social space
is clearly framed by the Nazi domination of Europe and conquering
plans over the rest of the world, including the United States, but it
is also the more habitual social space of romantic comedy in which
characters are inhibited in their intimate protocols by social and
psychological pressures. In the case of the spy plot, this comic space
is secured by the presence of performance: the actors get out of
danger and, in their small way, defeat the Nazis through a series
of inventive and successful theatrical tricks. Because of the film’s
comic perspective, the spectator understands that their play script-
ing and playacting will save them from all harm. On the other hand,
its generic instability, the vividness of danger and destruction,
suggest that, at a time like this, the protection given by comedy can
only be precarious and can disappear at any moment. This is why
we laugh with the characters’ antics but are never completely sure
that they are going to be safe. The generic mixture works both
ways: it constructs an unlikely safe haven in the midst of the spy
thriller or the wartime melodrama, and it gives a dangerous edge
to the comedy by making the spectator aware of the presence of
death outside the theatre door.
Performance, theatricality, even metacinema have been the pre-
ferred topics of most academic criticism of the movie. Marc Gauchée
argues that the film teaches that the theatre always precedes reality
(2004: 4). William Paul reads the film’s politics, or rather, its take
on Nazi politics, through its theatricality. Theatrical behaviour is

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 76 The secret life of romantic comedy

transformed into distinct political behaviour and, as a consequence,

politics is revealed to be inherently theatrical and Hitler is exposed
as the ultimate ham actor (1983: 248–9). Leland Poague contrasts
two types of theatricality, that of the professional actors and that
of the Nazis, and concludes that ‘extreme theatricality, outside of
its proper context, becomes a genuine threat to human existence’
(1978: 92). Hassan Melehy summarises the general consensus
when he argues that the film’s use of a theatrical context calls into
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question the authenticity and authority of Nazism (2001/02: 36).

However, performance also dominates, as we have seen, the rela-
tionships between the three main characters in the love plot. Sheila
Whitaker, who is mainly concerned with the film’s ‘fundamental
questioning of representation’, also relates, if only briefly, the film’s
general use of theatricality to the members of the triangle’s acting
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abilities and establishes a hierarchy between them: while Maria and

Tura can act with each other, Sobinski, the more straight player, is
at a loss (1976/77: 13). Our understanding and enjoyment of the
romantic comedy conventions deployed by Lubitsch is also depen-
dent on our awareness that at least husband and wife are always
performing in their interactions with each other and with the young
aviator. Further, we need to understand that, within the film’s
parameters, this sense of performance is not a signifier of deceit or
falseness. Rather, in the same way as the actors’ playacting protects
them from the Nazis, performance also constitutes the comic space
which protects the three principals from inhibitions and allows
them to interact with one another. In other words, it is also per-
formance that guarantees the film’s deployment of its sexual and
intimate discourses against the weight of reality and it is through
the concept of performance that the two parts of the plot and the
various generic configurations are linked and brought to bear on
one another.
If Josef and Maria play the parts of the vain theatre star/jealous
husband and the flighty wife/professional rival to perfection in their
scenes together, Maria’s amusing combination of untrammelled
sexual desire and easy domination in her scenes with Sobinski is
also based on her faultless rendering of her part and on the specta-
tor’s understanding that she is indeed playing a part. Both the war
of the sexes represented in the exchanges between husband and wife
and the representation of female desire in Maria’s secret dates with
her young lover appear to the viewer as contrived as her later

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 Comic negotiations 77

attempt at Mata Hari and as Tura’s impersonations of various Nazi

officers and spies. But contrivance does not stand here as opposed
to reality. In To Be or Not to Be’s brand of romantic comedy there
is no reality, no truth beyond performance. The multiplicity of
ontological levels produced by the actors’ easy slippage into theatri-
cal performances as real people (within the fictional world of the
film) provokes the feeling that there is no drastic difference between
the parts played by Josef and Maria Tura and those played by Jack
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Benny and Carole Lombard. There is no reason why a realistic

representation (on the part of the fictional characters and on the
part of the actors) should tell deeper truths about love and sexual-
ity. In fact, in the world of the film, reality consists not only of the
ugliness and horror of the Nazis but also of the repressions and
contradictions of real social institutions that frustrate desire. It is
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only at the level of performance that the characters can be truly

themselves in sexual and affective matters.
Maria finds herself in several situations of real danger in the
course of the film, especially when she visits the Nazi spy in his
room at the Gestapo headquarters, but there is only one moment
in which she appears to momentarily lose her cool and is at a loss
as to what to do, and that is, as has already been mentioned, when
Sobinski, after ascertaining that she loves him, announces his plans
to talk immediately and openly to her husband so that he gives her
a divorce and they can live happily ever after. She looks surprised
and starts to explain that she loves Tura and has no intention of
divorcing him. In other words, she had assumed that the lieutenant
understood the terms of her performance and did not expect him,
always the straight player, to misjudge it. Fortunately, she is saved
by the bell in the shape of the news of the Nazi invasion. She would
have had to explain to him that the loving poses that she had struck
and the clichés that she had conjured up were to be taken as a
sexual game, as an appropriation of convention for the expression
and enactment of desire. He might not have understood then, yet
when we next see them together, after Tura has found him in his
bed, Sobinski seems to begin to be adept at the game, a game in
which the parts are fluid, as proved by the ease with which the
lieutenant amusingly slips from the part of young lover into that of
jealous husband in the final scene of the film.
In spite of the constant presence of similar scenarios in earlier
Lubitsch films, some contemporary audiences may not have been

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 78 The secret life of romantic comedy

prepared to fully appreciate the ‘seriousness’ of the sexual and

power games proposed by the text, and their apparent frivolity may
have worked to worsen their incensed attitude to the director’s
incongruous genre mixing. For one thing, the sexual discourses
produced as a consequence of the historical combination of the
so-called sexual revolution of the sixties, the second wave of femi-
nism and the gay and lesbian liberation movements were not avail-
able to audiences then. The shift from the idea of sex as representing
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the deepest truth of ourselves and love as an essential, universal

feeling to that of both as cultural constructs and scripted protocols,
together with the notion of sexual and gender identity as the product
of a series of social performances, allows early twenty-first-century
spectators to understand the ‘truth’ of sex and love in a different
way and, therefore, to appreciate the series of performances pro-
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posed in To Be or Not to Be as perfectly valid expressions of inti-

mate matters. With this film, Lubitsch not only brought 1930s
romantic comedy to a brilliant end by combining his own brand of
sophisticated comedy with screwball but also, with his emphasis on
performance, anticipated future emergent discourses on love and
sex.
Performance is, then, central in the text, not only for its construc-
tion of the spy adventure plot and the discourses on Nazism, poli-
tics and even the nature of cinematic art, but also for its contribution
to the articulation of an ideology of love and desire. The links
between both types of discourses also revolve around the various
performing scenarios activated by the film: if both politics and
desire can be explained as performance, then there is no drastic
separation between them, no reason to be offended at the combina-
tion of both in a single text. Ehrhardt’s controversial line relates,
negatively, Nazi horror with male impotence, and inventively con-
trasts its destruction with the devastation of Lieutenant Sobinski’s
dynamite, but there are more positive meanings attached to the
trope: the theatrical troupe’s brilliant series of semi-improvised
scripts and impersonations, including Maria’s flirtation with
Siletsky, also evoke the married couple’s attitude to love and sex
as a series of performances, the parallelism suggesting a deeper
similarity between the Polish actors’ (and the film’s) love of freedom
and the freedom of love promoted by the film’s sexual discourses.
The importance of performance to the construction of Maria
as a desiring subject can best be seen in her first dialogue with

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 Comic negotiations 79

Sobinski. Her undisguised flirtation here follows what appear to be

well-rehearsed patterns but, unlike later on with Siletsky, there is
no goal in the flirtation beyond the activation and enactment of
desire. She does not pretend to be attracted to him: she is attracted
to him and shows it by apparently pretending. The view of sexuality
as a discursively constructed and highly regulated network of plea-
sures and sensations, and the conclusion that sex is subordinated
to sexuality, rather than the other way round, and as such equally
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regulated, was first proposed by Michel Foucault. Foucault was a

sexual pessimist and fantasised about an asocial regime in which a
multiplicity of bodies and pleasures replaced the inevitably regu-
lated notions of sex and desire (1981: 157), a fantasy that has been
criticised by Judith Butler as an essentialist move (1990: 97–9).
Post-Foucauldian critics like Butler or William Simon have theo-
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rised the constructedness of sex with greater equanimity. Simon,

for example, in his conceptualisation of sexuality as a script, argues
that desire follows rather than precedes behaviour: ‘not only do
individuals often “fake” their sexual responsiveness, often they
must simulate sexual interest in order to invoke authentic sexual
excitement’ (1996: 47). In the scene from To Be or Not to Be, the
aviator’s mention of his abilities at dropping tons of dynamite
command Maria’s ‘faked’ admiration but this pretence immediately
becomes an expression of her desire for him, of her excitement
about his comically fantasised infinite potency (infinite, especially,

4 ‘Quite a bomber’: Maria Tura takes the lead in the performance

of desire. Carole Lombard in To Be or Not to Be
(dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1942, United Artists)

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 80 The secret life of romantic comedy

if compared to her husband’s). The sexual scenario, then, is not

only facilitated by her performance but predicated upon it: no
desire without performance. The fact that it is the woman that takes
the lead in the performance of desire, and that she is celebrated for
it, makes the film’s sexual discourse a relatively extreme form of
the sexual liberation sought by early feminist discourses, because,
as Simon argues, the very idea of female commitment to sexual
pleasure was then, and still is now, threatening to many men and
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women (48).
This fear of female sexuality and of female sexual agency may be
partly soothed by the fact that Maria is, like Carole Lombard, a star
and, as such, larger than life, or else the anxious spectator can take
shelter in the idea that comedy is not serious. Narrative develop-
ment, however, should alert the spectator to the real intentions of
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the text: once the small crisis provoked by Sobinski’s plan to marry
her has been overcome, Maria is never punished, not even comically,
for her ‘excess’. Rather, she is supported by the text when, after the
bed episode, both her husband and her lover seem more or less
content with the arrangement. Her wish to have both a husband to
love and a lover to desire is finally granted by the story’s dénoue-
ment. Whether marginal or dominant, the presence of this ideology
of female agency and liberation from the sexual and psychological
norm in a mainstream film attests to its readability, to the fact that
in 1942 women’s claims for sexual equality were seen as a possible,
if only minority, option. Lubitsch’s activation of screwball conven-
tions, through his use of Carole Lombard, also suggests the potential
of the genre to convey such egalitarian meanings, even if that
potential was not often realised because of the screwball’s often
excessively oblique approach to sexual matters. It is screwball’s
encounter with the much more openly sexualised intimate scenarios
of the Lubitsch comedy that facilitates such activation.
Judith Butler, in her influential theory of identity, takes issue
with the Western metaphysics of substance according to which
gender identity is constructed but sex is natural. She accordingly
rejects the opposition sex/gender and argues that sex was con-
structed by specific discourses on gender. The production of sex as
a natural, unchangeable fact is the consequence of a social act of
regulation which requires the existence of two genders, two sexes,
two differentiated desires. She rejects psychoanalysis’ interest in
gender normality but appropriates the psychoanalytic perspective

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 Comic negotiations 81

that suggests the coexistence of multiple identifications which

produce conflicts with the fixity of normative concepts of masculin-
ity and femininity. The construction of sex and gender is for Butler,
as it is for Foucault, part of the dynamics of power but, for her,
this construction is based on a series of performances. She con-
cludes that ‘gender reality is created through sustained social per-
formances’ and that the notions of masculinity and femininity are
part of a strategy that conceals the performative character of gender
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and therefore the possibility of proliferating gender configurations

(1990: 141). To Be or Not to Be, a mainstream Hollywood film of
the 1940s, cannot possibly explore the multiplicity of configura-
tions of sex and desire that Butler finds, for example, in the drag
performer. Its sexual scenarios may be much tamer by modern
standards but they share with both Foucault and Butler the aware-
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ness of sex as a strategy of power and of sexuality as a matter of

performance. Both Josef and Maria (notice the iconicity of their
names) play according to well-known masculine and feminine ste-
reotypes, but their constant awareness that they are playing reveals
their view of sex and gender as acts of performance and their inter-
est in appropriating them for their power games. What is at stake
in their employment of the cultural constructions of the jealous
husband, the betraying wife, the vain actor, the nurturing woman,
and so on, is a struggle for power in the couple and, more positively,
a search for a workable script that can be used as the basis for a
relationship which exists in society but which uses social norms as
part of the script rather than as laws by which to abide. That Maria
is the more accomplished player of the two is beyond doubt, even
though Josef displays an unexpected degree of adaptability to his
wife’s wishes which, ultimately, saves the relationship and the social
and sexual configuration that the film’s comic space protects. This
configuration sees Maria as the centre of the family, and is formed
by an affectionate relationship with her husband which is based on
a series of well-rehearsed but flexible performances, and an under-
standing that her desire must not be impaired.

II. Romantic comedy in no man’s land: Kiss Me, Stupid

To Be or Not to Be is important from the perspective of romantic
comedy because of the liminal position it occupies between two
moments of the genre’s Hollywood history. Kiss Me, Stupid, a

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 82 The secret life of romantic comedy

movie that was as controversial on its release as Lubitsch’s but,

unlike it, subsequently failed to achieve the status of masterpiece,
may also represent the end of an era but hardly the beginning of a
new one.

Romantic comedy in the 1950s

What was the situation of the genre in the 1950s? If the 1940s
remain underrepresented in film comedy criticism, there is no short-
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age of excellent accounts of the following decade. Both Neale and

Krutnik (Neale and Krutnik, 1990: 169–71; Krutnik, 1990: 58–62)
and Jeffers McDonald (2005: 38–58) choose the so-called sex com-
edies as most representative of the period, accurately establishing
a contrast with the 1930s. Babington and Evans’s study, on the
other hand, reflects some of the complexity of the period by refer-
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ring not only to the Doris Day cycle of the end of the decade but
also to the Tracy–Hepburn series (as much part of the 1940s as of
the 1950s), the Billy Wilder farces, the ‘B’ family comedies directed
by Douglas Sirk at Universal in the early 1950s and, less interest-
ingly for these authors, the lush romantic comedies characterised
by glamorous European locations and high production values
(1989: 179–266). Ed Sikov, from his auteurist perspective, adds to
the list important films by Howard Hawks, Frank Tashlin and
Alfred Hitchcock that had been overlooked by the earlier critics
(1994).
As in the case of the 1930s, many of these cycles went on after
the end of the decade (the Doris Day sex comedies do not get under
way until the end of the 1950s and continue uninterruptedly during
the first half of the 1960s) but by the mid 1960s it was obvious
that all the comic trends that had developed in the last two decades
had virtually ground to a halt and there was nothing to replace
them. In this sense, the box-office and critical failure of Kiss Me,
Stupid may have been due less to the controversy that surrounded
its opening and to the boycott it suffered, as the received critical
opinion goes (see Sikov, 1998: 478–96), than to the fact that the
genre was moving fast into the dearth which would years later lead
Brian Henderson to announce its death (1978). Not that Kiss Me,
Stupid can be said to be out of touch with its time or to be a back-
ward looking film, but the future that it envisaged, rather like the
sexual utopia represented in To Be or Not to Be, was a future that
would never find a place in mainstream Hollywood cinema. The

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 Comic negotiations 83

film’s apparent message – that a marriage can be revitalised through

the partners’ infidelities, that the roles of wife and prostitute can
also be sites of wish-fulfilment fantasy for women, and that women’s
sexual desire can be stronger and narratively more interesting than
men’s – was not only ahead of its time but, to a very great extent,
also ahead of our own time. We may now recognise that the film’s
sexual discourses look forward to the future but by the time that
future re-emerged within the genre, it looked very unlike the one
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this movie had predicted or fantasised about fifteen years before.

In this sense, it can be surmised that Kiss Me, Stupid is a film
without a proper place in history.
The crisis of romantic comedy was probably difficult to predict
in 1964. Doris Day and Rock Hudson had been the darlings of the
box office since the beginning of the sixties and films like That
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Touch of Mink (1962), Lover Come Back (1962), The Thrill of It

All (1963), Move Over Darling (1963), Man’s Favorite Sport?,
Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963), Sex and the Single Girl (1964)
or Send Me No Flowers (1964) seemed to suggest, on the surface,
that the genre was alive and well. In a more openly satirical vein,
Billy Wilder had enjoyed uninterrupted success with Some Like It
Hot, The Apartment, One, Two, Three (1961) and even the love
story between a prostitute and a cop-turned-pimp, Irma La Douce
(1963). Wilder’s positioning of sex at the centre of most of his
comedies of the time, and its only slightly less overt importance in
the rest of the films mentioned above, is a logical consequence of
the cultural saliency of sex and sexuality in the 1950s, a saliency
that has been sufficiently documented by sociologists, film scholars,
and romantic comedy specialists (Seidman, 1991 and 1992; Dyer,
1986; Babington and Evans, 1989; Krutnik, 1990). This interest in
sex increased at the beginning of the 1960s and would eventually
lead to the so-called sexual revolution.
For the time being, however, the revolution had not yet arrived
although institutional and cultural norms – including cinematic
ones – with respect to sex were increasingly felt to be badly out-
dated. For example, demands for the relaxation of censorship
regarding female nudity were becoming more and more pressing:
while Rudi Gernreich is making a furore with his topless bathing
suits for women, producer Martin Ransohoff of MGM calls for an
end of the ban on nudity in the cinema following the removal of
some topless scenes from The Americanisation of Emily (1964), but

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 84 The secret life of romantic comedy

shortly afterwards The Pawnbroker (1965) displays some naked

female breasts for the first time in mainstream Hollywood
films. The central female character of the third James Bond film,
Goldfinger (1963), is called Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) and
Hollywood stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Carol Lynley
or Stella Stevens begin to appear naked in the pages of Playboy to
the dismay, among others, of the newly renamed National Catholic
Office of Motion Pictures (formerly the Legion of Decency). Billy
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Wilder may have misfired spectacularly by planning his film as a

1964 Christmas release, but his open and sympathetic treatment of
sex, prostitution and adultery in Kiss Me, Stupid was, at least in
theory, very much in tune with the Zeitgeist.
The film’s resonant failure, on the other hand, may be proof that,
while the cultural consideration of sex was changing very fast,
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romantic comedy as a genre was still not ready to incorporate such

changes to its conventions. Jeffers McDonald explains the end of
the sex-comedy cycle as a consequence of the ready availability of
the contraceptive pill, which made the withholding of sex until
marriage suddenly obsolete. Romantic comedy was, according to
her, not yet willing to incorporate ‘young women successfully shed-
ding [their] virginity’ (2007: 43). The innuendo and double enten-
dre that the genre had revelled and excelled in from the beginning
of its history now seemed inappropriate to a franker treatment of,
especially female, sexuality. Henderson, writing about the decade
that followed Wilder’s film, suggests precisely the linguistic open-
ness towards sex that can be found in a film like Semi-Tough (1972)
as one of the reasons for the decadence of the genre in that period
(1978: 22). The constant sexual references in Kiss Me, Stupid stand
somewhere on the borderline between double entendre and explicit-
ness, what Krutnik calls ‘aggressive innuendo’ (1990: 61). Thus
they satisfy neither the taste for subtlety of traditional Aristotelian
comedy nor the need for sexual openness that the sexual revolution
would demand, and leave the film in a kind of no man’s land, too
offensive for some, too tame for others. Or it could be said that
Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond use a traditional comic form in order
to convey what they consider a contemporary attitude. The genre
as an institution – that is, as a phenomenon which includes not only
texts and changing conventions but also an industrial and cultural
context, the audience and the critics – cannot contain their experi-
ment, demanding either a less problematic continuity with the

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 Comic negotiations 85

comic tradition or a more drastic rupture which in the mid-1960s

it was still too early to bring about. The critical and audience failure
of the film represents, in sum, an important moment in the history
of the relationship between Hollywood romantic comedy and the
cultural discourses it addresses.

Satire and comedy

The low cultural and academic status of comedy has already been
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noted here. Satire has often managed to escape this generalised

attitude because of its seriousness of purpose, and the anger and
aggressiveness that it sometimes conveys. This characteristic stern-
ness allows it to dissociate itself from comedy even though, since
Aristophanes, the vast majority of satire has remained within comic
boundaries. Sikov, without explicitly describing Kiss Me, Stupid as
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a satire, performs a similar operation when, in order to ‘save’ the

film from the ferocious attacks it has received, he argues that ‘its
tone is so consistently depressing, its vision so assiduously dispir-
ited, and its jokes so relentlessly bad, that the malaise it engenders
in its audience becomes a kind of triumph’ (1998: 479). Unlike this
critic, I would like to argue that an appeal to seriousness, sadness
and a depressing and dispirited vision is not necessary to appreciate
a text artistically and culturally, and that, in the case of Kiss Me,
Stupid, the satirical impulse exists wholly within the realm of
comedy, along with the seriousness of purpose. More centrally for
the main argument of this book, satire proves to be, as in To Be
or Not to Be, not only compatible with romantic comedy but also
crucial for the creation of its comic space. In other words, satire is
not only often a close neighbour of romantic comedy, as has already
been discussed, but can be used in combination with it in comic
texts in order to enhance their romantic potential. In Kiss Me,
Stupid romantic comedy articulates the utopian vision that the
satire finds missing in the movie’s social world, while satire proves
to be an integral component in the construction of that vision. By
highlighting the compatibility between both genres, this film sug-
gests that there is always a potential satire lurking behind the sexual
fantasies of romantic comedy.
In his theoretical account of film satire, Geoff King betrays a
similar bias to that present in Sikov’s analysis of Wilder’s film. For
him, satire is ‘comedy with an edge and a target’. Yet when won-
dering why use comedy in order to attack social vices or corruption,

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 86 The secret life of romantic comedy

he argues that satire has an unstable quality, ranging from ‘safer’

comic forms to darker realms beyond the comic. Really cutting
satire is relatively rare in mainstream cinema because comedy tends
to ‘pull the punches’ (2002: 93–4). That is, the truly interesting
satire, the dark, cutting edge one, is rarely comic. Comic satire tends
to be ‘safer’, not completely honest, not genuine, not radical – not
angry or not depressing – enough. King takes his inspiration from
Northrop Frye, who finds in the mythos of winter (as in the other
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three) six different phases, three of which are closer to comedy and
another three nearer tragedy. Yet Frye reminds us elsewhere that
there are two basic elements in satire: an object of attack, on the
one hand, and wit or humour founded on fantasy or a sense of the
grotesque and the absurd, on the other (1957: 224). That is,
although as his phases come closer to tragedy they become more
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serious, the first three phases are for Frye, precisely because of their
use of humour, truly representative of the mythos, the other three
being more marginal, less satirical. Satire’s favourite procedure for
the attack of its target is ridicule – of a person, a social class or a
cultural norm – in order to make it laughable, and if in classical
authors like Ben Jonson, Swift or Dryden satire may become
stern and even violent, its comic tone is hardly ever absent from
view.
Frye also defines satire as ‘militant irony’ (223) and this is related
to his notion that the genre always has a standard of correct moral-
ity or social normality against which to measure deviations, vices
and corruptions. While the moral standard in irony may often be
ambivalent, satire’s moral norms are always relatively clear, yet
the two forms often work together in texts, confirming once and
again satire’s comic tendencies. Take, for example, one of the
most popular satirical novels of the nineteenth century, William
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. The narrator often uses his licence to
separate himself from the characters and discuss them as fictional
characters in direct address to the reader, but, in his extremely and
even fiercely ironic stance, we often doubt whether we should trust
his words and take them at face value. Consider the following
passage:
And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man
and a brother, not only to introduce them, but occasionally to step
down from the platform, and talk about them [. . .]. Otherwise you
might fancy it was I who was sneering at the practice of devotion,

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 Comic negotiations 87

which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous; that it was I who laughed

good-humouredly at the reeling old Silenus of a baronet – whereas
the laughter comes from one who has no reverence except for pros-
perity, and no eye for anything beyond success. (1968: 117)
There is no need for much narrative context to realise that this
narrator, in spite of his words, is indeed laughing with his protago-
nist, Becky Sharp, both at the hypocrisy of the aristocrat’s family
and at the baronet himself, and including them within his satire.
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The customs of the country gentry, as well as those of several other

strata of nineteenth-century English society, are the constant target
of the novel’s satire, and an ironic narrator, who conveys the exact
opposite meaning from what he states, as well as an ironic protago-
nist, are consistently used to ridicule the author’s multiple social
targets. This does not mean that the narrative prompts the reader
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to identify with the protagonist, either. Becky is consistently, one

would say even obsessively, attacked in her behaviour, as a char-
acter with no moral scruples and a woman with no feelings, in what
we might today read as the author’s desperate and useless attempt
to prevent the almost certain sympathy of future generations of
readers. Her intelligence, resourcefulness and relentless ironic stance
do not save her from severe criticism and narrative punishment, her
meek counterpart Amelia Sedley coming much closer, in her silent
suffering and forbearance, to being a point of identification and
moral model for the reader. Yet, Becky’s character and actions
constitute the main channel for the satire of the novel, a satire in
which irony becomes one of its main tools.
Vanity Fair represents an obvious template for Kiss Me, Stupid
(as well as for much twentieth-century satire) in its use of comic
forms and in it, as in Wilder’s film, irony and satire function closely
together. This is most obvious in the development of the character
of Orville J. Spooner (Ray Walston). Initially the traditional senex,
the pathologically jealous old husband, Orville is the easy butt of
ridicule or alazon, but the spectator’s attitude towards him may
change as the target of the film’s satire becomes more complex and
far-reaching. We will come back to Orville later on but in order to
understand his narrative function and that of the other main char-
acters we must start by ascertaining what exactly is the butt of the
film’s satirical impulse.
Unlike in many illustrious precedents in European theatre and
narrative, old jealous husbands are not the main object of attack

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 88 The secret life of romantic comedy

here. Orville is never really criticised for having married Zelda

(Felicia Farr), a much younger woman. In fact, by the standards of
the Hollywood cinema of the time, the age difference between them
is practically average (above average would be, for example, the
thirty-year gap between the Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn
romantic lovers in Wilder’s Sabrina [1954], or the twenty-eight-
year gap between Gary Cooper and, again, Hepburn in Love in the
Afternoon [1957]) and the film never insists on this point. Marriage
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as an institution is not an obvious target, either, since the text does

not suggest that it brings about the death of love or that it has
become the representative of a repressive, hypocritical or corrupt
society – if we exclude, that is, the scene with Zelda’s parents. But
theirs is a very traditional, excessively socialised union. As in To
Be or Not to Be, the type of marriage that the film envisages as its
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moral norm is not incompatible with sexual experimentation and

fantasy, and occasional infidelity is presented as a healthy way of
solving a marriage crisis. It is, therefore, dominant moral standards
regarding marriage and patriarchal gender politics that come under
attack.
Capitalist ambition, in its readiness to prostitute even marriage,
is perhaps a clearer object of ridicule, but even here those who are
guilty of it are never really punished. While Orville is always half-
hearted about the plot to trick Dino (Dean Martin) into buying
his songs, Barney (Cliff Osmond), a more openly venal character,
finally achieves the success he yearned for. Not only is there no hint
of a comeuppance for him but, in a narrative move which has per-
plexed the critics, he becomes in fact Zelda’s ally in her chastise-
ment of her husband in the final part of the movie. It is not so much
that his and Orville’s behaviour are condoned as that capitalism is
this time not the text’s main target. The ‘honour’ of being the main
object of the film’s invective is left to the type of sexuality that was
quickly becoming contested in the surrounding culture but which
still fared strongly in dominant discourses: late Victorian middle-
class small-town sexual discourses, which defended the exclusivity
of marriage, the sanctity of female sexuality and wholesale repres-
sion, a discourse scathingly represented in the film by the well-
meaning grapefruit-loving vicar and the committee of comically
repressed married women who go around asking for signatures to
close down the Belly Button. More specifically, the sexual double
standard comes under heavy fire in a text whose radical defence of

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 Comic negotiations 89

gender equality in sexual matters did not do it any favours, either,

in a sexist society which the impending sexual revolution never
fought to reverse as clearly as this film did. It is primarily in this
social space constituted by competing sexual discourses that Kiss
Me, Stupid displays its complex satire.

Moral standards and character identification

Polly (Kim Novak) and Zelda always command the spectator’s
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sympathy, although not necessarily for the same reasons. Like Irma
la Douce (Shirley MacLaine) before her, Polly the Pistol is the
prostitute with a good heart and the text soon engages in a full-
length account of the road that led her to her present state to ensure
the spectator’s understanding of her ‘essential purity’. In Novak’s
performance, she constitutes the most unambiguous point of iden-
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tification for the spectator and, in the long central scene at the
Spooner household, she ‘rescues’ Orville from satirical attack and
farcical ridicule, humanising him and facilitating spectatorial iden-
tification with him. Her dream of leaving Climax and becoming a
wife may seem suspect from the point of view of gender equality
but it is partly offset by the text’s espousing of Zelda’s infidelity.
The temporary exchange of roles between the two women turns the
characters into elements of a formal pattern with ideological con-
notations: the fact that the wife becomes a prostitute for one night
while the prostitute becomes a wife suggests that there are no moral
hierarchies between them and that the roles of prostitute and wife
are interchangeable, not so much, as second-wave feminists would
argue, because marriage is a form of prostitution for women but
rather because they are both social roles with their own attached
sexual fantasies. Neither of them is final or irreversible, neither is
more morally reprehensible than the other and both are equally
celebrated by the text. Kiss Me, Stupid does not only satirise the
social repression of (particularly female) sexuality but, from the
perspective of romantic comedy, it liberates sex from its institu-
tional dimension and places it in the space of fantasy.
Zelda is a more complex case than Polly: while initially appear-
ing to be just a narrative function of her husband’s jealousy and
inadequacy, and therefore the secondary and colourless female
counterpart of traditional marriage comedy, she gradually comes
into her own through her unremitting resistance to Orville’s inex-
plicable behaviour and, particularly, in the final-reel fulfilment of

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 90 The secret life of romantic comedy

her fantasy of spending the night with Dino, the idol of her high-
school years. Her centrality after the trailer scene suggests that her
tryst with Dino is not just a punishment of Orville’s jealousy and,
especially, of his agreement to ‘sell his wife’, but a positive stand-
point from which to measure her society’s sexual habits and norms.
From this position she becomes the clearest mouthpiece of the
satirical text, the moral standard to be followed – a standard which
was perhaps too difficult to accept in 1964, especially because
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Zelda never gives an explanation for her actions. The text demands
that we see her behaviour not as a deviation, certainly not as a vice,
but as a viable alternative to dominant discourses on women’s
sexual habits.
The complication in terms of identification with the character
comes because her night with Dino occurs as a consequence of her
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husband’s reprehensible behaviour and, especially, of the singer’s

unadulterated machismo. In the scene of their sexual encounter the
spectator is expected to close off her/his awareness of the identity
of the man and concentrate solely on the woman’s position, or, to
put it differently, to celebrate Zelda’s defeat of her inhibitions while
continuing to abhor Dino’s treatment of women. It is a delicate
narrative balance which demands a simultaneity of apparently con-
tradictory subject positions on the part of the spectator, not dis-
similar from how Thackeray’s narrator expects the reader to
respond to Becky’s ‘sneering’ at her surrounding society: against
the dominant morality of its time (and, to a large extent, that of
the early twenty-first century also), we are asked to not only under-
stand but also celebrate and enjoy Zelda’s extramarital fling while
at the same time condemning Dino as a sexist predator. Ultimately,
Dean Martin’s character is, like, say, Horner in Wycherley’s Country
Wife, more a fallen angel sent by the narrative to expose the vices
of the Climax society than a convincing ‘autonomous’ character.
This is the reason why he is never punished by the film, in spite of
his abominable behaviour. In any case, by the time his encounter
with Zelda is over, Kiss Me, Stupid has already sufficiently estab-
lished its satirical standpoint and has shifted gear, using, as will be
shown below, its attack on the sexual mores of its social space as
the solid foundation of the magic space of romantic comedy.
Orville, for his part, embodies better than no other character the
film’s ironic ambivalence and its extreme demands on the audience.
After the first few minutes, in which he comically accuses the

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 Comic negotiations 91

milkman, his teenage piano pupil and even Barney of having an

affair with his wife, we soon realise, as he reluctantly puts into
practice his partner’s plan to sell their songs to Dino, that, like the
text and like the spectator, he is at all times aware of the immorality
of his behaviour and feels guilty about it. When he finally decides
to behave like a human being and throw the famous singer out of
his house, thus apparently jeopardising his last chance to sell his
songs, the spectators realise that we have been gradually coming
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closer to him and recognising ourselves in him, not only in his

weaknesses but also in his growing courage and sensibility. His
moral and personal growth, achieved during the central set piece
of the evening meal with Dino and Polly, in the course of which he
comes to realise the impossibility of accepting Dino’s and his own
behaviour and to respect women, definitely turns him, with the help
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of Polly, into a strong figure of identification. But then, after getting

rid of the singer, he invites his pretend wife to go to bed with him,
thus contravening received moral standards. At first it may be hard
for the spectator to accept that this moment represents the alterna-
tive proposed by the text to the venality, hypocrisy and sexism that
it has previously exposed. It is a moment in which the spectator
radically hesitates about the extent of her/his distance from the
character. As he opens the door to his bedroom and lets Polly/
‘Zelda’ in we wonder whether we should stay outside the door
criticising his infidelity, or go all the way with him and accept his
behaviour, thus placing ourselves on the wrong side of dominant
views of marriage. Our decision, however hard, is facilitated by
Zelda’s parallel behaviour but by this time we have already come
to realise that in order to appreciate this film’s satire we need to be
ready to occupy a position which most films would not dare offer
the spectator. We may also have realised that satire in Kiss Me,
Stupid is not an end in itself but, rather, the scaffolding for the
construction of a powerful comic romantic narrative.

Climaxing in Climax
Ginette Vincendeau has argued that comedy as a genre is both
mimetic of social reality and distanced from it through exaggeration
and performance (2001: 24). By performance she means the actor’s
rendering of a fictional character but we have already seen that a
related type of performance, that of social or sexual roles, is also
central to romantic comedy, as is proven not only by the plot of

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 92 The secret life of romantic comedy
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5 ‘Coming Mrs. Spooner?’: marriage as fantasy in Kiss Me, Stupid,

starring Kim Novak and Ray Walston (dir. Billy Wilder, 1964,
Lopert, MGM)
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To Be or Not to Be but by the conventions of role reversal and

mistakes of identity familiar to the genre since Shakespeare and
before. In romantic comedy, the distance from reality is provided
by the creation of the comic space, a space in which sexual and
affective scenarios are more or less freely played out by the char-
acters, but, as Thomas argues, this space is superimposed on the
social space and transforms it (2000: 14, 21).Yet, it might be added
that the transformation is never so thorough that the spectator
forgets the presence of the social space. In romantic comedy both
the social and the comic space, cultural discourses and fantasy,
remain separate but very close to one another. It is the recognition
of this simultaneity of duality and proximity that attracts the spec-
tator to the genre’s specificity. This simultaneity is particularly
striking in Kiss Me, Stupid. The character of Dino and his remark-
able similarities to the actor that plays him, his journey from Las
Vegas – where he has just finished a professional engagement – to
Hollywood, his drinking and womanising, the references to the Rat
Pack and the Beatles among others, place the not so fictional
Climax (there may be no Climax in Nevada but, according to The
Britannica Atlas there are four Climaxes in the U.S. plus one in
Canada) as close to a recognisable U.S. location as is possible in
fiction, a place as remote from the well-trodden track between the
two great centres of entertainment as the Bates Motel had been

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 Comic negotiations 93

from the main road a few years before. At the same time, however,
the characters’ increasingly unexpected attitudes towards received
sexual discourses and their ability to embody alternative discourses
without any negative consequences soon alert the spectator to the
fantastic overtones of the place. This persuasively constructed
double ontology turns Climax into the ideal physical and meta-
phorical space of a romantic comedy directly concerned with sex
and sexual discourses.
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The film is based on the Italian play L’ora della fantasia (2001),
written by Anna Bonacci in 1944 and previously adapted to the
screen by Mario Camerini with the title Moglie per una notte
(1952). The original’s title already underlines the importance of
fantasy both in the play and in the two films, yet it is in Wilder’s
movie that sexual fantasy occupies a most central position. Moglie
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per una notte engagingly transfers the action of Bonacci’s play

from Victorian England to nineteenth-century Parma but it is
otherwise very close to the original in its deployment of sexual
discourses: Enrico (Armando Francioli), the young musician, lusts
after Geraldine (Nadia Gray), the experienced courtesan, from
the moment he sees her. His desire is seen by the film as no more
than evidence of his immaturity, while Geraldine yearns after the
simple life that Enrico and his petit-bourgeois household represent,
but remains too detached throughout to succumb to any wish-
fulfilment fantasy. Enrico’s wife, Ottavia (Gina Lollobrigida), for
her part, is the faithful wife whose disappointment at her husband’s
adolescent behaviour never even tempts her to indulge in extra-
marital sexual fantasy. Instead, with the help of Geraldine, she uses
her husband’s jealousy to win him back. Camerini’s film, while
stressing the female perspective, works as a more conventional mar-
riage farce in which sexual fantasy is only represented indirectly by
the potentialities of the various sexual scenarios and never directly
through the characters’ actions. The romantic comedy of the film
lies in the final triumph of love over jealousy and professional ambi-
tion, and the comic space provided by the reconstruction of a fairy-
tale past protects a love that remains opposed to unbridled sexual
desire.
Apart from the easy transformation of Lollobrigida’s Ottavia
from ugly duckling to beautiful swan and her husband’s subsequent
surprise and rekindled desire for her (and the female star’s very
presence in the cast, representing a new, explosive type of post-war

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 94 The secret life of romantic comedy

female sexuality), there is little in Camerini’s film that evokes the

healthy connotations of sex that were then beginning to constitute
an emergent discourse in both U.S. and some European societies.
Twelve years later, Wilder’s movie turns that emergent discourse
into its central ideology and represents it through a very different
comic space, the space of romantic comedy. The geographical isola-
tion of Climax facilitates the transformation that the story under-
goes when Dino takes a detour from the highway and precipitates
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unexpected developments in the little town’s sexual scenarios. As

his presence among the locals confirms his larger-than-life rakish
behaviour and brings to the open their miseries and hypocrisies, the
spectator may not be prepared for the generic shift that the town’s
name, if nothing else, had already anticipated with the film’s usual
‘aggressive innuendo’. Indeed, this generic shift remained invisible
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for most critics who were not able to see beyond the film’s satirical
content: ‘A stop-and-start sex farce that is sometimes funny and
sometimes isn’t’ (Powers 1964: 3); ‘a comedy of pimpmanship
[which] cuts to the moral quick of American ambition’ (Durgnat,
1965: 27). Later authors, in monographic books on Wilder, have
not been able to redress the balance: ‘at the dawn of the sexual
revolution, Wilder set out to make sex seem filthy again’ (Sikov,
1998: 479); ‘less morally outrageous than aesthetically crude’
(Armstrong, 2000: 109); ‘a bawdy comedy, in the manner of the
Restoration theater, which would satirize some American preoccu-
pations with sex’ (Lemon, 2001: 40). Only Richard Lippe, in an
early reappraisal of the film, called attention to its blend of satire
and fantasy and wondered why earlier critics could only see morally
repulsive, sordid realism where there was, more importantly, ‘a
strong romantic spirit [. . .] which carries [the film] beyond day-to-
day reality and casts a suspended enchantment over the action’
(1971/72: 34).
Without theorising it, Lippe assumes a very similar theory of
comedy to that put forward in this book. The drab day-to-day
reality of Climax and of the entertainment industry represented by
Dino is the object of the film’s satire, but as the action develops,
the ‘spirit’ or romantic comedy transforms the story, recasting the
sexual and affective discourses it defends under the benevolent
atmosphere of the genre. This transformation takes place very
gradually during the central scene of the film – the evening for three
at the Spooner household, in which, following the advice of his

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 Comic negotiations 95

song-writing partner Barney, Orville hires hooker Polly to replace

his wife Zelda so that he can offer her sexually to Dino as a way
to get him interested in their songs. The description of the set-up
suggests almost endless possibilities for satire in a film which has
already spent its first hour relentlessly attacking both the society of
Climax and the Vegas and Hollywood star, particularly in the
objectification of women by men and the prostitution of moral
principles for the sake of social success and material wealth. This
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is the warped version of the American Dream which the spectator

of Wilder’s comedies had already been familiar with for over a
decade. As the scene develops, the film’s focus on the roles played
by the two men – the reckless womaniser and the obliging husband
– guarantees generic consistency with what had gone before, while
the growing concentration on the substitute wife announces melo-
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dramatic interpolations of the type already featured a few years

before in The Apartment.
Yet, Novak’s performance and the film’s general take on prosti-
tution, not as a fall from grace but as a socially significant but
morally neutral profession, ensure that pathos and pity are not
among the options offered the spectator. Rather, both the script
and the star’s performance enhance a more comic potential of the
scenario: the role playing and mistakes of identity of romantic
comedy. As Viola becomes Cesario and Rosalind becomes
Ganymede in the Shakespearean stories, Polly, the prostitute,
becomes Zelda, the married woman, for a night. From a satirical
perspective this enforced performance would have allowed the film
to continue its denunciation of moral squalor, but the film now
chooses a romantic comic perspective, in which the character is
given the chance to play out a sexual and social fantasy. Through
the satire of the first half, the film has established its ideological
position with respect to sexual desire and the role it plays (and
should play) in society. Now that position is used as a starting point
from which the same discourses will be positively presented through
the conventional deployment of the comic space. Polly’s enthusiasm
is such that, once Dino has been thrown out of the family house,
she drags Orville into joining her in her fantasy. Now they are not
playing parts for a third party anymore but only for themselves and
each other. Now the film is not satirising society any longer but
allowing the two characters to drop their inhibitions and play out
a sexual scenario characteristic of the genre.

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 96 The secret life of romantic comedy

Bang, bang
The scene fades out on Orville inviting the substitute Mrs. Spooner
to go to bed with him, and the spectator remains outside, wonder-
ing, as has been pointed out before, whether, given the male char-
acter’s recent record, to criticise him for taking advantage of the
situation or forget our moral scruples and join in the fantasy. The
critics predictably took the former option, a path that led them
nowhere in moral terms. Yet the film clearly prefers the latter, if
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we take into account what happens next: while Orville and Polly
spend the night as husband and wife, Zelda impersonates Polly the
Pistol in her caravan when Dino lands there on the rebound still
looking for action – not the filmic action enjoyed by Polly’s Western-
obsessed parrot but nevertheless one that can be summarised by the
same words: ‘Bang, bang’. A greater transgression by the patriar-
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chal moral standards of the mid-1960s, the singer’s seduction of

the wife cannot be explained by his consistently abominable behav-
iour with women or by her drunkenness as much as by the woman’s
willingness to indulge her teenage fantasy when the opportunity
unexpectedly presents itself. Since it would be inconsistent with
what had gone before to understand this climactic (in more ways
than one) episode within the generic boundaries of satire, the scene
confirms that the film has definitively abandoned this mode and
replaced it by a romantic comedy that does not celebrate, as in the
case of Camerini’s earlier version, received versions of romantic
and/or married love but rather the importance of sexual fantasy in
stable relationships.
‘How can there be romance in a world of bodily functions?’,
wonders Sikov, adding that the comedy has an unpleasant aroma
(1998: 489–90). Yet, as has been seen, Western cultural discourses
on love and marriage had been moving relentlessly towards a more
sexualised form of love in which not only was sexual pleasure
an essential component of happy marriages but sex was being
seen increasingly as a healthy pursuit in itself, a discourse which
would eventually incorporate the concept of ‘recreational sex’
(Seidman, 1991). Kiss Me, Stupid, in its articulation of sexual
fantasy as an important ingredient of a healthy marriage, may have
been ahead of its time as far as filmic representations of the genre
were concerned but it does, nevertheless, narrativise perfectly recog-
nisable and growingly prestigious emergent discourses of its time.
Hollywood romantic comedy had been gradually moving towards

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 Comic negotiations 97

a franker acknowledgement of sexuality in heterosexual relation-

ships and the growing complexity of its links with the concept of
romantic love, yet it did not seem ready to incorporate the positive
representation of sex that can be found, for example, in some
Ingmar Bergman comedies of the 1950s, especially his Shakespeare-
inspired Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende, 1955).
The so-called ‘sex comedies’ used the uprightness of stars like
Doris Day to label male sexual desire as reckless womanising
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and to repress female desire under social respectability, and Wilder

had previously joined the ranks by ridiculing the married man’s
sexual fantasy in The Seven-Year Itch (1955) and by offering
a relentlessly grim view of sex as commerce in The Apartment.
Even Some Like It Hot, a film in which an openly sexual scenario
– the night Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) and Joe (Tony Curtis)
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spend on the yacht – becomes the starting point of what might

turn into a stable relationship, seems ambiguous and leaves too
many questions unanswered about its attitude to sex with its
famous open ending. Perhaps Howard Hawks, by adapting his
screwball origins to modern cultural changes, succeeds best at
incorporating sexual desire into notions of heterosexual romance
and marriage in such films as I Was a Male War Bride, Monkey
Business (1952), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Man’s Favorite
Sport?
Sex had, of course, been the subject of comedy for centuries but,
after Shakespeare, it had been gradually displaced away from
romantic comedy and had found its natural space in satire. Mean-
while, sex had been gaining cultural visibility and prominence
ever since the end of the nineteenth century and had become, after
the end of World War II, an important concern in U.S. society
and, therefore, as Richard Dyer has cogently argued, also in
Hollywood films (1986: 23–42). 1950s romantic comedy had
acknowledged this centrality and had brought the discourses of
sexuality and the concept of romance as close as they had ever been,
but it was still reluctant to openly welcome sexual desire under the
protection of its comic space. Steven Seidman argues that, while the
sexualisation of love had been a long process and was not restricted
to the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s, what this decade brought
about in sexual matters was the defence of sexual choice, variation
and pleasure, greater challenges to the heterosexual, romantic and
marital norms, and the legitimation of the body as a site of sensual

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 98 The secret life of romantic comedy

pleasure (1992: 45). Satire’s traditional link of sexual desire with

deception, hypocrisy, the crisis of marriage and the double stan-
dard, and its usual deployment of these sexual discourses in mar-
riage comedy, was not the most appropriate way to tackle this
emergent discourse, but there was, of course, still much to satirise
in traditional attitudes to sex. Yet Kiss Me, Stupid, instead of
adopting a satirical approach to sexual desire and presenting it as
sordid, dirty and exclusively masculine, offers a more positive view,
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in tune with contemporaneous cultural discourses, and, conse-

quently, abandons satire as a way of representing sex. Romantic
comedy provides the logical alternative and, within its comic space,
the critique of the double standard and of women’s repression
becomes the starting point of a celebration of sex as healthy, socially
acceptable and conducive, in unexpected ways, to conjugal happi-
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ness. In generic terms, satire is not simply replaced by romantic

comedy, but, rather, the latter succeeds the former and can only be
articulated on the basis of the satirical structure it eventually
overcomes.
Alexandre Trauner’s sets contribute significantly to this generic
hybridity, the realism of the representation of the social background
of Climax subtly shoring up the magic spaces that the Spooners’
home, Polly’s caravan and, finally, the street outside the television
shop gradually become. However, it is more spectacularly the filmic
construction of Zelda’s face that underlines the possibility of tran-
scendence conjured up by the genre. Two tracking shots to a close-
up of Felicia Farr’s face in the film’s final moments mark the
transition to a world of sexual fantasy that is protected by the space
of comedy. The first one takes place when Zelda realises that her
visitor in Polly’s trailer is no other than Dino, the idol of her teenage
years, and her initial shock at the possibility of one of Polly’s cus-
tomers treating her as a prostitute is replaced first by a curiosity
mixed with wonder and then by a growing willingness to bring her
fantasy to fruition. The combination of the actress’s performance
and the frame movement confirm the film’s intention: to protect
and fulfil female sexual desire and turn it into an object of celebra-
tion rather than repression. This is a characteristic moment of the
genre in which the comic space becomes visible.
The second time this stylistic option is taken comes in the film’s
penultimate shot. As Dino’s live performance of ‘Sophia’ on the
television continues to be heard in the background, a two-shot of

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 Comic negotiations 99
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6 ‘Kiss me, stupid’: Zelda’s face and the comic space. Felicia Farr in Kiss
Me, Stupid (dir. Billy Wilder, 1964, Lopert, MGM)
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Zelda and Orville frames their reconciliation even though the

husband still does not know what is going on. As in Shakespeare’s
comedies, the character not only comes to accept but also embraces
the wonder and mystery of human relationships and this marks the
culmination of the transformation of his identity into a more toler-
ant, mature and – hopefully – sexually confident human being. An
earlier moment, when he is alone in the house after his wife has
left him, finds Orville longingly looking at Zelda’s dummy, in a not
dissimilar way from Dino’s earlier look, suggesting that, after his
night with Polly, Orville is finally ready to learn to see his wife as
a sexual being. Now Zelda, who had already undergone a similar
process, but one which included a specifically feminine liberation
of her hitherto repressed sexuality, has stayed silent, waiting for
her husband to finish, while the widescreen format has kept the two
characters onscreen in virtual close-up. Once Orville runs out of
unanswered questions – ‘how would you?, when did she?, why
would he?’ –, Zelda utters the film’s famous final line: ‘Kiss me,
stupid.’ Repeating the previous tracking shot, the frame moves now
to an extreme close-up of the woman’s smiling face, the night time
lighting and the crooning music in the background contributing to
the articulation of a space as thoroughly transformed as ever in the
genre.
That this is practically the film’s final shot suggests that it is in
the space signified by Zelda’s expression that the characters are to

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 100 The secret life of romantic comedy

stay, the return to society traditionally predicated by the genre only

acceptable if the fantasy scenario so spectacularly represented
remains forever in place. With Dino safe and sound in his preferred
Hollywood environment, Barney unpunished for his mendacity
cheerfully signing autographs just offscreen, Polly finally driving
away, having managed to purchase a car with the money Dino paid
her replacement for one night, and the married couple happily rec-
onciled in spite of their infidelities, this is as far as can be from the
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satirical mode in which the film started. It is precisely the length of

this journey from satire to romantic comedy that makes the film
significant from a generic point of view. The particular combination
of the two genres described here provides an important insight into
the changing role of sex in romantic discourses, a changing role
that in Hollywood terms proved too drastic for critics and audi-
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ences in 1964.

Comic combinations
The analyses of To Be or Not to Be and Kiss Me, Stupid have
explored the presence in specific texts of romantic comedy in
combination with other comic genres, particularly satire. The two
selected films are very useful for this type of analysis because of
their historically significant position, closing in both cases what
historians have seen as the two most productive periods of Holly-
wood romantic comedy. Perhaps the kind of precarious historical
position occupied by the two texts lends itself to departures from
the norm and rejections of generic purity more readily than when
the films are more ‘safely’ located at the peak of the popularity of
a given genre. At the same time, it is, as has been seen, this generic
instability that allows them to articulate more forcefully the con-
ventions of the genre and to explore its meanings and discourses,
by placing them side by side with other conventions. It is not that
these films are representative in their extreme hybridity of how
romantic comedy generally works. There is little doubt that many
other films use the conventions of the genre in ‘purer’ but equally
interesting ways. Rather, the theoretical perspective proposed here
allows us to account for all texts in a more consistent way, to
acknowledge the frequency of the presence of conventions belong-
ing to different genres in a great many individual texts, and to treat
such cases not as exceptional, radical or transgressive but, rather,
as historically significant.

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 Comic negotiations 101

In the case of romantic comedy, the ideological uniformity gener-

ally found by critics is, as I have argued before, more a consequence
of a narrowing in critical definitions and conceptualisations
than of empirical observation. As these two texts show, the com-
bination of its central tenets with other comic conventions almost
immediately contradicts the determinism ascribed to the genre pre-
viously. Additionally, the study of filmic texts as blends of various
comic genres solves oft-rehearsed taxonomical problems: a text
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does not have to be, for example, a romantic comedy, a marriage

comedy, a satire or a farce – it can be all of them at the same time.
While the term comedy may ultimately prove too large and unwieldy
for the study of film genre, the constant crisscrossing and over-
lapping of other generic terms proves to be nothing but a logical
consequence of the fact that all genres crisscross and overlap in the
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texts, as well as a corollary of the relentless historical fluctuation

of all generic configurations.
To Be or Not to Be and Kiss Me, Stupid are not romantic
comedies but use the conventions of the genre in significant
ways. As I have argued here, in Wilder’s film romantic comedy
eventually becomes the dominant genre, satire remaining an essen-
tial generic ingredient precisely in so far as it is finally superseded,
whereas in Lubitsch’s film there is a greater balance between
the various comic genres. In both cases, the different genres feed
off each other and contribute a degree of textual complexity to
which conceptualisations of genres as groups of films and of
films as belonging to specific genres do not have access. Both films
additionally illustrate the low cultural and academic status of
romantic comedy. To Be or Not to Be became part of the canon
as one of the most brilliant comedies in the history of Hollywood
in so far as its romantic comedy elements remained invisible.
Kiss Me, Stupid was almost universally rejected because its satire
was too base, too obscene, too vulgar, or because its satirical
view of love, sex and marriage was too hard to take. Romantic
comedy had no share in the success of the former or in the
resonant failure of the latter. It may be the critical fate of the genre
that, in combination with other genres, it becomes invisible, and it
is only when the happy ending coincides with or can be interpreted
as a defence of a conservative view of heterosexual romance that
romantic comedy is allowed to shine forth . . . if only to be imme-
diately chastised for its conservativeness. If this is the situation

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 102 The secret life of romantic comedy

when romantic comedy appears in combination with other comic

genres, it is even more pronounced on those occasions – again much
more frequent than has been acknowledged – in which it is
seen in the company of more serious genres, such as the thriller
or melodrama. It is to these instances that I would now like to
turn.
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 3

Romantic comedy on the dark side

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I. The other thrills of Rear Window

Alfred Hitchcock, more than any other director, has been identified
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with a single genre, the suspense thriller. While it took several

decades and the joint effort of various auteurist critics and scholars
such as Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Donald
Spoto or Robin Wood to rescue his films from the sphere of popular
entertainment and usher them into the Olympus of high cinematic
art, they have remained there by virtue, not only of their cinematic
purity, as the director and Truffaut agreed about Rear Window
(Truffaut 1986: 319–21), but also of their generic purity. Hitchcock’s
revitalisation of the format and conventions of the suspense thriller,
and his enormous influence on the genre’s subsequent history,
allowed critics virtually to identify the director with this genre and,
consequently, to take the films’ genericity more or less for granted
in order to concentrate on auteurist, psychoanalytic, feminist or
philosophical issues which made the artist truly great or, at least,
interesting from a cultural standpoint.
More recently, however, considerations of a greater generic
variety have gradually begun to emerge in writings on Hitchcock,
and the presence of comedy and romance in his films has become
more noticeable. Lesley Brill started by highlighting the importance
of the romance genre in his oeuvre and went on to compare his
films to those of Preston Sturges (1988, 1999), while Dana Polan
(1991), Susan Smith (2000) and James Naremore (2004), among
others, have focused, from different perspectives, on Hitchcock’s
use of humour. Stanley Cavell, most centrally for my argument
here, approached North by Northwest (1959) as a ‘late’ screwball
comedy, as a continuation of the ‘comedies of remarriage’ that he

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 104 The secret life of romantic comedy

himself had labelled and explored some years before (1986), fully
contextualising the film within the generic field of romantic comedy.
North by Northwest is also a central text in Brill’s theory of the
Hitchcockian romance, a film which he considers a modern version
of the medieval romance of adventure, good and evil, quests, lucky
coincidences, animism and psychological transparency (1988: 6), a
film in which, for example, ‘Eve retains hints of Persephone, the
goddess of flowers and vegetative fertility kidnapped by the king of
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Hades and finally rescued through the agency of Demeter and Zeus’
(12–13). Romantic comedy and romance, therefore, have joined the
suspense thriller and the adventure movie – itself a modern version
of the romance story (Taves 1993) – as part of the generic context
of this particular film, producing an instance of Hitchcockian
impurity in a film which paradoxically remains thoroughly
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Hitchcockian. Thus, North by Northwest appears as an example

of the genre mixture that characterises the workings of most films,
or, to use the words of Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson in their
analysis of Rear Window, of ‘the generic intertext in which fiction
films operate’ (1986: 195).
Naremore, like Smith before him, notes Hitchcock’s tendency to
play variations of tone between different scenes of a film, and even
within the same scene, and this is facilitated by what he calls the
‘classic Hollywood’s all-purpose plot’. He goes on to mention as
examples of such variations The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), The
Birds (1963) and Rear Window (harrowing violence plus a New-
Comic plot) (2004: 25). Comedy and romance are important ingre-
dients in these films, as they are in others like The Farmer’s Wife
(1928), Rich and Strange (1932), To Catch a Thief (1955), The
Trouble with Harry (1956) and certainly Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Since
the exploration of love and sexuality in Hitchcock’s work had
already been a central critical concern since the heyday of feminism
and psychoanalysis, the space is now open for a consideration of
his films as generic intertexts. Yet, with the exceptions of North by
Northwest in the analyses of Cavell and Brill, and Mr. and Mrs.
Smith, as a more or less standard screwball comedy, no work has
been done so far on the presence of romantic comedy in the direc-
tor’s canon. Additionally, neither Cavell’s philosophical approach
nor Brill’s treatment of the romance as an eminently ‘serious’ genre
do justice to the comic dimension of Hitchcock’s use of romantic
comedy.

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 105

In this chapter, I look at Rear Window, again not as a romantic

comedy, but as a text in which this genre interacts with another
one, in this case the non-comic suspense thriller, producing, as a
result of this cross-fertilisation, relevant consequences for our
understanding of the film. For this purpose, The Birds, which like
Romeo and Juliet may be described as a romantic comedy gone
wrong, could also have been chosen because of the way in which
the horror of the main section brings to the surface the unconscious
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drives and anxieties of the romantic comedy structure of the begin-

ning. However, I have decided on Rear Window partly because,
with three full books and hundreds of academic and journalistic
articles to its name, the references to the presence of romantic
comedy in it are surprisingly almost non-existent.
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Look at me
Throughout the film, Jeff (James Stewart) insists on looking through
his window at the other side of the courtyard and ignores what is
going on inside his own apartment. When Hitchcock describes the
film to Truffaut he shares this blindness: ‘You have an immobilized
man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The second part shows
what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts. This is actu-
ally the purest expression of a cinematic idea’ (1986: 319–21). For
the director, the ‘two parts’ of the film are Jeff looking and the
courtyard outside. His apartment remains invisible. With some
important exceptions, the majority of critics, starting with Jean
Douchet, Robin Wood and Laura Mulvey, follow the lead of the
character and the director and keep looking out of the window.
Douchet inaugurates the discussion of the film as metaphor for
the cinema, equating Jeff’s look with that of the spectator and the
window with the screen: the protagonist is chair-bound like our-
selves and, like ourselves, projects his guilty desires onto the other
characters and situations (1960: 10). Since then, as with To Be or
Not to Be, the metacinematic perspective has been dominant.
Mulvey argues that Jeff does not find Lisa (Grace Kelly) interesting
until she crosses over to the block opposite and becomes the exhi-
bitionistic object of his gaze. In a move not unlike that performed
by much feminist criticism, this critic replicates the male protago-
nist’s attitude and finds Lisa as boring as he does while she remains
in his apartment (1989: 23–4). Wood partly departs from Douchet
from the beginning by calling our attention to the relationship

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 106 The secret life of romantic comedy

between the two protagonists but immediately introduces the link

between this relationship and the various stories across the yard.
He then goes along with Jeff’s preference for these stories when he
sees the film rather as a therapeutic cure of Jeff’s and, by extension,
modern society’s alienation than as a condemnation of prying and
voyeurism (1989: 100–1).
Tania Modleski’s departure from Mulvey’s view of Lisa as solely
passive and exhibitionistic object of male desire and positing of her,
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instead, as a powerful presence and a strong, active woman (1988)

starts a trend of recuperation of the female protagonist which cul-
minates with Sarah Street’s analysis of fashion in the movie (2000)
and John Fawell’s later monograph on the film (2001). For this
critic, the text is an ‘ode to feminine wisdom and style, an apprecia-
tion of women that avoids the condescension or paternalism that
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Hitchcock often displayed in his interviews’ (2001: 6). Yet, this has
not necessarily meant greater attention to the dynamics inside Jeff’s
apartment. For example, one of the main points made by Modleski
is that in Rear Window the woman also looks, that Lisa is a repre-
sentative of the female spectator at the cinema (a spectator that had
been erased by Mulvey’s theory) in that, rather than interested in
spying on her neighbours, she relates to them through empathy and
identification. This leads her to conclude that both spectatorship
and narrativity may be more feminine than Mulvey had thought
since they place the spectator in a passive and submissive relation
to the fi lm (1988: 80–3). Although the film’s fi nal look is Lisa’s at
Jeff in the last scene, the text remains for this critic fi rst and fore-
most a metacinematic commentary on the relationship between
spectator and screen. What has changed from Douchet to Mulvey
is that Mulvey’s is a gendered spectator, and from Mulvey to
Modleski that for the latter the spectator is not just male.
The scarcity of analyses of the Jeff–Lisa relationship, outside
indirect reflections of it in the other stories, has gone hand in hand
with the virtual erasure of the film’s genericity from critical com-
mentary. Although Rear Window has occasionally been mentioned
in connection with Hitchcock’s use of humour and comedy, and
even though John Michael Hayes’s script is acknowledged to have
contributed a lighter touch, breezy dialogue and witty double enten-
dre (Fawell, 2001: 3), the film’s use of the suspense thriller format
for the murder story that Jeff discovers from his window has tended
to override any other generic considerations. One exception is Stam

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 107

and Pearson’s article, which follows the dominant trend in dealing

mostly with voyeurism, the cinematic apparatus and reflexivity, but
they see the apartment complex across the yard not only as an
artistic and filmic microcosm but also as a combination of several
classic Hollywood genres: in Miss Lonelyhearts’ apartment is played
out a 1950s social realist film, in Thorwald’s a murder mystery, in
Miss Torso’s an MGM musical or even a 1950s soft-core porn film,
the dog couple echo a domestic comedy and the songwriter a
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musical biopic, with Jeff as the substitute director coordinating all

of these ‘framed genre pantomimes’ (1986: 195).
Although Stam and Pearson only mention these cases as instances
of the ‘generic intertext’ of popular films, and do not aspire to give
an exhaustive account of all the genres present in the different
apartments (for example, they do not mention the newlyweds), it
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is noteworthy that they fail to refer to Jeff’s apartment as also

containing another ‘genre pantomime’, even though this is the most
important space of the film. This absence is almost as remarkable
as that of the movie from Lesley Brill’s list of Hitchcockian texts
which relate, more or less directly, to the genre of romance. Brill
analyses some twenty films but sees no connection between Rear
Window and romance, maybe for similar reasons to those that
made Wood revise his view of the film in the course of the 1980s
and 1990s: from such general interpretations of the text as repre-
senting the ‘chaos world that underlies the superficial order’ (1989:
107), he moved first to ‘the impossibility of successful human rela-
tions’ (1989: 378) and then to the ‘seemingly hopeless incompatibil-
ity of male and female viewpoints within our socially constructed
arrangements of gender and sexuality’ (1999: 81–2). That is, rather
than a romance narrative, Rear Window is, for Wood, about the
impossibility of romance and, beyond that, about the hopelessness
of any kind of communication between men and women.
However, the film is much more ambiguous about men and
women’s incompatibility, especially if we consider not only the
stories developing in the other apartments but also what actually
happens between Jeff and Lisa. To start with, those other stories
are decisively coloured by Jeff’s perception: they reflect his more or
less unconscious fantasies and anxieties about heterosexuality (and
maybe homoerotic desire, too). As much a film about the spectato-
rial process of interpreting clues and ‘the full complexity of the
viewing activity’ as about the look (Bordwell 1985: 40), the text

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 108 The secret life of romantic comedy

constantly emphasises Jeff’s construction of his own narratives on

the basis of the very vague snippets of other people’s lives that he
sees. Those constructed stories reflect not just his own experience
with Lisa, but, more importantly, the fears that this experience
raises and that he projects onto the people across the yard. The
spectator follows Jeff’s initiative and generally accepts his interpre-
tations and articulations of desire, frustration, loneliness and hatred,
largely on the basis of the character’s reactions to what he sees.
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Even when Jeff is asleep, as happens at the beginning and at the

end of the narrative and a few more times in the middle, what we
see in the various panning shots becomes coloured by Jeff’s inter-
pretation, perhaps not so much by what he sees, since he is asleep,
as by what he is imagining in his dreams or nightmares. As a con-
sequence, the other stories necessarily reflect Jeff’s attitude – they
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could be said to constitute assorted projections of his identity – and

so they only tell one part of the story. In other words, it is not the
text but Jeff that thinks that men and women are incompatible.
What is missing is Lisa’s part of the story, her perspective on rela-
tionships, her opinion on whether men and women are compatible
or not.
Romantic comedy gives us access to this perspective or, to put
it in slightly different words, we cannot have access to Lisa’s per-
spective unless we focus on the film’s engagement with the conven-
tions of this genre. Since romantic comedy defends, as we have seen,
romantic, affective and/or sexual compatibility between people
(generally, although not necessarily, between men and women), it
goes without saying that Jeff is an unlikely candidate for the genre,
given not only his reluctance to even consider a future for his rela-
tionship with Lisa but also the extreme aggressiveness of his opin-
ions and attitudes towards Lisa in particular and women in general.
Additionally, the cast which immobilises him in his wheel-chair and
that covers the whole lower part of his body is, as many critics have
pointed out, an all-too-obvious metaphor for sexual impotence.
Yet, although the presence of the cast is prolonged beyond the end
of the film by the fracture of his other leg as a consequence of his
fall from the window, Jeff does change his attitude in the course of
the action and is finally converted, however ambiguously, to the
pleasures of heterosexuality, as his contented smile suggests in the
film’s final shot. Like other romantic comedy heroes before him, he
has been changed by the experience provided by the comic space,

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 109

the genre consisting, as Steve Neale has pointed out, of, among
other conventions, a learning process (1992: 292–4). Like North
by Northwest, according to Cavell’s analysis, Rear Window is
about the process whereby the male character becomes a worthy
candidate for marriage (1986: 263 and passim). Accordingly, in the
final stages of the story, Jeff’s attitude shows several signs of soften-
ing: his reaction when Lisa comes back to his apartment after slip-
ping the anonymous note under Thorwald’s door; his surrender to
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her love when she holds him in her arms after his fall; and his smile
as he sleeps with his two legs in casts with Lisa sitting next to him
in the last scene.
In any case, it must be admitted that Jeff never makes it easy for
the comic space to take hold of his apartment. Lisa is a different
matter. For much of the film she is only half-heartedly interested
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in the various people she can see from the window, but when she
comments, jokingly or in earnest, on what she sees, her views are
pointedly different from Jeff’s: Miss Torso, for example, rather than
the Queen Bee surrounded and pampered by all the drones among
which she chooses the wealthiest men, as Jeff’s sexist interpretation
of her life goes, is, for Lisa, forever ‘juggling wolves’ because she
is not interested in any of these men. From her first appearance,
Lisa consistently carries with her the comic space of the genre, not
only personifying its firm belief in compatibility but also relentlessly
seeking to transform the drabness of her beloved’s apartment into
a more conducive space to the pleasures of coupledom. She is not
just an erotic object for Jeff and the male spectator to look at. She
is a very strong and active subject underneath the veneer of her
wealth and apparent frivolity. The fact that most critics have seen
Rear Window as a single-protagonist movie speaks volumes not
only about the resilience of patriarchal structures but also about
the invisibility among the critical and academic institutions of
certain generic configurations, precisely because of their ‘feminin-
ity’. Slavoj Zizek has recently suggested that this critical tendency
to overlook the inside of the apartment has indeed been a serious
oversight:

What happens on his side of the window, in the hero’s apartment –

the amorous misadventures of Stewart and Kelly – is by no means a
simple subplot, an amusing diversion with no bearing on the central
motif of the film, but on the contrary, its very centre of gravity. Jeff’s

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 110 The secret life of romantic comedy

(and our) fascination with what goes on in the other apartments

functions to make Jeff (and us) overlook the crucial importance of
what goes on this side of the window, in the very place from which
he looks. (1999: 126)

Lisa spends much of the film and all of her energy trying to get Jeff
to look away from the window, to turn his face towards the inside
of his apartment, to project his identity onto his relationship with
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her rather than onto the other windows. When she apparently gives
up and decides to join him in his interest and fascination with what
goes on in other people’s lives, this is not a capitulation but only a
strategic move. By joining him by the window and projecting herself
onto the opposite side of the courtyard, she is only enlarging the
space of the (in more ways than one) diminutive apartment and
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eventually cancelling out his former fascination by turning the

whole space of the film into his (and now also her) apartment.
In what is left of this chapter, I follow Zizek’s advice and turn
away from Jeff’s perspective, not because it is not important in the
film but because it has already received more than its critical due,
and concentrate for once on Lisa’s perspective. Likewise, in spite
of the obvious pleasures to be found behind the other windows in
the Chelsea block, Jeff’s apartment deserves more attention than
has been given so far and a generic approach seems an appropriate
way to make up for this critical oversight. Obviously, much of what
goes on in this location is related to the look, the window and the
courtyard, but the action here is not exhausted by the characters’
projection towards the outside: there are Lisa’s repeated attempts
at catching her boyfriend’s attention, there are the tense and intense
conversations about their problematic relationship, there is Stella’s
advice on love and marriage, there is Doyle’s (Wendell Corey) reac-
tion to the intimacy that he finds between Jeff and Lisa the second
time he visits the apartment, there is the violent invasion of this
space by Thorwald in the climactic scene of the film, and there is
the final scene, whose end, for all the ambiguity tendentiously
interpreted as a sign of precariousness by Wood and others, sug-
gests, at least, a change in the status quo (precisely what Jeff
resisted) in the direction of Lisa’s desire. None of these moments
can be seen in isolation from the generic conventions of the thriller
that dominate the rest of the action and the space of the courtyard,
because in this as in other films generic clusters do not work

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 111

independently but in close combination with one another. The

romantic comedy of Rear Window is not all-pervasive or unstop-
pable, as it is in purer instances of the genre. Its encounter in this
film with a non-comic genre such as the suspense thriller makes it
more fragmentary, more intermittent, less confident in its celebra-
tion of specific sexual discourses than in the two comic films ana-
lysed previously. Yet it defines Lisa as a character, accompanies her
in her endeavours throughout the film and fights a generic battle
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that can only be said to be lost if we consider Jeff’s perspective

exclusively and ignore the most obvious aspects of the film’s
resolution.

Society calling
Even before Lisa makes her first appearance, Jeff’s apartment has
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become, in spite of himself, a space traversed by contemporary

affective discourses. As Elise Lemire has brilliantly argued, Jeff
embodies a male reaction to dominant sexual and social discourses
in the early 1950s that asked men and women to conform (2000:
66–8). While white middle-class women’s conformity consisted in
returning to the fast-growing suburban home after the exceptional
parenthesis of the war and in becoming good mothers and house-
wives, men were supposed to marry, settle down and be good pro-
viders for their wives and children. The pressures of conformity
often became too heavy a burden for both men and women to carry
(Ehrenreich, 1983). The emergence of Playboy magazine in 1953,
which celebrated the sexually promiscuous heterosexual single
man, and the gradual proliferation of such books as the novel The
Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955) or the psychological study
Must We Conform? (1955) indicate that men were resisting hetero-
sexual ‘normality’ in greater and greater numbers. In their desperate
quest for liberation from the ‘breadwinner ethic’ it was only to be
expected that men would see women as the main culprits because
of their insistence on getting married. As Playboy repeatedly
asserted, this was a magazine for men who loved women and hated
wives (Ehrenreich, 1983: 42). Jeff’s fantasies and fears in Rear
Window are a direct consequence of this state of affairs. After the
title credits and the famous opening panning shot, the film plunges
straight into the articulation of these discourses, first through the
telephone conversation between Jeff and his editor and then through
his subsequent dialogue with the company nurse, Stella (Thelma

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 112 The secret life of romantic comedy

Ritter). These discourses revolve, on the one hand, around the issue
of marriage, and different contemporary approaches to coupledom,
and, on the other, and inevitably related to the former, around
constructions of homosexuality as defective masculinity.
Jeff may become increasingly involved in his voyeuristic plea-
sures as the film unfolds, but it must be remembered that he does
not engage in his Peeping-Tom activities as a matter of choice. If
we are to believe his own perception of himself as he intimates it
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to his friend, he is much more interested in resuming his glamorous

life of adventure than in ogling the young women in the neighbour-
ing apartments. In this sense, we may consider in some detail the
sequence in which Jeff looks at Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy) for
the first time, as she dances, scantily clad, around her kitchen.
Setting the structure for the rest of the film, Hitchcock provides
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various shots of Jeff looking and corresponding reverse shots of the

young woman from his approximate position. The reverse shots are
relatively lengthy, apparently taking pleasure in the woman’s gyrat-
ing body, and the reaction shots reveal a measure of voyeuristic
interest on Jeff’s part. Simultaneously, Jeff discusses his situation
with Gunnison and the next job he would have taken if he had not
had his mobility impaired. When the protagonist finds out what the
assignment would have been – the conflict in Kashmir – and that
it will be given to somebody else, his interest in Miss Torso imme-
diately dwindles and he starts looking at somebody else, specifically
the middle-aged sculptress in the basement.
It is as if a struggle has been taking place between Jeff’s voyeuris-
tic pleasures and his professional life. Once he is reminded of the
wonderful excitement of adventure, his erotic life recedes into the
background and the attractive young woman turns into the matronly
artist downstairs. The scene, however, could be read differently: the
protagonist’s erotic curiosity in Miss Torso remains in place as long
as he can see himself as an intrepid adventure photographer. Once
it dawns on him that he is, at least temporarily, unfit for adventure,
his erotic drive also staggers. Maybe when he recovers he will
become again not only a roving professional but also a predatory
heterosexual in the Playboy mould. The ambiguity of this scene
derives from Stewart’s performance: while the film’s concentration
on Miss Torso from Jeff’s perspective suggests the importance of
the voyeuristic look, his facial expressions in the reaction shots
never seem to spell more than a neighbour’s curiosity. This impres-

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 113

sion, in fact, extends to the whole movie and renders Stella’s criti-
cisms of his virility and Lisa’s growing fears more credible. In any
case, this is probably the first and also the last time we can discern
something like erotic curiosity in Jeff’s gaze, if only because of the
textual insistence on his look and the nature of its object. From
now on, women will start to mean something different, something
altogether less attractive.
Apart from Miss Torso, the only other female characters that
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appear in the film as would-be erotic objects of Jeff’s gaze are the
two young women who disappear from view as they undress, ready
to sunbathe on the balcony of one of the top floors, but the only
time Jeff sees them he seems to be more interested in the hovering
helicopter whose pilot is ostensibly looking down at the women
than in the women themselves. In general, the sunbathing beauties
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and dancing female bodies that materialise on the screen through

Jeff’s gaze, as he utters his frustration, are less an expression of the
protagonist’s Playboy mentality than an early textual disclaimer of
any danger of homosexuality, which was at the time, as cultural
critics have pointed out, the devilish quagmire into which men
would inevitably fall if they were not to follow the rules. Playboy
defended that there could be healthy male heterosexuality outside
marriage but cultural constructions of the time, such as this film,
suggest that the battle had by no means been won. Bachelorhood
beyond a reasonable age was surrounded by fears of homosexuality
while male desire for other men was seen as a shortcoming to be
overcome, very close to the ‘hormone deficiency’ that Stella will
soon accuse Jeff of suffering from.
Why doesn’t Jeff want to marry Lisa? This is the question around
which most of the sexual discourses of the film revolve. From the
perspective of romantic comedy it is a very familiar question and
one which directly links Rear Window with many of the sex
comedies of the period. On the other hand, what separates the film
from a sex comedy like, say, Indiscreet (1958) or Pillow Talk is
a slightly different question: why doesn’t Jeff want to have sex
with Lisa? Two general types of answers have been given to these
questions, one related to Jeff’s preference for a life of adventure
and negative attitude towards women and marriage, and the
other revolving around his more or less latent homosexuality.
Critics like Juan Suárez or Robert Samuels, among others, have
explored the latter avenue, in both cases proposing psychoanalytic

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 114 The secret life of romantic comedy

interpretations of Jeff’s reluctance to accept Lisa’s advances. Suárez

activates the structure of paranoia and usefully explores Jeff’s iden-
tification with Mrs. Thorwald, which he interprets as his desire to
be nursed by a man (1996: 365), while Samuels revises Mulvey’s
theory of the Lacanian gaze in order to read Jeff’s voyeurism dif-
ferently, concluding that, in their fascination with Grace Kelly,
earlier critics have ‘missed the hairy athlete who hides behind the
curtain’ (1998: 121).
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Convincing though these symptomatic readings are, it has not

been sufficiently emphasised that the film itself seems to have no
difficulty referring to the protagonist’s problematic sexual orienta-
tion in relatively open terms. It is not only that, through much of
the narrative, Jeff is much more interested in Lars Thorwald
(Raymond Burr) than in Lisa. Both his girlfriend and Stella con-
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stantly taunt him with his being less than a man. When he explains
to Stella that Lisa wants to marry him, the nurse’s reply – ‘That’s
normal’ – is simply commonsensical, but when Jeff says that he
does not want to get married, Stella’s question – ‘Is that normal?’
– immediately recalls the 1950s horror of homoerotic desire. Nor-
mality in sexual matters is the opposite of homosexuality, the
‘normal’ cure for which is marriage. Homosexuality remains unut-
terable but the very resistance to name it on the part of the char-
acters increases its visibility. Stella seems aware of this when, in
response to his attempt to explain that Lisa is not what he wants
at the moment, she asks: ‘Is what you want something you can
discuss?’ Similarly, later on, Lisa tries to draw her boyfriend’s atten-
tion once again with a second shower of passionate kisses but Jeff,
forgetting to kiss her back in mid-action, returns to what really
interests him, the Thorwald case, and, after mentioning some
incriminating evidence, asks for her opinion: ‘What do you think?’
Lisa, pulling away from him in despair at his lack of responsiveness,
replies: ‘Something too frightful to utter.’
While this dynamic of representing but not saying ensures that
the 1950s spectator understands what is at stake and allows the
contemporary spectator to examine topical definitions of homo-
sexuality, the film is less interested in the exploration of alternative
sexual orientations than in the problematisation of patriarchal mas-
culinity (Fawell 2001: 6 and passim). Jeff’s potential for homoerotic
desire is part of an often confusing amalgam in the construction of
his character that includes the Playboy mentality, anxieties about

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 115
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7 ‘Is that normal?’: Stella questions Jeff’s masculinity. Thelma Ritter

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and James Stewart in Rear Window (dir. Alfred Hitchcock,

1954, Paramount)

female sexuality, the love of adventure and the great outdoors and,
as Suárez suggests in the title of his essay, homosocial desire (1996:
359). Like his look at Miss Torso in the first scene, stranded
between the camera’s concentration on the woman’s body and
Stewart’s non-committal performance in the reaction shots, Jeff’s
refusal to marry is overdetermined in a way that does not neces-
sarily make narrative sense. The film throws in various possible
reasons why the protagonist does not want Lisa but is not particu-
larly interested in integrating them into a coherent characterisation
of Jeff, thus prompting spectators to make connections – such as
homosexuality and the fear of women, or homosociality and homo-
sexuality – which the text itself does not take very seriously. Rather,
Rear Window is more concerned with building as formidable as
possible an obstacle to the heterosexual union, and this obstacle is
completely inside Jeff’s mind.
The discourse on homosexuality as ‘hormone deficiency’, then,
is subordinated to the discourses on heterosexual desire and mar-
riage. Jeff’s temporary interest in Miss Torso in the first scene is a
consequence of his boredom after spending six weeks with nothing
to do but look out of the window (no DVDs then and Jeff does not
seem to be the book-reading type). This boredom has gradually
turned into restlessness and it is as a consequence of this that he
becomes vicariously involved in other people’s lives. But, as he says

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 116 The secret life of romantic comedy

to Gunnison, there is something worse that his frustration could

lead him to if a change does not happen soon: he might do some-
thing drastic, like getting married. Marriage, the ‘normal and
healthy’ choice for an adult man like Jeff in the 1950s, is trans-
formed into a desperate measure, a nightmare of household appli-
ances and nagging wives. The familial bliss of contemporary
suburban life bleakly evoked here has soon turned awry, opposed
as it is to the fantasy of the great outdoors, of the man in the
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Roosevelt and John Wayne tradition (Lemire 2000: 67). As he

utters his threat of getting married, and Gunnison, the institutional
voice of society, replies that it might be a good idea, Miss Torso is
instantly replaced by the Thorwalds and a story that sparks Jeff’s
imagination much more vividly. As if to confirm that in his neigh-
bourhood wives do not discuss but just nag, the first glimpse we
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get of the married couple shows the bedridden wife pretending to

feel worse than she obviously does when she hears her husband
coming home, and mercilessly shouting at him as he tidies up
around her. Jeff’s anxieties about conforming could hardly have
been expressed more plainly. Since we never see his editor and he
never appears in the narrative again, his advice to marry goes obvi-
ously unheeded and the nightmare of married life that the film has
just visualised registers much more powerfully with the spectator.
In terms of affective discourses, therefore, Rear Window initially
sets itself outside the dominant order, expressing through Jeff the
superiority of a life of bachelor adventure and excitement over sub-
urban or lower-middle-class urban family life. Thus, the film can be
seen as one more symptom of the emasculation that conformity was
threatening the U.S. male with, and one more dream of escape from
the increasing oppression of family life. Lisa will soon become, in
spite of Jeff’s efforts, a powerful antidote to this view, but even before
she appears Stella already anticipates the lasting validity of what at
first sight may be seen as a traditional discourse: the discourse of
romantic love and sexual attraction leading to marriage. Thus she
becomes the film’s first spokesperson for romantic comedy.
Stella articulates not one but two alternative discourses on sexual
desire and marriage. She starts by contradictorily accusing her
patient of an unhealthy interest in the people across the yard (par-
ticularly the young women) and doubting his virility. The not so
veiled references to homosexuality become part of her defence of
marriage when Jeff introduces the question of marriage to Lisa

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 117

Fremont in the dialogue referred to above. As has been suggested,

Stella’s words are not so much an attack on Jeff’s sexual ambiguity
as part of a normative defence of marriage as the guarantee of
sexual health besides emotional and personal happiness. At the
same time, virility on the man’s part and, more generally, the
acknowledgement of the power of sexual desire are important
ingredients of the type of marriage that she defends. Jeff does not
want to get married but for Stella this is not only evidence of the
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danger of perverse sexuality but also of a ‘modern’ approach to

marriage that she – and the film – profoundly dislikes.
From the way in which it is constructed through Stella’s words,
fashionable 1950s marriage reads as an early articulation of the
discourse of intimacy that, according to David Shumway, emerged
in the last third of the twentieth century and came to partially
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replace romantic love (2003: 3). While the love proposed by Stella
is based on sexual infatuation – people coming together like two
taxis on Broadway – and marriage and a happy life together should
be a consequence of this initial moment of passion, Jeff argues that
there is an intelligent way to approach marriage, that we have
progressed emotionally and that people have different emotional
levels. This summarises the discourse of intimacy as opposed to that
of romantic love. Whereas, as Shumway argues, romantic love was
only interested in the build-up to marriage but never in the reality
of a life together after the wedding, producing as a consequence
frustration and successive marriage crises, the discourse of intimacy
provides a model for the continuing expression of emotion through-
out the duration of a relationship. Passion is replaced by emotional
closeness, deep communication, friendship and sharing, all feelings
that outlive and replace the thrill of new love (27). This is the dis-
course that has coexisted with romantic love for decades but has
steadily gained ground and credibility.
It is odd that the representative of this new discourse in Rear
Window is a character who is not interested in women or marriage
at all and relishes instead a life of independence and permanent
travel, with no more than casual relationships. We may speculate
that this unlikely association is made because the concept of inti-
macy was an emergent discourse, familiar enough to 1950s specta-
tors to be understood, but not one that had reached wide levels of
acceptance and clearly not the film’s choice. A lasting relationship
sanctified by marriage and based on the violent passion of romantic

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 118 The secret life of romantic comedy

love is what Stella, the dominant voice of wisdom at this point, is

proposing in her discussion with her patient. The central paradox
of the discourse of romantic love – how can a relationship based
on a moment of passion last a lifetime – is not even hidden in
Stella’s words: she and her husband were ‘a couple of maladjusted
misfits’ when they met and still remain the same but their relation-
ship has been successful. While the contradiction is so glaring that
the spectator can hardly fail to record it, the alternative discourse
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of emotional levels of engagement, profound knowledge of each

other and pre-marital communication, uttered as it is by such an
unlikely spokesperson, does not stand much of a chance of succeed-
ing. Rather, the discourse of intimacy seems to be no more than a
weapon in the hands of the nurse to castigate Jeff’s reluctance to
marry.
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The scenario is, therefore, set for the ideological struggle to take
place through the narrative confrontation of wills that is about to
start. Inside the room, as in the social space of so many romantic
comedies, male independence and romantic love have staked out
their positions. Significantly, Stella’s first visit is bracketed by two
corresponding views of marriage in Jeff’s look at the apartments
opposite: the Thorwalds’ married life, dominated by disappoint-
ment, constant arguments, deception, infidelity and, as we will find
out later on, violence, just before Stella comes in, and the newly-
weds, who make their first entrance as the nurse is leaving, showing
the excitement of first love. Since, as has been mentioned before,
the protagonist’s interpreting activities can be seen as projections
of his own psychological life, it may be surmised that, at this point,
Stella’s rhetoric has made some progress and the excitement of
marriage is at least contemplated as a possibility by the reluctant
hero. This is only temporary and at the film’s conclusion this new
couple has already started to resemble the Thorwalds (like, perhaps,
Jeff and Lisa). In any case, the two terms of the debate have been
powerfully stated inside the social space of the room.

It started with a kiss

Stella’s comic defence of a romantic love based on desire and sexual
passion has brought the film closer to the conventions of romantic
comedy and now the stage is set for the introduction of a comic
space that will allow the characters to play out its scenarios of
desire. As has been suggested, the generic configuration of Rear

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 119

Window does not allow completely free rein to the comic space,
compromised as it is by the projection of sexual and social anxieties
through its suspense thriller dimension (Suárez 1996: 366), and by
Jeff’s (and the spectator’s) insistence on looking the other way. Yet
the first fade out, which follows Stella’s departure after the newly-
weds’ first kiss, openly transports the spectator and the narrative
to a different level of reality, if only temporarily. The subsequent
fade in signals a temporal ellipsis – it is now evening – and the mise
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en scène has been noticeably transformed: the new long shot of the
courtyard is now suffused in an artificial orange light, which beyond
denoting the sunset turns the screen into a veritable mise en scène
of desire (Cowie, 1984). The spectator may vaguely relate this
change on the screen to the blind being pulled down in the newly-
weds’ apartment a few seconds before and mentally construct a
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space of sexual fantasy, or, more plausibly, to the charged atmo-

sphere of other Hitchcockian murder stories, filmed in similar arti-
ficially manipulated sound stages, like Rope (1948).
The impossibly orange sky, as the camera pans around the now
quiet courtyard, is accompanied by an unidentified female voice
rehearsing a song. The fact that the whole of the film’s soundtrack
is composed of diegetic sound and that, as a general rule, the spec-
tator is always aware of the source of a melody or a sound effect,
makes this snatch of musical rehearsal more remarkable, especially
if we consider that, as in the first shot, the camera pan ends on a
medium close-up of a now sleeping Jeff. The impression is, once
again, that he may be dreaming this world of intense orange light
and beautiful female voices, a radically different fantasy from the
one he will soon start constructing around the window of the
Thorwalds’ apartment. Given what has just happened in the previ-
ous scene, this fantasy seems to have been conjured up by Stella’s
paean to romantic love and passion or even by what he may
imagine is going on beyond the newlyweds’ window. In a different
sense, the way in which Lisa is introduced at this point may, in
retrospect, be read as a Hitchcockian false clue, a threat of a crime
about to be performed which does not materialise but anticipates
the murder that will actually take place later on. This dimension of
the scene as leading nowhere for the Hitckcock fan, avidly looking
for a murder story, may partly explain why critics have insisted on
ignoring the inside of the apartment as a secondary, unimportant
appendage to ‘what really matters’ in a Hitchcock film. On the

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 120 The secret life of romantic comedy

other hand, given Jeff’s opinion of marriage and his unusual aggres-
siveness towards Lisa, the manner of her appearance here may
indeed be announcing a different type of crime against Jeff, maybe
one of even more serious consequences than the murder he will
later investigate.
Let’s look at the visual articulation of what is probably one of
the most spectacular character entrances in the history of cinema.
The medium close-up of Jeff, now asleep and therefore unaware
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of the activity outside, suddenly incorporates a cast shadow over

his face, anticipating danger. As Fawell suggests, the film’s romance
story is introduced as a threat, a dark shadow in the protagonist’s
life (2001: 63). That this shadow does not correspond to a femme
fatale out of a contemporary film noir is immediately revealed by
the reverse close-up of Lisa’s face approaching Jeff. A new cut to
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him, now in close-up with his face completely covered by her

shadow, confirms the absence of immediate danger and anticipates
the next shot of Lisa, moving in slow motion to extreme close-up
distance, practically kissing the camera (and metaphorically the
spectator). A change of angle still in extreme close-up shows the
kiss in profile as the slow motion is replaced by a different manipu-
lation of speed in post-production, the step-print, a method which
suggests motion by means of a succession of stationary stills (Fawell
2001: 153), producing an effect of great intensity in the rendering
of the kiss. Hitchcock here uses cinematic technique in a radical
way to involve the spectator in the kiss in such a way that, by the
time the characters’ lips touch, we cannot help feeling part of the
scenario thus created. The static shots and Jeff’s stasis are counter-
pointed by the overwhelming sensation of movement as Lisa closes
in on him. There is no way in which the male protagonist, and
through him the spectator, can escape from Lisa’s ‘assault’ in what
feels like an extreme manoeuvre to conquer an unattainable for-
tress, openly reversing the pattern of male–female relationships in
a patriarchal society where the man is usually the conqueror and
the woman the fortress. Simultaneously the voice of the singer and
all other background noise has suddenly disappeared and been
replaced by a pregnant silence which confirms that the film’s space
has been transformed into a magic space, one clearly differentiated
from the social space articulated before.
This is one of several intensely filmed kisses in Hitchcock’s career
but what is unusual about this one with respect to comparable

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 121
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8 ‘Anything bothering you?’: Lisa starts her campaign to subdue the

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fortress of reluctant 1950s masculinity. Grace Kelly and James Stewart

in Rear Window (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, Paramount)

moments in Notorious (1946), Vertigo (1958), Marnie (1964) or

even To Catch a Thief is that it does not come as the culmination
of a process of romantic attraction between a man and a woman,
representing the moment of final liberation of inhibitions, but is,
rather, only the introduction to their relationship. Given the posi-
tion that it occupies in the narrative, this spectacularly visualised
kiss can be interpreted as the index of Lisa’s sexualised approach
to romantic affairs. Made in the year after the publication of
Kinsey’s report on the sexual habits of U.S. women and the launch-
ing of Playboy magazine, Rear Window constructs a heroine who
may still want to get married as her ultimate goal in life but who,
at the same time, is not only active in a social sense, probably a
former model turned business woman (see Lemire 2000: 69–70;
Street 2000: 102–3), but also in a sexual sense, taking the initiative
at every moment, as her subsequent behaviour in the film repeatedly
proves. As 1950s films as varied as Love in the Afternoon, An Affair
to Remember (1957), The Girl Can’t Help It, Indiscreet, Pillow
Talk or even The Seven-Year Itch show, sexuality had come to the
forefront in the representation of love in the comedy of the decade,
but the woman’s attitude, whether resistant or willing, was gener-
ally one of waiting for the man to make his move. The kiss in Rear
Window may be far from transgressive sex by early twenty-first-
century standards but it still suggests a relatively unusual female

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 122 The secret life of romantic comedy

behaviour and one which the film consistently endorses. Stella had
already introduced the erotic power of romantic love through her
image of the crashing Broadway taxis and Lisa’s kiss now confirms
that what the comic space so forcefully introduced by her at this
point is going to protect is not so much the emasculating post-war
version of marriage that Jeff and the spectator have become
extremely anxious about but the openly sexualised expression of
heterosexual desire that she stands for.
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Lisa, then, has brought into the apartment the space of romantic
comedy and clarified the kind of intimate behaviour promoted by
that space, but we soon realise that in a film like Rear Window it
takes more than a sequence like the one described above to con-
solidate the presence of this genre. The second thing that impresses
the spectator after the exceptional filmic construction of the kiss is
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Jeff’s cool reaction to it and to subsequent attempts on the part of

his girlfriend. The next time we catch them in the middle of an
intimate kiss, for example, he manages to divert her attention to
the Thorwalds’ apartment, making her worry about his sexual
orientation. Here the verbal exchange which follows her self-
introduction while she turns on various lamps and parades her
expensive designer’s dress could still be recuperated as the erotically-
charged sparring that Greenblatt places at the origin of romantic
comedy’s representation of sexual desire. Yet, as the scene develops,
we soon realise that the viciousness of assertions like Jeff’s associa-
tion of Miss Torso (or what he thinks of her) with Lisa cannot be
easily assimilated and interpreted as an expression of his desire for
Lisa but rather of his repulsion towards her femininity and, specifi-
cally, her sexuality. In the following scenes, the force of Kelly’s
performance and the filmic construction of Lisa as a strong-willed
and sexually active woman who knows what she wants, together
with her adaptability to changing scenarios in order to achieve her
objective, will be counteracted by Jeff’s unusually violent resistance
and his insistence on constructing women and sex as dangerous and
undesirable. This struggle will be narratively carried out through
the generic confrontation between romantic comedy and the gothic
suspense thriller, with its attending sexual anxieties, a confronta-
tion between two spaces that stage opposed 1950s discourses on
masculinity, femininity and sexual desire.
The encounter between the two generic configurations starts
from this very moment. The stylised evening atmosphere that pre-

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 123

cedes the kiss can, as we have seen, signify the articulation of the
space of comedy in which a compatibility of desires can be repre-
sented in a magically transformed social space, or the gothic space
of the thriller in which murderous drives often signify sexual obses-
sion and repression. The kiss itself is ambiguous enough: first, we
see a frightening shadow, full of threat and foreboding, and the
next second, Lisa’s desiring face fills the screen. Desire and anxiety,
romantic comedy and the thriller, have staked out their positions
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and their claims for the spectator’s attention. In the rest of this
scene, Jeff keeps letting his gaze wander across the window and
nastily resisting Lisa’s repeated attempts to make him look at her
instead. Their subsequent dialogue turns from the lively screwball-
like banter signifying sexual friction to the more serious argument
about the impossibility of living together. By the end of this exchange
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Lisa leaves the apartment, apparently in despair, yet her promise/

threat not to return for a long time, at least not until tomorrow
evening, suggests that the battle is far from over.
Romantic comedy conveys an optimistic attitude to the feasibility
of affective and sexual relationships, which in this case are domi-
nated by the image of the socially and sexually active post-war U.S.
American woman. The thriller suggests a heterosexual scenario
dominated by male–female incompatibility, lack of communication
and violence, whether traceable to repressed homoerotic desire or
to other causes, and is here represented by the aggressive and reluc-
tant Jeff. Romantic comedy, on the other hand, has, throughout its
history, explored various ways of reconciling gender difference with
desire. From the point of view of this genre, Rear Window incor-
porates emergent 1950s discourses on male and female sexuality
and takes advantage of their increasing visibility in U.S. society
(Ehrenreich, 1983; Dyer, 1986: 24–34) in order to put forward a
view of romantic love which, while based on traditional patriarchal
views of marriage as women’s ‘natural’ goal in life, also returns to
Shakespearean definitions of love as openly ruled by sexual desire.
As a result, those who love, like Lisa, are sexually forward, and
those who are reluctant to love, like Jeff, are afraid of sex. Thus,
the two genres can meet on a common ground: the representation
of sexuality and, more specifically in this case, male anxieties about
female sexuality. The thriller tends to pathologise those anxieties
whereas romantic comedy seeks to overcome them through the
power of desire.

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 124 The secret life of romantic comedy

It can, therefore, be concluded that the film activates the space

of romantic comedy in order to celebrate the type of femininity
represented by Lisa. She embodies both a resistance to dominant
discourses which construct the ideal woman as middle-class subur-
ban housewife and contemporary debates about women’s strong
sexual appetites. Faced with this far from submissive woman, Jeff
displaces his unbearable anxieties about his own masculinity onto
the investigation of a murder story which not only constructs mar-
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riage as riddled with guilt, deceit and murder but also allows him
to keep the formidable Lisa at a distance, first replacing her pas-
sionate kisses with speculations about the Thorwalds, and then lit-
erally sending her away to become part of his murder story, thus
plunging the spectator in the generic world of the Hitchcockian
thriller. Romantic comedy strives to bring the protagonists together,
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and the thriller, siding with Jeff, pushes them apart because, in this
generic configuration, Lisa conjures up the shadow of feminisation
and unmanning. As Lemire graphically puts it, ‘when faced with
Lisa and her desires, Jeff can’t get it up’ (2000: 75).
Once the encounter between the two genres has been brought to
the fore, issues of Jeff’s potential homosexuality recede into the
background, at least momentarily, and our attention is shifted to
specific aspects of the war of the sexes. The threat of latent homo-
sexual desire is resolved in the final confrontation between Jeff and
Thorwald, one in which, on the one hand, Jeff comes into contact
for the first and only time with the repressed object of his desire –
Thorwald manages something that Lisa has repeatedly failed to do:
move her boyfriend from the wheelchair to the bed – and, on the
other, violently rejects such a desire by defeating the murderous
villain. However, as we will see in the next section, both before and
after this climactic confrontation, the generic struggle between the
two ways of conceiving heterosexual desire is also resolved, or
rather, highlighted without achieving a clear resolution. The thriller
ending is riddled with ambiguities but so is the romantic comedy
ending which occupies the film’s epilogue.

The neverending story

The film’s climax starts with a rather confusing telephone call: Lisa
decides to sneak into Thorwald’s apartment, instructing Stella to
get Jeff to ring the apartment when they see the villain approaching.
Jeff unhooks the telephone but is asked by the nurse to give his

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 125

girlfriend one more minute to find some incriminating evidence.

Then, unexpectedly, both Jeff and Stella’s attention gets diverted to
Miss Lonely Hearts in the apartment downstairs. When Stella
realises that the lonely woman is about to commit suicide, she urges
Jeff to ring the police. At this point the composer’s finished song is
heard in the courtyard and this stops her from swallowing the pills,
in the nick of time. In the meantime, Lisa has been all but forgotten,
and when the two onlookers shift their gaze back to the flat upstairs,
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it is too late: Thorwald has already come up to the landing leaving

them no time to warn Lisa. At this point, Jeff, who had started
ringing the police for Miss Lonelyhearts, changes the content of his
call to report that another woman is being attacked.
In the course of this sequence, therefore, Jeff lifts the telephone
receiver to ask Lisa to leave the apartment immediately, which he
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does not do, fails to warn her when Lars arrives, starts calling the
police to stop another woman from committing suicide and finally
succeeds in saving Lisa by using the same telephone call, as a kind
of afterthought, once he has confirmed that the other woman is
safe. It is as if, at the moment of maximum danger for his girlfriend,
he still cannot make up his mind between the two women – the
real one and the projection – and only settles for Lisa when his help
is not needed by the other one. Or, to put it in a different way, the
protagonist can still not decide whether Lisa should be murdered
or not. His (and Stella’s) wandering eye suggests that, in spite of
her effort to ease herself into Jeff’s adventure, Lisa has not yet
managed to command his undivided attention. Rather, by having
moved over to the other side, she has become one more actor in
her boyfriend’s pleasure theatre, and, inside this scenario, the
woman downstairs, who in her solitariness had always been some-
thing of a favourite with the photographer anyway, can claim
seniority. The text has structured the events in such a way that the
spectator may not even notice the unconscious hierarchies operat-
ing in Jeff’s mind but it can be surmised that he still has not learned
to prefer the ‘real Lisa’ to his constructed fantasies, figments of his
anxious imagination. At this very late point in the narrative, he
keeps up his battle against marriage, or, as has been argued before,
heterosex.
Various commentators have noticed that when Lisa reveals Mrs.
Thorwald’s wedding ring to Jeff, now safely lodged in her own
finger, she is both signifying the success of her mission and her

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 126 The secret life of romantic comedy

‘threat’ that she still aims to marry him and, sooner or later, to
have sex with him. The suspense thriller operates here with
maximum potency not only to bring about the longed-for narrative
climax but also to reinforce the male anxieties about commitment
and about female sexuality that the genre has represented in this
film. If the physical resemblance between Mrs. Thorwald and Lisa
suggests that Lisa has already been metaphorically killed once, now
Jeff conjures up the incarnation of his unconscious desires, to, once
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again, in a feast of overdetermination, get rid of his girlfriend. The

telephone call finally prevents the second murder when Thorwald
has already started his gruesome commission, as if Jeff had finally
been shaken out of his dream. After this awakening, faced with the
possibility of losing Lisa forever, Jeff seems finally ready, as Sander
Lee suggests, to engage with the embodiment of his darkest impulses
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and, therefore, with his fear of marriage and commitment (1988:

24–5), a readiness which is dramatised through his struggle with
Thorwald. As a result of this, not only is the murder case resolved,
but Jeff finally accepts Lisa as his lover and life companion, even
if, ambivalently, this signifies a second broken leg.
Lee suggests that the conflict is not resolved but is, at the end,
at least resolvable. There may have been earlier hints of Jeff’s incipi-
ent change of mind with respect to Lisa, but, as the evidence of the
ambiguous telephone call confirms, only a few minutes before his
unconscious was still violently rejecting her and wishing her dead,
so we cannot expect the protagonist to become all of a sudden the
champion of women’s rights and the possessor of a deep knowledge
of female sexuality. In any case, his surrender to Lisa’s caresses and
ministrations, lying in her lap after the fall in the courtyard, is a
beginning, and one that should be seen as proof of the film’s hope,
however hesitant, in heterosexual compatibility. As if to confirm
this, the final scene, a sort of textual coda, returns the spectator
firmly to the space of romantic comedy.
The generalised critical and cultural contempt towards the genre
is nowhere more clearly seen than in assessments of the conven-
tional happy ending, which has come to encapsulate everything that
is wrong with romantic comedy: facile erasure of conflict, lack of
innovation and originality, patriarchal conservativeness and staunch
defence of the obsolete institution of marriage. This has led, as I
argued before for the genre as a whole, to inclusion in the genre of
only those ‘happy endings’ that can be assimilated as standard and

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 127

unproblematic and consideration of the rest as occasional subver-

sions of or deviations from the conventions. However, a closer look
at this generic convention proves that ambiguity and variety are
relatively frequent and, one would say, even part of the convention
itself (Deleyto, 1998). The ending of Rear Window is one such case,
not particularly exceptional in its ambiguity, and not very different
from, say, the endings of Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve, An
Affair to Remember, Pillow Talk or The Apartment. Uncertainties
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about the future of the relationship are there in Rear Window as

they are present, to a lesser or greater degree, in many other instances
of the happy ending: Jeff continues to be prostrate in his wheel
chair, now with not only one but two broken legs, and Lisa, at first
showing willingness to learn to be the adventurer woman he wants,
soon replaces the book she is reading, Beyond the High Himalayas,
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by the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar, thus signifying that neither

she nor Jeff will eventually change, and casting a shadow on the
possibility of their ever meeting on common ground, even reinforc-
ing their parallelism with the Thorwalds.
Yet, the two have come together, Lisa seems to have moved in,
attaining her objective, and she seems happy enough, as does Jeff,
whose contented dreams now show on the blissful expression of
his face. No doubt there will be problems ahead, but those are
not part of the film, which, unlike life but like other films, finishes
the moment the final credits start to roll. At this moment, the
two characters are powerfully protected by the magic space of
romantic comedy and the particular details of the two characters’
positions in this scenario can now be interpreted within the specific
contours of the film’s discourses on heterosexuality: Lisa’s choice
of reading matter suggests that the type of heterosexual relationship
envisaged by the film is not one in which either of the partners
needs to lose their identity and become a mirror image of the other
person, but rather can continue to be themselves within the rela-
tionship. Jeff’s two broken legs may be interpreted as a metaphor
of his necessary debasement in front of Lisa, a form of positive male
humiliation that this film shares with many other romantic com-
edies. On a more explicit sexual level, he may now have accepted
Lisa’s sexual forwardness and begun to learn to acknowledge it as
a normal, although to him perhaps novel, expression of female
sexuality. It was Jeff that most needed to change and, in this as in
other films, change involves a process of feminisation of some sort

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 128 The secret life of romantic comedy

and a reversal of gender roles. As Lemire has pointed out, Rear

Window does not endorse 1950s gender ideals but both exposes
them and offers a way out (2000: 85). Lisa’s personal masquerade
of masculinity in this scene may be disturbing, as Street concludes
(2000: 107), but, given the way in which her character has been
constructed throughout the film and given her sustained commit-
ment to the conventions of romantic comedy, her powerful feminin-
ity remains wholly within the boundaries of the genre.
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This final evocation of romantic comedy in Rear Window does

not cancel out the impact of the thriller. In fact, the ambiguities of
both endings are a consequence of the interaction between the two
genres. From a narrative viewpoint, it may be said that the romantic
comedy ending predominates since it comes last, but in terms of
generic analysis, what matters is not so much the narrative resolu-
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tion but the way in which the interface between the two genres has
constructed an early 1950s scenario of male anxieties about women
and marriage, of criminalisation of homoerotic desire and of a hope
in heterosexual compatibility based on male acceptance of female
sexuality. Romantic comedy is not here to predominate over other
genres but rather to contribute a comic perspective and a protective
atmosphere which intimate that all problems in matters sexual have
a solution and that desire, in this case heterosexual desire, will not
be interfered with.

II. The space of comedy and beyond: Crimes and Misdemeanors

Near the beginning of Allen’s film, Alfred Hitchcock is quoted in
typical postmodern fashion. A classical two-shot shows Judah
Rosenthal (Martin Landau) trying to dissuade his lover Dolores
Paley (Anjelica Huston) from disclosing the details of their affair
to his wife. After a straight cut, this is followed by a similarly
framed shot of the protagonists of Hitchcock’s screwball comedy
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), in which husband and wife (Robert
Montgomery and Carole Lombard) are having a comparable fight
which ends with the male protagonist being thrown out of his
house. On a first viewing, the Allen fan may interpret this allusion
to a classical comedy as an indication that the tone of Crimes and
Misdemeanors will soon lighten up and that it will eventually
become another comedy of contemporary love and desire portray-
ing modern women’s and especially men’s anxieties about sexuality,

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 129

commitment and moral responsibility. Fragments from Mr. & Mrs.

Smith are then interspersed with shots of Clifford Stern (Woody
Allen) and his niece Jenny (Jenny Nichols) watching the old movie
in a Manhattan cinema. The presence of Allen’s by then well-
known schlemiel character this early in the film’s diegesis seems to
confirm the first impression. So does, for those in the know, the
fact that Jenny is played by the daughter of stand-up comedian and
theatre and film director Mike Nichols, a predecessor of Allen in
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ushering in the contemporary comedy of the sexes through such

films as The Graduate (1967) and Carnal Knowledge (1971) and,
the year before Crimes, Working Girl. In retrospect, however, this
intertextual hypothesis turns out to be less than accurate and the
reference to Mr. & Mrs. Smith a little more complex.
Crimes and Misdemeanors features two stories which only come
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together in the final scene and, while the story of Judah and
Dolores is never even slightly touched by comedy, Clifford’s becomes
gradually darker, as if contaminated by its contact with the other
strain of the plot. The film brings together the murder plot of a
Hitchcockian thriller and the comedy of manners of desire and
infidelity among mature middle-class New Yorkers typical of earlier
Allen films, but there is in Crimes a gloomier strain in the repre-
sentation of desire and a more precarious presence of romantic
comedy than, for example, in Rear Window. In terms of Allen’s
career, the movie may be seen as the central piece in an unofficial
trilogy of increasingly more pessimistic multi-protagonist explora-
tions of contemporary love initiated with Hannah and her Sisters
(1986) and culminating three years later with Husbands and Wives,
before Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) changed the trend and
introduced the generally more optimistic comedies of the 1990s.
By referring to Hitchcock’s film, therefore, Allen is not anticipat-
ing a generic shift towards comedy but, rather, calling our attention
to a generic contrast and evoking the better-known and more fre-
quent allegiance of the English director to the thriller: if Mr. & Mrs.
Smith was the only ‘pure’ romantic comedy directed by ‘the master
of suspense’, the dramatic plot of Crimes is Allen’s attempt to make
a thriller à la Hitchcock. This experiment with a new genre, however,
is not arbitrary. Allen uses the thriller in so far as it can affect the
evolution of his brand of romantic comedy. If, in the late 1970s
and early 1990s, the New York director had played a crucial part
in the introduction and consolidation of the nervous romance

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 130 The secret life of romantic comedy

(Krutnik, 1990), and thus contributed important texts to the history

of the genre such as Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979) or A
Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), ten years later we find
him exploring the limits of the genre. The reference to Mr. & Mrs.
Smith suggests that the film we are about to see will exist in the
same generic framework as Hitchcock’s but will be crucially influ-
enced by its encounter with the Hitchcockian thriller in a way that
the master’s own comedy was not.
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The general tone of Crimes and Misdemeanors is pessimistic. The

love triangle is doubled and Judah and Dolores’s story of murder
and despair becomes an inverted mirror of the relationship between
Cliff and Halley (Mia Farrow) in the ‘comic’ plot. Love and desire,
Allen’s and romantic comedy’s favourite subjects, are never given
free rein in a comic space but are, instead, defined by boredom,
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selfishness and infidelity. The alternatives to coupledom are equally

hopeless, as proved by the sexual experiences of Cliff’s widowed
sister, Barbara (Caroline Aaron) and by the predicament of the
unhappy, neurotic Dolores. Gender relationships in this film move
between the extremes of superficiality and betrayal. The few jokes
afforded by the text are more anxious and morbid than usual.
Professor Louis Levy (Martin Bergmann), who brings some hope
to the film through his neo-Sartrean philosophy based on the impor-
tance of love for the human being, ends up committing suicide
without any explanation many years after having survived Nazi
concentration camps. The most generous character in the film,
Rabbi Ben (Sam Waterston), is ‘rewarded’ with the loss of his sight
even as his daughter is getting married. And yet all the ingredients
of romantic comedy, as they had appeared in previous Allen movies,
are still in place: the contemporary chronicle of sexual mores and
protocols, the Allenian brand of humour and even the transforma-
tive space of comedy, present here through Ben’s humanity, Profes-
sor Levy’s optimistic philosophy of life, and Lester’s (Alan Alda)
theories of comedy, as well as in the setting of the final scene.
The generic uncertainty found in Crimes is a consequence not
only of the special juxtaposition it proposes of thriller and comedy
but, more specifically, of the permeability of the latter with respect
to the former, the elasticity it shows in allowing itself to be trans-
formed by the thriller. While previous critical work on the film has
almost exclusively concentrated on its ‘serious’ dimension and on
the philosophical underpinnings of the thriller plot, this analysis

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 131

will try to show, from the perspective of romantic comedy, that its
devastating representation of love and sexuality is the result of the
unworkable fit between the social and the comic space. Conse-
quently, the film cannot be properly understood without due atten-
tion to its use of romantic comedy from the margins of the genre.
The genre’s transformative space is constantly visible in multiple
forms but never manages to affect the social space, dominated here
by decadence, coldness and cynicism and therefore closer to the
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space of melodrama and existential tragedy. Existing in the inter-

stices between two spaces which never come together, humour
often becomes heartbreaking and tendentious in the Freudian sense.
It is only what could be described as a narrative afterthought that
finally saves the film from total darkness and despair. Yet this final
coda becomes, almost from outside the story, a fitting culmination
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of the film’s ideology and, along with the rest of the dénouement,
one of the most brilliant moments in the whole of Allen’s filmic
career.

Love, faith and the comic space

Crimes ends with a wedding celebration, but the fact that the spec-
tator knows neither the bride nor the bridegroom suggests that
there may be a romantic comedy here but it is somebody else’s, not
ours. As the genre dictates, there is a final reunion of sorts, with
most of the characters of this multi-protagonist movie attending the
ceremony and the two consolidated couples – Halley and Lester,
and Judah and Miriam (Claire Bloom) – also present. Lester can
finally introduce Halley as his girlfriend to his family and friends
and, at one point in the scene, we see Judah and Miriam kiss for
the first time, in a long shot which underlines the social dimension
of their happiness – they are planning their daughter’s wedding –
but simultaneously separates the spectator from them emotionally.
However, neither the formation of the new couple nor the confir-
mation of the old one, after a crisis of which the wife has not even
been aware, constitute the story’s true resolution, which consists,
rather, of a double event: Cliff’s shock at Halley’s choice of Lester
over himself and Judah’s veiled confession of his crime and revela-
tion that he feels no remorse. Both events, signifying disappoint-
ment in love and the absence of a moral structure in the universe,
are alien to the world of comedy. Yet, there are important compen-
sations, namely the presence, physical or narrative, of Rabbi Ben

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 132 The secret life of romantic comedy

and Professor Levy, whose views of the world and the human being
are spectacularly summarised in the final montage sequence and
work as a counterpoint to the chilling experiences of the two pro-
tagonists. If Cliff and Judah remain the main characters to the end,
it is the other two that articulate the space of comedy, a space both
extremely precarious and vigorous.
Ben and Levy coincide in defending the need to encourage a
moral attitude in people’s lives whether from a religious or a secular
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perspective. Professor Levy is the subject of a documentary that

Cliff is making and his philosophy is revealed to the spectator
through four fragments of this documentary. The common denomi-
nator of these four interventions is the importance of love in our
lives and its role as a substitute for the idea of God. The notion of
God as an invention of the human being places Levy within an
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existentialist philosophy in which the norms of ethical behaviour

are the sole responsibility of humans and the idea of God a distil-
lation of those norms and, therefore, of our own choice. However,
this knowledge makes for a very cold and inhospitable universe and
it is human beings that make it liveable with our feelings. From our
infancy, we need great doses of love to face God’s silence and it is
love, in spite of its contradictions, that prevents us from ending our
lives prematurely and from falling into despair. Levy’s philosophy
is very inspiring for the spectator and, especially, for Cliff, who is
therefore devastated when he learns that the philosopher has com-
mitted suicide. Yet the film reserves the professor’s most hopeful
words for the final scene. We know that after saying this he killed
himself but, from a narrative viewpoint, his suicide is not the end.
After the story proper has ended, we hear him again, in voice-over,
emphasising the importance of both the big and small decisions that
we make in our everyday lives and pointing at the lack of corre-
spondence between the morality of our actions and the reward we
get from them, a good summary of his allegiance to the doctrines
of existentialism (see Lee, 1997: 287 and passim). He then returns
to his favourite subject, love: since life is unfair for the authentic
person, unhappiness is our constant companion and we are the only
ones that can give meaning to our lives with our capacity for love.
In the face of repeated disappointments, most people keep trying
and manage to find great satisfaction in the little things, in our
families and work, and in the hope that in the future our children
will understand the universe better. Mary Nichols argues that

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 133

Professor Levy’s theories articulate a comic view of the world: Allen

has his philosopher commit suicide but keeps his most affirmative
words for the ending, with an invitation to endurance, survival and
hope (1998: 153, 163).
Rabbi Ben, for his part, makes his views manifest through the
generosity that characterises his relationships with others and the
advice that he offers Judah earlier in the narrative. For him faith
in God is reason enough to believe in the existence of fairness in
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the world. He has performed the Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’

which gives meaning to his life and makes him happy. He resembles
Judah’s father, who in an earlier flashback had admitted that he
would rather believe in God, even if he knew He did not exist – God
is more important than truth. He also evokes, outside Allen’s
oeuvre, Pascal’s concept of le pari (the bet) and, within the history
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of cinematic comedy, the religious belief of two characters in Eric

Rohmer’s Ma nuit chez Maud (1969) and Conte d’hiver (1991).
According to Loic (Hervé Furic), the catholic intellectual of Conte,
living in the hope of the existence of God is preferable to living
without it, even if we are sure that that hope will never materialise.
The benefits that faith affords us compensate for the possibility that
we may be misguided, and even if the soul turns out not to be
immortal, those who believe have a much better life than those who
do not.
In spite of the distance between the cultural and religious tradi-
tions that inspire them, Rohmer’s and Allen’s comedies share more
than one element in their analyses of interpersonal relationships in
contemporary Western societies, including similar moral structures
for their worldviews. However, the dénouements of their films are
not necessarily analogous: while the female protagonist of Conte,
who embodies Pascal’s notion in her lived experience, is finally
rewarded for her absolute faith with the return of her beloved, the
reward Crimes has in store for Ben is his final blindness, in a story
in which eyesight has great symbolic importance. His intense faith
and his goodness have not been enough to cure his illness and the
centrality of blindness as a metaphor in the movie highlights the
text’s scepticism towards the character’s devotion. And yet, Ben
keeps his faith to the end, against all odds, while Levy’s final
resounding words remain in our minds beyond the credits. The film
does not offer easy solutions but also refuses to give up hope or,
in generic terms, to deny the transformative power of comedy.

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 134 The secret life of romantic comedy

It is as if, in one of his darkest movies, Allen found it difficult

to discard his comic view altogether. Yet the comic atmosphere and
Levy’s final observations appear too late in the story and remain
curiously isolated from the characters and events, remaining inside
a fictional documentary which will perhaps never be finished. On
the other hand, this split between theory and life and the painful
inability of the comic space to affect the lives of the characters help
clarify the nature of one of the genre’s central features: the comic
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space consists of an abstract concept of love, an optimistic attitude

to life based on the wonders and mysteries of desire. Specific mani-
festations of love and desire, such as those present in Allen’s film,
have an ideology, reveal certain power relationships and reflect
hopes and anxieties belonging to a historical moment, but in roman-
tic comedy, from the sixteenth century to our times, they are simul-
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taneously used as a magic force, capable of transforming the world.

In other words, love as lived experience, with its demands, imper-
fections and contradictions, constitutes both the social space of
romantic comedy and, simultaneously, the stuff from which its
utopian comic space is made. Crimes, a film in which love and
desire only bring about frustration and despair, invites the spectator
to consider these two versions of love and the way in which they
allow romantic comedy to combine reality (real love) and fantasy
(utopian love). Allen’s text suggests that, while in most films the fit
between the two is taken for granted, it sometimes may be difficult,
even impossible, to bring them together. This insight helps to under-
stand the genre’s dynamics better. In other instances of romantic
comedy, the comic space enables the characters to readjust their
attitude towards love and desire in various ways, while the lifting
of their sexual inhibitions often helps them change their identity,
mature psychologically and/or approach social problems in a more
positive way, but in this film there seems to be no hope of trans-
formation, even if the comic space appears to be in place. Following
Babington and Evans’s description of Carnal Knowledge, we could
define this as a dystopian comedy, that is, a comic text in which
relations between the sexes have become impossible (1989: 277).

Inside the Statue of Liberty or love in the time of cholera

Jenny and Cliff come out of the cinema where they have been
watching Mr. & Mrs. Smith. It is cold and rainy outside and they
are looking for a taxi, always a difficult endeavour in Manhattan.

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 135

Allen allows the spectator one of the film’s few jokes, when his
character says: ‘I think I can see a cab. If we run quickly we can
kick the crutch from that old lady and get it.’ Aggressiveness
towards women characterises much of the humour in the film. This
aggressiveness is often directed at Cliff’s wife, Wendy (Joanna
Gleason), who, for example, is at one point compared with Hitler.
While the old lady of the joke obviously has little to do with the
problems of the married couple or with the bleak view of marriage
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offered by the narrative, the film’s rhetoric reveals its ‘true colours’
when an ellipsis immediately after the joke transports the spectator
to Cliff and Wendy’s apartment, where he is just arriving after
dropping Jenny at her house.
That the old lady joke unconsciously vents the protagonist’s
frustration at his married life is not only suggested by editing – the
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straight cut that signifies a temporal ellipsis – but also confirmed

by the mise en scène and framing of this and the other scenes in
which we see the two together. Most of the time we see them
arguing in the suffocating space of their flat, their intimate life
apparently made up of accusations, reproaches and disagreements
which are barely concealed by the veneer of civility that they show
on social occasions. Visually these scenes resemble both some of
the marriage scenes of Hannah and her Sisters and similar situations
in Husbands and Wives. Doors, walls and corridors turn the home
into a labyrinth full of obstacles in which communication is impos-
sible. In their first scene together, Cliff and Wendy hardly ever share
the frame and when they do they constantly argue, without even
looking at each other, standing on the edges of the frame with a
big gap between them. If they fleetingly look in the other’s direction,
their eyes are full of anger and resentment and the overall impres-
sion is that, rather than live together, they are permanently in each
other’s way. This is the representation of a rapidly dissolving
relationship but, in terms of sexual politics, it is not neutral. The
spectator is never afforded the possibility of sharing Wendy’s per-
spective while Gleason’s performance constructs one of the most
negative, unsympathetic female characters in Allen’s oeuvre. By the
final scene, the two have decided to split up and Wendy tells her
beloved brother Lester that she has met someone else. Again,
although it had been made sufficiently clear that the relationship
had no future, the text continues to hold on to the view that it is
all her fault, even indirectly accusing her of infidelity, although we

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 136 The secret life of romantic comedy
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9 The mise en scène of the end of love: Women take the blame.
Woody Allen and Joanna Gleason in Crimes and Misdemeanors
(dir. Woody Allen, 1989, Orion)
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know that it is Cliff who has been trying to be unfaithful for much
of the film. The general impression that we may draw about con-
temporary relationships is that marriage as an institution does not
work any more and that women are to blame.
Before Wendy tells her brother about the break-up, Cliff has
already told his sister Barbara. Their short dialogue includes the
film’s last joke. When Barbara says that a relationship in which sex
does not work has no future, her brother agrees and adds: ‘The last
time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty.’
This line summarises the textual attitude towards women and is an
almost literal illustration of Freud’s theory of humour and the
comic. Freud argues that the most effective jokes are those he calls
tendentious, which make possible the satisfaction of an impulse by
overcoming an obstacle. The obstacle is always the same: woman’s
incapacity to tolerate uninhibited sexuality due to her social repres-
sion. Tendentious jokes allow us to recover what used to be ours
and we have had to repress. The Viennese thinker reveals his tra-
ditional view of women’s inferiority and weakness, as well as his
sexist attitude towards male and female sexual desire, in his use of
the term ‘incapacity’ to define women’s attitude to sex. As he
elaborates in other writings, for Freud women’s resistance to sex is
not only part of their sexual development but also crucial to rein
in men’s drives. The pleasure afforded by the tendentious joke
consists precisely in demolishing the female obstacle and includes

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 137

an important element of hostility towards women for not allowing

the consummation of men’s desire (Freud, 1983: 144–5).
Although Freud’s theory originates in a cultural context in which
women’s sexual desire was almost unthinkable and certainly rep-
rehensible, Allen’s joke, uttered in a very different historical context,
accurately reflects all the elements of the theory: man’s impotence
in the face of repression of his sexual drive, the conversion of
impotence into pleasure through laughter, and explicit hostility
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towards women. For Freud pleasure in the joke consists of two

stages: the fore pleasure, resulting from the joke’s linguistic strate-
gies to achieve the comic effect, and the real pleasure, consisting in
overcoming the female barriers to sex. In this case, Cliff is ostensi-
bly conveying his view of his relationship with Wendy: she, with
her disdain towards masculinity and her refusal to have sex, is to
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blame for their estrangement. The woman says no, the man represses
himself and then vents his frustration through humour. Cliff
becomes, therefore, a Freudian man – the uncomprehending victim
of women’s forever resistant sexuality.
But the joke does not only express the protagonist’s hostility
towards his wife. Just as the reference to the old lady’s crutch was
immediately followed by a scene between Cliff and Wendy, the
Statue of Liberty line anticipates the arrival of Lester and Halley at
the party and Cliff’s shocked realisation that the two are together.
Narrative sequentiality facilitates the interpretation of the joke as
an unconscious displacement of the character’s hostility not towards
his wife but towards Halley, for rejecting his desire for her and,
especially, for choosing Lester, the embodiment of the values he
most detests in life. Thus, Lester’s superficiality, dishonesty and
materialism are tendentiously displaced onto the female character,
a displacement which had subtly started earlier on, when Halley
had revealed an excess of interest in her job and a readiness to
sacrifice everything to professional success. It is within this context
that her final preference for Lester over Cliff must be understood
and it is also within this context that the movie’s last joke makes
complete sense.
It is, therefore, not the wife but the professional and desiring
woman that becomes the ultimate embodiment of the film’s grim
view of heterosexual relationships. The Freudian interpretation sug-
gests not only, as William Pamerleau argues, that the text’s funda-
mental tension is that between love and economic and social success

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 138 The secret life of romantic comedy

(2000: 107), but, more insidiously, that the real problem, as con-
structed by the text, is that a woman should choose the latter over
the former. This dimension of its ideological structure places Crimes
within the neo-conservative discourses of the 1980s, which openly
blamed feminism, women’s demands of equality and their massive
presence in public life for the growing unhappiness in their private
lives. As Susan Faludi has explained, however, it was not women’s
unhappiness that was really at stake but the consequences for men
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of the profound social changes that were taking place (1992: 9). In
this film, patriarchy’s undeclared fears once more come to the
surface: while Halley appears to be reasonably happy at the end of
the film, Cliff ends up disappointed in love and his private life is
deeply affected by women’s decisions. Halley’s choice is presented
as the wrong choice and even as a form of betrayal, although she
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had never made any promises to him and, therefore, she has not
betrayed anybody. We can only understand this once we manage
to distance ourselves from the text’s rendering of the story: as with
Wendy, the only access we ever have to Halley’s subjectivity is
through Cliff’s perspective and idealised construction of her. This
construction becomes so powerful that critics have concluded that
her betrayal surpasses all previous betrayals in Allen’s films (see,
for example, Lee, 1997: 284). In terms of the representation of
heterosexual desire, Cliff’s interest in Halley is initially presented
as a counterpoint to his marriage and as a consequence of its crisis,
but the text finally reveals what could perhaps be described as its
hidden ideology: that Wendy is just an exaggerated version of
Halley in her desire of material wealth, in her disregard for her
husband’s job and affective and sexual needs and, as it turns out,
even in her reverential admiration of her brother Lester.
In general terms, therefore, the film’s humour has no contribu-
tion to make to the implementation of the comic space. Rather, it
highlights its impossibility and becomes closer, in generic terms, to
the type of humour that can be found in satire. As in that genre,
its main objective is not to create a festive atmosphere that will
facilitate the temporary abandonment of social norms and repres-
sions but to attack society. On the other hand, while satiric humour
is often conscious and direct, Crimes is a lot more reluctant to admit
the nature of its critique. It expresses pessimism at the social evolu-
tion of intimate matters in U.S. society in the 1980s and blames it
on the relative gains of feminism.

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 139

Splitting genres
The film’s double plot, dual structure and double generic allegiance
is replicated by the final scene’s two clearly differentiated spaces,
both in terms of physical location and cinematic rhetoric. On the
one hand, there is the main hall of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in
which the wedding celebration is taking place and, on the other,
the adjacent room to which Cliff withdraws after the ceremony in
order to nurse his distress at the unexpected ending of his desire
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for Halley. In the first of these two spaces, to which most of the
scene is devoted, life goes on: Barbara is still looking for a partner,
Judah and Miriam return to their previous comfortable life together
after their muted crisis, Lester celebrates his conquest of Halley
with his usual sense of humour, Wendy begins to savour her recently
gained freedom, and unknown guests praise Lester, the successful
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film director, for his generosity in financing his niece’s expensive

wedding. Meanwhile, illustrating Lester’s theory of comedy –
comedy is tragedy plus time –, time has stopped in the second space.
Here the end of the relationship between Cliff and Halley is staged
as she gives him back his only love letter and asks for his under-
standing, which he refuses on moral grounds. Then we witness
Judah’s confession of sorts, which is presented as his last nod at
the ethical universe which he has definitively abandoned.
The end of the love affair even before it had started and the
revelation of a morally empty universe place the characters outside
comic time: without love and without the hope that life may make
some sense, there is no future for humankind. The framing used to
visualise both spaces is also significant: while the action in the main
room is presented by means of a relatively high number of brief
shots, including a very unusual series of shots/reverse shots at this
stage of Allen’s career, for the second space the director resorts to
his favourite no-cuts rhetoric in which the uninterrupted intensity
of the spectator’s look at the characters corresponds to the impor-
tance of the narrative event. Judah’s narration constitutes the cul-
mination of this stylistic option. Allen presents this protracted
moment through just two long takes, totalling more than four
minutes between them, only briefly broken by one cut to the main
room. During the confession, the camera closes in on the character’s
face very slowly until he is framed in an asphyxiating close-up
which offers a brilliant visual counterpoint to the overcoming of
the moral crisis that he narrates. This stylistic option suggests that

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 140 The secret life of romantic comedy

his liberation from guilt has brought about a more horrible type of
imprisonment.
The formal and dramatic contrast between the two spaces under-
lines the predicaments of two characters whose narrative experi-
ences have literally set them apart from the social space of comedy
and have therefore prevented their eventual transformation. Life
goes on and the power of comedy remains visible in the next room
but the two protagonists do not belong to that space anymore. This
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split is emphasised by a contradiction in Judah’s speech: the char-

acter starts by conveying his own experience in the third person, as
if it were the plot of a film, but when at the end Cliff confronts him
with his moral objections to this plot, Judah replies that he is not
talking about cinema but about reality: ‘If you want a happy
ending, you should go and see a Hollywood movie.’ The spectator,
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of course, knows that this is a Hollywood movie and that the happy
ending is actually taking place next door. The space occupied by
these two characters, therefore, is the space of a world that is
impervious to the regenerative mechanisms of comedy.
What is Cliff thinking about at the end of the film? How can we
interpret the sadness and resignation of his countenance? It could
be argued that he is meditating on the difference between cinema
and reality mentioned by Judah before leaving. The world in which
he has tried to live his romance with Halley is a film world, not
only because of its utopian view of relationships but also because
of its moral structure, which is lacking in a contingent and unpre-
dictable reality. In the real world, crimes are not punished, love is
hardly ever reciprocated and social appearance and dishonesty
generally triumph over the goals of the Sartrean authentic person.
Judah has speeded up Cliff’s fall from his cinematic cloud and has
metaphorically closed one more door to comedy. Yet, a wedding
between two people, the traditional symbol of the ritual of renewal
proposed by comedy, has just taken place, while a bustling group
of guests provide the traditional comic environment, sanctioning
once again the communal dimension of marriage and the triumph
of love and youth over death. Two fleeting shots of some children
among the guests at the wedding anticipate the hope in the future
that Levy will soon spell out in his final words. The benevolent
space of comedy, inaccessible as it has proved to be for the pro-
tagonists, seems to have finally found its place in the social space.
The division of the setting in two locales reinforces the impression

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 141

that we are being told a tragic story while a romantic comedy is

taking place next door, a romantic comedy that we are only allowed
to glimpse in the final moments. One could even speculate that in
a different film, told from a different perspective, Lester and Halley,
Wendy and her new friend or even Barbara, if she ever meets some-
body she likes, might become protected by the comic space, but
that would be another story, one in which romantic comedy would
not have to fight the losing battle it has fought here.
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The wedding and Cliff’s conversation with Judah are the last
events narrated by the film but not the text’s final word. Once the
separation between social and comic space has been confirmed, the
movie closes with the last fragment of the documentary on Profes-
sor Levy, who for the first time is heard in voice over while a
montage sequence of ten shots takes us back to the highlights of
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the story, bracketed by shots of Ben dancing with his newly married
daughter. Sam Girgus argues that the flashback is a crucial element
to express interiority in this film. The combination of a close-up of
a character and a flashback that indicates a memory articulates an
interior space which visualises one of the most important themes
of the movie: the presence of the past in our lives (2002: 118–19).
However, this time the successive flashbacks represented by each
of the ten shots are not narratively motivated by a character’s
memory but are totally external and only justified by Levy’s words.
It should also be said that this is the only occasion when the phi-
losopher’s dissertation is not accompanied by footage from Cliff’s
documentary, i.e. him talking to camera. These characteristics set
the scene apart from the rest of the film, a scene in which only the
first and last shots (both of the wedding ball) are anchored in the
narrative present. It is, therefore, not a character but the text itself
that merges the philosopher’s conclusion about life and love with
a selection of images of earlier moments in the story in order to
offer its own conclusion. It is now that reality definitively becomes
film and the social space becomes comedy.
The sequence starts with images that illustrate the fundamentals
of Sartrean philosophy: when Levy talks about the important deci-
sions that human beings have to make from time to time we see
Judah and Dolores arguing, in anticipation of his crime, and when
he mentions the small decisions, we see Cliff kissing Halley. As we
hear him say that we define ourselves by the decisions we make,
we are given a shot of Judah ‘commissioning’ Dolores’s murder

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 142 The secret life of romantic comedy

over the phone, and when Levy affirms that our identity is the total
sum of our choices, we go back to shots of Mussolini and Lester
edited together in Cliff’s mock documentary. The sequence contin-
ues along this line until a tracking shot shows Dolores walking back
to her apartment before dying, while the philosopher argues that
human happiness does not seem to have been included in the struc-
ture of creation. This is a visual summary of the calamities and
misfortunes of life which have been the subject of the narrative,
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but, unlike the film’s story, Levy’s final words now go on to cele-
brate the pleasures that can be found in the little things, in human
tenacity in the face of an indifferent universe, and in the hope that
our children will one day discover the mysteries of existence. These
optimistic words are accompanied by the last three shots: when
Levy reiterates humans’ capacity to love, we see a shot of the
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wedding service; when he explains that, in spite of the obstacles,

human beings keep on trying, the film goes back to a shot of Cliff
and Jenny walking in the street after going to the cinema; and when
he mentions the small pleasures and the hope in the future, we are
shown one more shot of Ben dancing in the dark with his daughter
until the dance ends with the applause of the guests, followed by a
fade out to black and the final credits.
This is an exceptionally moving scene as the spectator, even after
repeated viewings, gets caught once and again in the resigned opti-
mism conveyed by the combination of Levy’s words and the image
of the happy blind father being tenderly led over the dance floor
by his daughter. Their expressions reflect the powerful love they
feel for each other but, simultaneously, we cannot help feeling sad
about the blindness that has overpowered the only totally good
character in the story. His hesitant movements evoke the ending of
a contemporaneous film, Ran (1985), in which a succession of shots
of a solitary, blind young man walking uncertainly on the edge of
a cliff translate into images the end of social relations and of
the bond that joins human beings to the world to be found in
Shakespeare’s King Lear, the play adapted in Kurosawa’s film.
Similarly, Ben’s total loss of vision metaphorically suggests the end
of the moral universe represented by this character. At the same
time, however, Levy’s words in the soundtrack offer a comic coun-
terpoint to Shakespearean despair. Within the story of Crimes it
may prove difficult for the spectator to feel close to Ben’s daughter,
since we have not been given the chance to identify with her, but

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 143

the one character who has so far represented the future generation
is Jenny, the protagonist of the last but one shot.

The fisher king and the future generations

In a recent analysis of Allen’s Manhattan, Lee Fallon argues that
the film’s central theme is not the dubious morality of the relation-
ship between the older man and the younger woman, but the spiri-
tual rejuvenation of the city of New York through the character
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that best embodies it. As in the legend of the fisher king, Manhattan
and Husbands and Wives deal with the spiritual decline of the king
of the city, whose only hope lies in the spiritual renewal he pursues
through repeated and often failed sexual encounters. Fallon asks
the spectator to abandon the dictates of bourgeois morality and to
interpret the films not on a realist level but as symbolic quests for
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spiritual redemption. Manhattan is, for him, a fable about a mature

man who identifies himself with a vibrant but corrupt city and who
considers that his only hope of rejuvenation is a young woman, free
of pretence and neurosis, who will, if he lets her, return his faith
in humanity (2001: 54). In Crimes, Cliff is also the fallen king,
grieving over a society he does not understand any more. Unlike in
earlier films, sexual relationships are now too much part of the
social crisis and cannot help to overcome it. In this social world,
Barbara’s sexual experience and the Statue of Liberty joke represent
the limits of a sexuality which is part of the problem rather than,
as usually in romantic comedy, its solution. Cliff has looked for
spiritual renewal in sexual desire but has resoundingly failed. The
way out must come from a different quarter.
The protagonist’s failed relationship with Halley is the clearest
symbol of the negative perspective offered by the film on the position
of sexual desire in the 1980s, and of the dead end into which recent
social changes in this field had led men and women. As we have
seen, this discourse coincided with contemporary neo-conservative
responses to those social changes, but, as Seidman argues, the cul-
tural consensus on the dangers of a liberated sexuality was much
broader in the United States and also included liberal discourses,
tempered and transformed by the devastating consequences of Aids
(1992: 61–76). In generic terms, it is significant that Allen has
chosen the thriller as a generic counterpoint to comedy. In the
mid-1980s a group of films had started to appear, labelled by critics
as family thrillers or erotic thrillers, which routinely associated an

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 144 The secret life of romantic comedy

(almost always female) uncontrolled sexuality with death. Films like

Fatal Attraction (1987), The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1991),
Cape Fear (1991), Basic Instinct (1992) or Single White Female
(1992) convey as problematic a view of sexual desire as the one that
can be found in Crimes (see Williams, 2005). Romantic comedy had
continued to be popular with its more optimistic discourse about
love, but even in this genre romantic love and sexual desire would
soon begin to be displaced, during the 1990s, by other types of
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relationship. Films like White Men Can’t Jump, Clueless (1995),

Walking and Talking (1995), The Truth about Cats and Dogs
(1996), If Lucy Fell . . . (1996), My Best Friend’s Wedding or The
Object of My Affection suggest that love and sex need not control
all types of interactions between men and women and friendship is
increasingly posited as a more reasonable option (see Deleyto,
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2003). More recently, the genre has followed the lead of White Men
and My Best Friend’s Wedding in offering happy endings in which
the heterosexual couple do not end together, in comedies like In
Good Company, Prime or The Break-Up. The crisis of love and
traditional attitudes towards sexual relationships appears to have
installed itself quite comfortably in the realm of romantic comedy.
Crimes is, therefore, not an isolated case but part of a broader ten-
dency both inside and outside the genre. In this film, it is not an
abstract concept of love – the love defended by Levy as an antidote
to loneliness and despair – that is attacked but, more specifically,
romantic and sexual love. For this reason, a sexual relationship
between Allen’s protagonist and a much younger woman like the
one in Manhattan would not make any sense.
The absence of viable instances of romantic love, however, does
not preclude the presence, even the abundance, of other types of
love: Cliff’s love for his sister and Wendy’s admiration for her
brother, the intimate friendship between Ben and Judah, the close-
knit family of Judah’s childhood, the love between Ben and his
daughter, or Cliff’s affection for his niece. Filial love, parental love,
friendship and love for one’s family permeate the story from begin-
ning to end and represent feelings that are not affected by the sar-
castic humour and the moral indictment that the text has in store
for heterosexual love.
Of all these relationships, the one that is most clearly protected
by the comic space is that between Cliff and Jenny. ‘I’m crazy about
that kid’, enthuses the protagonist at the beginning of the movie.

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 145

The best moments of his everyday life are those he shares with her:
at the cinema, walking in the streets of Manhattan, buying her
presents, teaching her ‘practical’ lessons about life, explaining to
her his love for Halley. It comes as no surprise that, in order to
illustrate the human being’s perseverance in the face of adversity,
the text chooses a shot from one of the scenes featuring these two
characters. Once sexual desire has been discarded as a source of
regeneration for the fisher king, affection for Jenny appears as the
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best option for the future. The girl represents the purity of youth
and the hope of adapting better to a fast changing world, a world
Cliff cannot understand anymore. She symbolises the superiority of
future generations. Cliff may have been bitterly disappointed in his
desire for Halley and he may be demoralised after the break-up of
his marriage, but the love celebrated by Levy is still present in his
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life through his relationship with Jenny. A few years later, in a more
optimistic period of Allen’s oeuvre, Dj (Natasha Lyonne), the inter-
nal narrator of Everyone Says I Love You (1996), fulfils a similar
role and has a similar relationship with her father, Joe (Allen), and
it is the intensification of her perspective, through her narrating
voice, over those of the other characters that gives the film a more
optimistic tone, which extends to the older characters, as well. In
Crimes, on the other hand, her influence is more limited.
It may be no coincidence that Cliff’s niece has the same name as
the protagonist of Portrait of Jenny (1948), the film wildly praised
by the surrealists for its subversion of the bourgeois morality also
criticised by Fallon which narrates the fantastic story of the love
between an adult man and a little girl who grows up while he waits
for her without ageing until their love can be consummated. More
recently, Beautiful Girls (1995) also features a similar relationship,
this time between the male protagonist and a young teenage girl
played by Natalie Portman in a fascinating combination of adoles-
cent vulnerability and postmodern precocity, who also asks him to
wait until she grows up so that they can get married. The parallel-
isms with these films might tempt biographical critics to posit a
morally reprehensible subtext in Allen’s film but such an interpreta-
tion is not justified by the text and would lead nowhere. Portrait
of Jenny and Beautiful Girls are, like Manhattan, versions of the
legend of the fisher king though they reveal, to a greater or lesser
extent, a belief in the viability of romantic love. This belief is con-
spicuously absent from Crimes. Rather, the similarity lies in the

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 146 The secret life of romantic comedy
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10 Alternatives to romance: Jenny widens the space of romantic

comedy. Woody Allen and Jenny Nichols in Crimes and Misdemeanors
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(dir. Woody Allen, 1989, Orion)

mixture of purity and wisdom of the young female characters and

in their ability to represent a better future for the male protagonist.
Jenny, therefore, embodies the confluence of the superiority of
family love over sexual desire and the transformative power of
comedy.
To sum up, in Crimes all the elements of romantic comedy, as
it has been described here, are in place: a social space formed by
certain ideological discourses on love and sex, masculinity and
femininity; the presence of humour in order to offer a specific per-
spective on those discourses; and the transformative space of the
genre. Yet, the pessimism of the ideological discourses, the aggres-
siveness and precariousness of humour in the film and the distance
between the social space and the comic space separate the film
from romantic comedy. The discourses on romantic love and their
relationship with sex correspond to a feeling of disillusionment
towards social changes in this field which became typical of the
cinema and culture of the late 1980s. These discourses combine a
neo-conservative critique of the libertarian attitudes of the previous
decade with the difficulty to find workable alternatives. The film
articulates a point of view which is not only monolithically male
but openly sexist, and it consequently demonises feminism and
women’s demands of gender equality as the source of all evil. The
humour deployed by the text does not contribute to the construc-
tion of a comic space but, in a more satirical vein, criticises social

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 Romantic comedy on the dark side 147

mores and, in many cases, constitutes an almost literal illustration

of the type of male hostility towards women theorised by Freud.
The elements for the articulation of a comic space are not only
present but are even verbalised, from an existentialist perspective,
through professor Levy’s philosophy, and yet his words never
manage to make an impact on the relationships between the main
characters but remain latent, metaphorically speaking, in the next
room, until, in the final montage sequence, they end up promoting
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different types of love, especially family love between different

generations. This final message certifies the crisis of romantic love
and suggests new avenues of social regeneration. From the perspec-
tive of genre history, Crimes stands on the interface between two
of the most popular Hollywood genres of the late 1980s, the roman-
tic comedy and the family thriller, underlining the cultural and
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narrative links between the two that make their combination not
only possible but also culturally relevant. Within Allen’s career, the
film belongs to a period of existential crisis and formal experimen-
tation which extends to his constant exploration of the limits of
romantic comedy – the genre that he had crucially helped revive at
the end of the earlier decade. Thus the film may be seen as a theo-
retical lesson on the genre’s limits: the representation of love and
sex and the positing of a comic space are not enough for romantic
comedy to be active if humour does not contribute to the construc-
tion of the comic space and if the comic space remains isolated from
the social space of sexual and gender discourses. Finally, from the
perspective of the history of romantic comedy, Crimes anticipates,
in spite of the precariousness of the genre’s presence in it, ideologi-
cal positions which will become increasingly familiar in the next
two decades: the growing preference for other types of relationships
over romantic love and the ‘happiness’ of an ending in which the
traditional heterosexual partners do not end up together.

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 4

Contemporary romantic comedy

and the discourse of independence
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The history of romantic comedy in Hollywood has been seen as a

series of popular cycles followed by periods of dearth or, at least,
transitions in between peaks. While, as I have argued in this book,
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there is much more to the genre than has been included in previous
accounts, there is no denying that romantic comedy, perhaps more
than other genres, has had its ups and downs in the last century or
so. The situation, however, seems to have changed in the last three
decades. When, in the early 1990s, Neale and Krutnik identified
first the nervous romances of the late 1970s and then the new
romances, starting around the mid-1980s, as two distinct cycles,
they could not predict that the popularity of the genre would con-
tinue unabated well into the twenty-first century. Today romantic
comedy remains as strong at the box office as it has been for the
last twenty-five years. Neale’s definition of the new romance – the
‘persistent evocation and endorsement of the signs and values of
“old-fashioned” romance’ (Neale, 1992: 295) – has become clearly
insufficient to encompass everything that has happened in the
genre.
More recently, Krutnik has enlarged the scope of the new
romances into the 1990s by adding to their initial characteristics
the postmodern scenarios of deception and fabrication that he finds
in several films of the decade (1998: 28–33, 2002: 140–4). At the
same time, however, he acknowledges the bewildering variety
shown by the genre in the last twenty years (2002: 139–40) and
lists various subgroups, hybrids and developments which fall clearly
outside the narrow definition offered by Neale, a definition based
on the ideological apriorism of the cycle’s neo-conservative return
to a past of traditional patriarchal heterosexuality and monogamy.
Leger Grindon (2007) is also dissatisfied with the notion of the new

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 149

romance as the prevalent trend in contemporary romantic comedy.

Taking his cue from William Paul’s theory (2002) of the integration
of the grotesque in the genre since There’s Something about Mary,
he finds two prevailing modes in post-1997 instances of the genre:
ambivalence and the grotesque. For him, contemporary romantic
comedy lovers find themselves so mired in ambivalence that the
grotesque, which highlights the power of sex to disturb, distort,
humiliate and infantilise, is called upon to destroy the obstacles
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between the couple, a dangerous operation because the grotesque,

with its potential for parody, puts at risk the affirmation of roman-
tic love. While for Grindon only those films that deal directly with
the traditional concept of romantic love can ultimately be included
within the corpus of romantic comedy, the new tendency he posits
points rightly towards the lack of fixity of the ideology and form
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of the genre. More generally, the evidence of the genre’s abundance

and sustained popularity in the last three decades suggests that it
has expanded significantly, not because of the cultural importance
of the new-romance ethos as a contemporary articulation of
modern heterosexual love but, more generally, because of the great
diversity of approaches to intimate matters that it has been able to
encompass.
Thus, romantic comedy has not only dealt with the tension
between modern fear of commitment and a fantasised past in which
relationships were easier, or with more unambiguous idealisations
of old-fashioned romance coinciding with the rise of the New Right
in the 1980s. It has also featured, in ways that have proved signifi-
cant for millions of spectators around the world, the slow but
unstoppable increase in visibility of gay and lesbian romance; the
contingency of love and the proliferation of relationships depicted
in multi-protagonist comedies; the liberatory dimension of sex
within or outside romance; the frequent preference of friendship
over love and sex on the part of romantic protagonists; love and
desire in the context of teen group pressure; the erotic potential
of the workplace in the era of late capitalism; the complicated
adjustments of men and women to the new ‘post-feminist’ sexual
politics; interracial, interethnic and transnational romance; the
ever-growing generalised anxiety about heterosexuality and the
open preference of an increasing number of film couples for
short-term relationships – the ‘happy right now’, to borrow Kelly
McWilliam’s phrase (forthcoming) – over the always and forever.

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 150 The secret life of romantic comedy

The inadequacy of the traditional generic formula based on the

formation and consolidation of the special heterosexual couple
is today more blatant than ever as much in our culture as in roman-
tic comedy, and the ‘neo-traditional romantic comedy’ (Jeffers
McDonald, 2007: 85) is not the only or, in my view, the most
relevant tendency within the contemporary panorama. The genre
has been unusually busy in the past three decades, and the variety
of sexual and intimate scenarios broached here, as well as their
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continuing relevance in the construction of contemporary identities,

may be sufficient to explain its current popularity and why this
popularity has lasted so long.
It may be no coincidence that the first stirrings of this extended
period of visibility took place approximately at the same time as
other stirrings of a different kind were beginning to be felt: those
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of the new independent cinema. Although the overwhelming major-

ity of the examples mentioned in theorisations of contemporary
romantic comedy are not only generically more or less ‘pure’ but
also commercial films, there has also been life for the genre, and a
very exciting one, outside the mainstream. In this chapter, I would
like to argue that the variety of narrative and ideological approaches
to intimate matters articulated by the genre in recent years may be,
at least in part, attributed to the growing impact of independent
cinema on the mainstream and the subsequent all-but-complete
absorption of the former by the latter.
Originally taken to signify simultaneously financial and indus-
trial independence from the Hollywood majors, stylistic and narra-
tive originality, cultural marginality and alternative points of view,
the concept of contemporary independent cinema has had to change
in recent years in order to adapt to shifts in its relationship with
the mainstream. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, most
of the independent companies of the 1980s and 1990s have either
disappeared or been absorbed by the big studios; the term is now
routinely applied to films distributed by the ‘classics’ divisions of
the majors, and the aspiration of the filmmakers of most indepen-
dently produced features is to be noticed by one of these ‘classics’
divisions in order to secure worldwide distribution.
‘Has “indie” become merely a brand, a label used to market
biggish budget productions that aim to please many by offending
few?’, wonders Chris Holmlund, who later concludes that, although
independents are now in a position of dependence, ‘creative

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 151

imagination, determination, and courage continue to be present’

(2005: 1, 11). For Geoff King independent cinema is not a phenom-
enon with clear margins but a wide spectrum which touches on the
experimental, the avant-garde and the amateur at one end and the
mainstream at the other. The variety of forms of financing, produc-
tion and distribution, as well as the multiple combinations of indus-
trial arrangements with aesthetic forms and cultural positioning,
make it impossible to restrict the label to just one type of film,
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especially when the panorama remains extremely volatile. At indus-

trial as well as aesthetic and ideological levels, ‘independence’ is a
relative rather than an absolute quality (2005: 9). Similarly, Yannis
Tzioumakis argues that the distinction between independent and
mainstream filmmaking is ultimately impossible to make both in
terms of economics and aesthetics, and suggests that the term
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‘American independent cinema’ is best understood as a discourse

which is constructed indistinctly by filmmakers, producers, trade
publications, academics and film critics, an object of knowledge
through which the various institutional forces involved in the cir-
culation of film texts highlight specific practices and procedures
(2006: 9–11). In this sense, the discourse of American independent
cinema has influenced the way in which we look at and make sense
of contemporary films, whether these are ‘truly’ independent or, as
is the case with the vast majority of them, not.
King argues for the existence of a dialectical and dynamic rela-
tionship between ‘independent’ films and the output of the big
studios (2005: 57). Contemporary romantic comedy, however, has
been identified almost exclusively with the mainstream, possibly as
a way to prevent the ideological variety and progressiveness associ-
ated with the discourse of independence from affecting the patriar-
chal heterosexual determinism for which it has been generally
criticised. Although, as has been argued here, they are ideologically
more complex than they have been given credit for, films like
Splash, Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, Notting Hill or Maid
in Manhattan are easier to fit into the dominant discourse of roman-
tic comedy than not-so-mainstream Hollywood products such as
Desperately Seeking Susan (1984), Gas Food Lodging (1991), Go
Fish (1994), Bar Girls (1994), The Daytrippers (1995), Walking
and Talking, Chasing Amy (1997), The Opposite of Sex (1998) or
Splendor (1998). Woody Allen’s disappearance from the forefront
of romantic comedy discourse after his first two hits, Annie Hall

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 152 The secret life of romantic comedy

and Manhattan, may be related to his deal with Orion in the 1980s,
a company which, as Tzioumakis has argued, chose to pursue
independence at a time when the industrial context demanded alli-
ances with the majors, a choice that led to its final demise (2006:
228–40).
The fact that one of the characteristics most often adduced in
definitions of independent cinema is its transgression of generic
conventions, its ‘anti-genericity’ – which has led some commenta-
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tors to describe the label itself as a genre (King, 2005: 167) – has
not facilitated the consideration of the existence of a strand of
romantic comedy, one of the most highly codified of genres, within
independent cinema. However, the more flexible approach to the
genre proposed here allows us to do so. While it may be true that
the discourse of independence, with its connotations of ideological
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progressiveness and transgression, has not often found it useful to

associate itself with romantic comedy’s culturally accepted conser-
vativeness, the texts themselves tell, as usual, a different story. The
short selection of independent movies mentioned above may serve
as an illustration of the ways in which romantic comedy has devel-
oped through the discourse of independence, while mainstream
films as diverse as My Best Friend’s Wedding, The Object of My
Affection, High Fidelity (2000), Rumor Has It . . . or The Break-Up
show the influence, both stylistically and ideologically, of indepen-
dent cinema.
Cross-fertilisation with other genres has continued to exist in
contemporary Hollywood cinema as energetically as in the past, as
is proven by the briefly discussed cases of Speed or Out of Sight,
but also by many other examples mentioned by Mernit (2000: 21–
2) and Krutnik (2002: 134–5), including Romancing the Stone
(1984), Back to the Future (1985), Prizzi’s Honor (1985), Some-
thing Wild (1986), Married to the Mob (1988), We’re No Angels
(1989), White Men Can’t Jump, The American President and a long
list. However, another type of relationship – the crossover and
mutual influence between mainstream and ‘independents’ – may be
just as characteristic of this period, among other reasons, because
so-called independent cinema, no matter what compromises and
limitations it may have been subjected to, has found it easier to
provide a platform from which to ‘translate’ recent cultural devel-
opments in the field of intimacy and sex into filmic texts. Among
these cultural developments, I would like to mention the predomi-

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 153

nance of a female point of view on intimate matters, the growing

preference for friendship over love, especially among female roman-
tic protagonists, the emergent visibility of lesbian and gay love, the
presence of unconventional forms of heterosexual desire and the
use of a rhetoric of realism in the representation of heterosex.
Although authors like Jeffers McDonald have noticed a recent
increase in male-centred romantic comedies, which she labels
hommecoms (2007: 107), the focus on female perspectives and
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experiences has been more prominent in the genre as a whole than

ever before. The centrality, among romantic comedy stars, of Julia
Roberts, Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Lopez or Jennifer
Aniston already points to the prevalence of a female point of view
in the mainstream, but independent cinema has led the way in
incorporating into the genre cultural changes and contemporary
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protocols related to women’s new position in society. This has often

brought about a more distanced attitude towards romantic love and
heterosexual relationships and an increased relevance of friendship
in the characters’ lives. Desperately Seeking Susan, for example,
features female heterosexual desire in its story of modern love, but
the erotic interests of the two women leads are ultimately subordi-
nated to the special relationship that is established between them.
Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) is from the beginning more concerned
with finding Susan (Madonna) – and, later, with becoming Susan
– than with any of the men she meets during her adventure, includ-
ing the man she falls in love with, while Susan playfully replaces
Roberta as a wife for a while not out of any interest in the latter’s
husband but in order to adopt a different social identity. The film’s
ending is ambiguous about the exact nature of the women’s rela-
tionship but it is definitely their friendship that the comic space
protects and encourages.
Films like Gas Food Lodging and Walking and Talking, among
many others, also have heterosexual protagonists for whom female
homosocial desire, to adapt Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term, is more
fulfilling and more central in their lives than the men they are
involved with. The wedding that Walking and Talking narrates, for
example, is more important because of the consequences it has for
the two female friends than because of the two people that are
getting married. Friends with Money (2006) uses the structure of
the multi-protagonist movie to explore the disappointments, frustra-
tions and compromises in the love lives of four female friends. By

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 154 The secret life of romantic comedy

means of this structure the film endeavours to offer a not-too-

optimistic canvas of the contemporary white middle-class hetero-
sexual scene from a female perspective: the woman whose previous
relationships with men have all but annulled her ability to choose
and have led her to an inertia that seriously curtails her capacity to
function from day to day; the unhappy married woman on the brink
of a divorce; the extremely wealthy and apparently fulfilled woman
whose marriage is based on alarmingly superficial protocols; and the
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clothes designer whose husband and father of her child is probably

gay and yet enjoys the most satisfactory relationship of the lot, even
if the sex may not be dazzling. These relationships, however, are not
as important in themselves as for the ways in which they feed into
the dynamics of their friendship, which never becomes idealised but
is clearly the centre of their lives and constitutes the film’s main
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interest. Given the various anxieties and dissatisfactions surrounding

heterosex, it may be concluded from the film that female friendship
is the new love. In general, the filmic blossoming of same-sex friend-
ships, like, to a lesser extent, the gay-friend convention in My Best
Friend’s Wedding, The Object of My Affection or As Good as It
Gets (1997), analysed by Baz Dreisinger, attests to the ongoing crisis
of heterosexual love in our society (2000: 11).
Female friendships, then, have become central in recent indepen-
dent romantic comedy scenarios, but it is not easy to determine the
extent to which these friendships also reveal an anxiety about
lesbian desire. Desperately Seeking Susan is certainly ambivalent
about it but, as Kelly McWilliam suggests (forthcoming), the genre
has become a fertile space for the exploration of lesbian desire, at
least since the release in 1994 of Go Fish and Bar Girls. These and
other movies, including Do I Love You? (2002), April’s Shower
(2003), Saving Face (2004) or Imagine Me & You (2005), have
started to reveal the specificities of filmic constructions of girl-to-
girl love and have, according to McWilliam, developed their own
particular conventions within the genre. Other independent movies
have explored non-conventional forms of female heterosexual
desire. The Opposite of Sex and Secretary (2002), for example,
locate the predicaments of their female heroines within a context
of sexual equality between men and women in which more or less
explicit sado-masochistic practices acquire new meanings. In
general, the narrativisation of multiple forms of female desire and
women’s experiences in contemporary intimate scenarios within a

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 155

comic climate has allowed independent cinema to exert a growing

influence on more mainstream productions and has contributed to
a very large extent to the evolution of romantic comedy in recent
years.
This does not mean that male desire and men’s difficult adjust-
ments to new social and sexual circumstances have been ignored
by the genre, as proven by the recent spate of hommecoms, includ-
ing The Tao of Steve (2000), Hitch (2005) and Wedding Crashers
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(2005). In the independent sector, films like Beautiful Girls and

most of Edward Burns’s comedies have also catered for the hopes
and anxieties of contemporary males but in many other indepen-
dent romantic comedies the fate of male desire has often been to
play second fiddle to the female characters. Even a film like The
Daytrippers, which features a husband who has come out of the
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closet and has been having an affair with another man for a year,
presents almost exclusively the wife’s perspective and the spectator
only finds out about the recent changes in the man’s sexual orienta-
tion at the very end of the movie, at the same time as his wife.
Independent cinema has also explored the vicissitudes of gay love
and desire from a comic perspective in films like The Wedding
Banquet (1993), Kiss Me, Guido (1997), Bedrooms & Hallways
(1998), Trick (1999) or Adam & Steve (2005). Yet these comedies
have had a more limited impact on the genre, while male homo-
sexual love appears to have been served better by other genres –
witness the cases of My Own Private Idaho (1991), The Living End
(1992), The Doom Generation (1995) or Brokeback Mountain
(2005). More popular comedies featuring gay characters, like The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), To Wong Foo,
Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) or, within the main-
stream, My Best Friend’s Wedding, The Object of My Affection
and As Good as It Gets are not concerned at all with gay love and
desire, as if the genre were perfectly comfortable with gay charac-
ters in all kinds of social relationships as long as they do not express
their sexuality openly.
Various forms of heterosexual desire have remained dominant
in the genre, even within an ‘indie’ context. A case in point is Next
Stop, Wonderland (1998). Distributed by Miramax when the studio
had already become firmly integrated within the Hollywood indus-
trial machine, its differences from equivalent mainstream films are
revealing. It is similar, for instance, to Sleepless in Seattle in that

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 156 The secret life of romantic comedy

the two lovers do not meet until the very end of the story and in
that they both focus on the difficulties of men and women who are
‘out there’, looking for suitable partners and afraid of loneliness,
immersed in the crisis of heterosex but reluctant to give desire up
altogether. Both texts take very different stylistic and ideological
approaches, which can be summarised in the contrast between the
old-fashioned romanticism of Nora Ephron’s film and the anti-
romantic realism with which both lovers approach their own desire
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in Brad Anderson’s movie.

Realism is, of course, a relative term, a mode which is as depen-
dent on artistic and cultural conventions as others, and one which
does not provide a closer or more faithful perspective on reality
than the rest. Realism is also an artistic form which changes (and
often ages) very fast. In any case, one of the central features of the
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contemporary independent discourse, although by no means shared

by all so-called independent movies, is a realistic vocation, which,
in the case of romantic comedy, seeks to guarantee a more immedi-
ate, unmediated focus on intimate protocols, probably a legacy of
the 1970s (Jeffers McDonald, 2007: 72–3). Whether individual
independent texts achieve this privileged link with reality is more
problematic. Sleepless in Seattle, My Best Friend’s Wedding or
American Pie (1999), for example, may well have as many impor-
tant things to say about contemporary love as Go Fish, The Day-
trippers or Next Stop, Wonderland. Realism is, however, more
embedded in the independent cinema discourse than fantasy, and
films like Sliding Doors (1997), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind (2004) or Stranger than Fiction (2006) are, for the moment,
only exceptions to this rule, although individually just as revealing
about contemporary love and desire as the others.
Eternal Sunshine, for example, uses its science-fictional conceit –
a company that erases the memories of those who have been unhappy
in love so that they can start all over again without the heavy weight
of the past – to reflect on what constitutes identity, the part of our
identity that is formed by past romantic and sexual entanglements
and, ultimately, the ‘all-time’ romantic theme of the simultaneous
power, inscrutability, resilience and vulnerability of desire. The
fantasy of Stranger than Fiction is of a metafictional kind. Revolving
around the conceit of a protagonist who can hear the voice of
the author/narrator of the story he is in, the film thematises genre
theory when the author, after meeting her protagonist in the flesh,

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 157

convinces a literary theory professor that comedy can be as worthy

and as aesthetically great as tragedy and proceeds to change the
ending of her novel accordingly. Finally, The Science of Sleep (2006),
Michel Gondry’s sequel of sorts to his Eternal Sunshine, underlines
the extreme fragility of the space of comedy when dealing with
contemporary relationships and suggests that, in spite of their
mutual desire, its young protagonists can finally only get together
in their dreams. The fantasy of this film does not exclude reality but,
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rather, builds its romantic discourse on the frustrations of the every-

day. This is what the genre has always done but what is missing
here is the transformative power of romantic comedy, its vocation
of transforming the everyday rather than escaping from it.
In general, however, in spite of these fantastic incursions, realism
as a filmic mode has undoubtedly constituted a more fertile field
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for independent cinema to explore the vicissitudes of modern love.

Before Sunset is analysed here as an example of this tendency.

Love in real time: Before Sunset

The realism of Before Sunset does not exclude metafiction. The film
knowingly inscribes itself within the history of cinema by, on the
one hand, openly acknowledging the influence of Eric Rohmer’s
Parisian comedies of manners and Jacques Rivette’s Céline et Julie
vont en bateau (1974) – Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan
Hawke) roam around recognisable but not openly touristic Parisian
locations, like Rivette’s protagonists (even the actress and the char-
acter of Linklater’s movie have the same names as Rivette’s pro-
tagonists!). On the other hand it presents itself as the continuation
of Linklater, Delpy and Hawke’s earlier Before Sunrise (1995). In
the earlier film, Céline, a French woman returning to Paris from
visiting her grandmother in Budapest, and Jesse, a young U.S.
student touring Europe after being dropped by his girlfriend in
Madrid, meet by chance on the train, get off at Vienna and spend
less than a day together, promising to meet again in six months’
time. Before Sunset picks up nine years later (the film was also made
nine years later). It is 2004 and Jesse is now in Paris, on the
last day of the European promotional tour of the novel he has
written about their one-day relationship. Céline has heard of his
book presentation and comes to the Shakespeare and Company
bookshop, where he is finishing a Q&A session with a group of

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 158 The secret life of romantic comedy

journalists. It is late afternoon and they only have a few minutes

before he catches his flight back to the United States. The time they
spend together corresponds exactly to the duration of the film,
about eighty minutes. While Before Sunrise had used ellipses to
compress about twenty hours of real time into ninety-five minutes
of film, Linklater now imposes on himself the strict discipline of
doing away with ellipses altogether and has his camera constantly
accompany the two characters in their wanderings around Paris,
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from the bookshop by the bank of the Seine, where they start, to
Céline’s apartment. The stringent formal strategies become, beyond
the real-time conceit, part of the film’s discourse on love, desire and
contemporary relationships.

The realities of love

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Near the beginning, Jesse confesses, to Céline’s embarrassment, that

he went to Vienna six months later and was devastated to find that
she was not there. This event does not appear in his novel, which
ends at the same point as Before Sunrise, but he explains that he
had initially written a different ending in which both of them turn
up for their date, have sex for ten days, then realise that they do
not get along and part ways. The editor did not like this ending
and persuaded Jesse to change it. Céline likes the original ending
better, even if it did not happen, because it is more realistic, but
understands the editor because people want to believe in love and
love sells.
By turning the plot of Before Sunrise into a fictional novel, the
filmmakers establish two levels of discourse about love in Before
Sunset: on the one hand, what happens in the novel, including the
characters’ comments about it and, later on, about their memories
of their ‘one-night stand’, and, on the other, the actual relationship
that is developed between them in the course of the film’s narrative.
In other words, when assessing the film’s view of love and desire
we must focus both on what the characters say – their own dis-
courses about love – and on what the text says through the narra-
tive of their relationship in their eighty minutes together. Céline
and Jesse both verbalise contemporary intimate discourses and
enact them, both talk about love and experience it. At this point,
for example, Céline criticises the traditional view of love as a pow-
erful passion that transcends time and is always projected towards
the future, because that is only something that happens in popular

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 159

novels to sell books, and prefers what she sees as people’s real
experience, in which this type of love does not work, precisely
because it is not real. Ironically, in Before Sunrise, the idealised
view of romantic love is the ‘real’ one, while the ‘realistic’ one – the
two characters spending ten days together and then separating –
never actually happened. As the story develops, this polarisation
between real and ideal love is questioned in various ways.
In generic terms, several things can be said about this dialogue.
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In the first place, the ending of the novel does not bring about the
union of the lovers. Rather, the two young people have had a few
hours of happiness and excitement together and have set up the
meeting in the unrealistic hope of prolonging what must now
come to an abrupt end. Before Sunrise may leave a tiny door open
to the ‘always and forever’ but is by no means committed to that
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ideology. Rather, as a film of the 1990s, it privileges the momentary

excitement of the one-night stand and, therefore, reflects the con-
tingency of contemporary relationships, even though, perhaps
because of the age of the characters, this pure relationship is free
of the anxieties and compromises which have characterised many
examples of the genre in the last three decades. That Céline now
takes this open ending as a fantasy of romantic love is, therefore,
illustrative of the age of diminishing expectations in which she lives
and which she appears to have seamlessly incorporated into her
identity.
Secondly, the fantasy of love, however tentative it may have
become, is described as part of a popular culture which appropri-
ates people’s dreams and desires for monetary profit. Jesse’s novel
is part of the same popular culture to which the genre of romantic
comedy belongs, but the film initially separates itself from this dis-
course by expressing awareness of its purely capitalistic objectives.
However, love (i.e. traditional romantic love) would not sell if it
were not still a potent component of how men and women relate
to one another. To hear Céline talk, one would infer that she does
not believe in romantic love and its influence in people’s lives, and
that she would never fall for this kind of trap. Nothing is further
from the truth. As she gradually discloses, her brief encounter with
Jesse nine years before has powerfully affected all the relationships
she has had since then. Now, their continuing intimacy, as if their
meeting in Vienna had only taken place last week, proves that, in
the film’s discourse, there is more to love than a manipulative

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 160 The secret life of romantic comedy
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11 Love as fantasy and reality: Céline and Jesse fictionalise their past.
Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunset.
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(dir. Richard Linklater, 2004, Warner Bros.)

fantasy promoted for commercial purposes. It would seem that,

rather than not believe in love, Céline is using her anti-romantic
discourse as a defensive mechanism against something that, far
from being unreal, is, in her construction as a character, very pow-
erful. But this is after all only a film, which will eventually become
one of those popular texts that Céline had rejected at the beginning,
including itself within the category of ‘tiny bestseller’ that Jesse calls
his book, one more romantic dream that, for all its realistic trap-
pings, eventually fails to depict reality ‘as it is’, pandering to the
greedy designs of the film industry.
A dynamic is established, therefore, whereby reality and fiction/
fantasy are opposed as far as intimate relationships are concerned.
The text borrows and sharpens a rhetoric of realism from earlier
filmic traditions in order to present itself as an ‘innocent’ reproduc-
tion of real people’s experiences, and even when its characters, also
adept at the discourse of the superiority of real life over fiction,
become embodiments, however tentative or imperfect, of the very
fantasy of romantic love they reject, it detaches itself from them
through its formal strategies. Yet the film is not particularly to be
trusted: in the end, it is not its realism but its use of generic and
cultural conventions, its constructedness, that most powerfully and
accurately sheds light on contemporary relationships.
As we have seen, romantic comedy, while not being reality, uses
its own generic devices in order to construct discourses which

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 161

represent the boundaries within which real people interact inti-

mately in culturally and historically specific ways. What is relevant
is not whether or not the genre manipulates reality – it plainly does
– but what those manipulations actually say about that reality. This
can be best appreciated in Before Sunset’s apparently spontaneous
and ‘unscripted’ dialogues: Céline complains that Jesse’s book ide-
alises their relationship but, when she is asked to explain why, she
says that her character is sometimes a little neurotic, clearly not a
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mechanism of idealisation. The film’s method of apparently spon-

taneous improvisation facilitates the proliferation of these moments
in which the character, faced with the representation of herself on
the written page, discloses her anxieties and fears by denying them.
In other words, as is gradually revealed, her own idealisation of
that moment has become an important component of her sexual
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identity, and the failure of all her subsequent relationships to

measure up to that idealisation has turned her into the neurotic
woman she will soon confess to be. Idealisation and neurosis are
more clearly related in the character’s psyche and in the contempo-
rary intimate discourse she embodies than in the logic of her words.
Through her experience, the film is suggesting that in contemporary
relationships the idealisation of romantic love still plays an impor-
tant part. Before Sunset, while positing itself as a ‘slice of life’ nar-
rative, lifts its romantic discourses above the everyday, but, like
other romantic comedies, uses this manipulation in order to return
to the same everyday in a more powerful and discursively coherent
way. ‘Reality’ in this film is only one more of the mechanisms
employed by the text in order to convey its message.
How is this reality constructed in filmic terms? While Jesse and
Céline discuss his book and the way in which their past experience
has been fictionalised in it, the film is articulating their present-day
relationship through the dialogues, the actors’ naturalistic perfor-
mances and a specific use of film grammar. One of the premises of
the formal construction of the film is that the editing must preserve
the continuity of real time and space. For example, at this point
in the narrative, the two characters have turned away from the
Seine, into the streets behind the bookshop. The sequence has been
built by means of a series of follow-focus tracking shots which
accompany the characters in their walk and shot/reverse shots
whenever they stop momentarily. This is a very traditional use of
framing and editing that seeks, in these early scenes, to establish a

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 162 The secret life of romantic comedy

pattern for the spectator: the various framings and cuts convey a
continuity which is not manipulated but real. The cuts between the
different tracking shots, for example, ensure that the spectator
knows that the narrative is actually covering the whole length of
the streets the characters are walking along, that they are turning
from one real street into another and that no part of their progres-
sion has been omitted from view. Now, as they walk along a
narrow street with houses on their right and a fence on their left,
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the cut from a follow-focus tracking shot from behind the charac-
ters to one that precedes them again confirms that no time or space
has been elided – the background remains strictly constant – and,
as a relative novelty, introduces a two-and-a-half minute-long take,
which covers the time that it takes them to get to the end of this
particular street. This long take, like the rest of the film, risks
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making the spectator lose her/his patience (especially the spectator

accustomed to the quick elliptical cutting of most contemporary
movies), but enhances the impression of realism as we feel that we
are simply witnessing a conversation between two real people, in a
real street, in real time, as they walk, stop and continue walking.
The shot covers their dialogue about the book and then her
account of what she does in her job for the Green Cross. It is sig-
nificant that their conversation about the fictionality of the book
and Céline’s comments on the capitalistic manipulations of popular
culture are presented in this openly unobtrusive, ‘non-manipulative’
way. It is as if the text is emphasising the difference between
popular culture’s tendentious methods of representing reality and
its own more honest methods. Jesse and the editorial industry have
manipulated their previous encounter in the novel he has just
published but the film is not manipulating their new encounter,
limiting itself to discreetly recording it or quietly witnessing their
conversation, thus intensifying the contrast between romantic
constructions of love and the reality of it. As Céline concludes later
on, ‘reality and love are contradictory.’ This contrast is part of
the film’s intimate discourse and the fact that the spectator may
‘fall’ for the powerful illusion of reality attests to the filmmakers’
success at sorting out their views on relationships along different
ontological levels: fictional, i.e. romantic love vs. real people relat-
ing to one another in real space and real time. This is, as is often
the case with so-called realistic texts, the film’s most sophisticated
construction.

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 163

Walking and talking

The long take and the other formal devices deployed in Before
Sunset, then, are not just a neutral way of recording the progression
of the love affair. The film’s formal construction is more than a
realistic method of representing a brief affair between a man and
a woman. It uses the brevity of this encounter and the devices that
reinforce our impression of it as ‘real’ in order to put forward a
view of contemporary relationships in which the present is pre-
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ferred over the future, self-analysis and talk of love over action or
commitment, talk of sex over sex, walking and talking over bodies
and physical intimacy. This is an intellectual type of relationship
that affects the characters deeply and becomes as powerful for them
as others based on more emotional or carnal exchanges. The film’s
method of representation feels realistic not because it is objectively
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so but because it appears to be the most appropriate way – in clas-

sical terms, the most decorous way – of constructing this particular
type of relationship cinematically.
In this sense, Before Sunset becomes an illustration of what
David Shumway has called ‘relationship stories’, the most appropri-
ate type of fiction to represent the discourse of intimacy, with its
structure of exposition, analysis and instruction (2003: 149–57).
There is a before and after for these two characters, a life outside
the plot – her job, her war-photographer partner, Jesse’s wife and
child in New York, the tiring promotional tour he has just ended
– but the spectator is less interested in these than in an affair
that, for all the film’s open-endedness, is exclusively of the ‘here
and now’ variety and is developed through their penchant for self-
analysis. For Nick James, the film’s central message is that romance
is cool and sex is not (2004: 15). In this, it seems to follow the
neo-traditional romantic comedy criticised by Jeffers McDonald for
its de-emphasising of sex in favour of a vaguer romantic intensity
(2007: 97). But in the course of this film we do not see much of
either romance or sex, although both romance and sex, or sex as
a more traditional expression of romantic love, may well be waiting
in the wings after the film’s close. What seems really cool in the
romantic world of Before Sunset is to talk about romance and sex.
In an age of heightened awareness of intimate discourses, the film
seems to suggest that there is nothing as erotic as talking, and that
when talking leads to something else, the romance stops being
interesting for the spectator. When words stop, the time has come

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 164 The secret life of romantic comedy

to switch off the camera. It is not that the film is coy about sex.
Rather, it is just not very interested. This is the type of romance of
self-analysis inaugurated on the screen by Woody Allen in the
1970s but one which has since then evolved and metamorphosed
into something else: a defensive mechanism against the ravages of
desire in the contemporary intimate panorama, which has turned,
like friendship, into a cultural practice that is revealed to have
manifold attractions. Even touching each other as a way to soothe
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their anxieties about other relationships is, as a later scene inside

the car suggests, dangerous and to be avoided at all costs. Talking
in Before Sunset is not just sexy, it is also much safer. It’s sexy
because it’s safe.
Brian Henderson argued in his famous article that classical
romantic comedy was predicated on the suppression of the question
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‘How come we never fucked?’ Once the question could not be sup-
pressed any longer – once sex could not be left out of the structure
of the genre – romantic comedy, the critic surmised, could not
flourish anymore (1978: 21–2). A good proof of the basic sound-
ness of Henderson’s thesis was that the genre did not return to form
again until Woody Allen and other filmmakers found a culturally
understandable and convincing way of bringing sex into the equa-
tion. The dialectic between romantic love and sex became part of
the thematic structure of Annie Hall, The Goodbye Girl and the
other nervous romances, and even if explicit representations of
sexual desire did not always figure prominently in the romantic
comedies of the 1980s and 1990s, its role in the new intimate spaces
of the genre was never seriously challenged. Sex may not have
always been there but neither was it constantly denied or postponed
any more.
On the other hand, the ever-growing presence of more or less
explicit sex in mainstream films, the recent blurring of boundaries
between commercial and pornographic movies as far as the repre-
sentation of sex on the screen was concerned, and its consequent
normalisation as one of the most obvious attractions of the con-
temporary mainstream may have produced a saturation that the
independent cinema of those decades was quick to capitalise on.
sex, lies, and videotape (1989) caused a sensation not because of
the exploitation tactics suggested in its title but precisely because it
did not deliver its promise. Before the pleasures of visible sex
reached their 1990s mainstream apogee with Paul Verhoeven’s

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 165

Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995) and, later, Stanley

Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Steven Soderbergh’s film already
anticipated an exhaustion that affected both cinematic spectator-
ship and cultural discourses. There is some sex on the screen in sex,
lies, and videotape but both characters and spectators are much
more interested in what the protagonists have to say about it to
the psychoanalyst, to each other or to the videocamera than in
seeing it on the screen. Ann Mullany (Andy McDowell)’s initial
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frigidity does not prevent her from talking about sex and it is even-
tually this talk of sex that leads her to enjoy it again, although for
the spectator sex in the long climactic scene happens offscreen, and
remains only accessible through what she says about it. The voy-
euristic expectations are frustrated when the sex scene is abruptly
interrupted before physical contact between the protagonists is
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initiated, but we do not really mind, enthralled as we are by their

confessional chat. The recorded interviews reveal the characters’
capacity for intense contact. In the end, these interviews – for-
malised dialogues about sex – become a viable substitute for physi-
cal arousal.
Soderbergh’s film inaugurates what can be considered one of
the most important lines of development of independent cinema in
the 1990s: the confessional comedy, a group of ‘serious’ comedies
about intimate relationships, love and romance, which favour
word over action and emotion over irony (Levy, 1999: 273). Films
like Rambling Rose (1991), The Wedding Banquet, Ruby in Para-
dise (1993), Clerks (1994), The Brothers McMullen (1995), Smoke
(1995), Walking and Talking, Beautiful Girls, Box of Moonlight
(1997) and many others constitute an alternative to mainstream
Hollywood not because they take the spectator to places where
other films do not dare to go. Rather, the daring consists in
apparently not going anywhere, staying with the everyday lives of
their mostly young protagonists, more or less recognisable contem-
porary types, rather than visiting special-effects-ridden fantasy
worlds or spaces of radical otherness. This low-key vocation is not
only reflected in the generally very simple formal strategies employed
to visualise the stories but also in the predominance of dialogues
over action. The sexual dimension of romance is ever-present in
the characters’ conversations because sex has, after decades of
pushing cultural boundaries, become normalised as part of the
construction of contemporary relationships, but, in most of these

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 166 The secret life of romantic comedy

films, rather than the fulfilment of desire, it becomes a problem to

be solved, a source of anxiety, and much more pleasurable as a
topic of conversation than as an actual activity in which the char-
acters are longing to engage. Walking and Talking is paradigmatic
in this respect: like the protagonists of Sex and the City, the
two heroines enjoy their talks about their heterosexual partners
much better than their relationships with them. The sex is seen as,
at best, an uneventful activity but the real excitement lies in discuss-
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ing it before or afterwards, with your friends or even with your

partners.
The title of Before Sunset could have easily been Walking and
Talking. After all, this is, almost exclusively, what Céline and Jesse
do throughout the film and what they had also done in the previous
Before Sunrise. In fact, since the ‘indie’ breakthrough success of
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Slacker (1991), the pleasures provided by Richard Linklater’s films

have basically consisted in listening to the characters talking to one
another: from the apparently inane talk of the slackers endlessly
hanging out at the shopping mall in SubUrbia (1997), through the
pseudo-philosophical conversations of Waking Life (2001) and the
intense theatrical dialogues of Tape (2001), in which past actions
are conjured up out of apparent nothingness through words, to his
adaptation of Philip S. Dick’s discursive A Scanner Darkly (2006),
the director has shown that, in his fictional world, the word always
takes centre stage. In a review of A Scanner Darkly, Tim Robey
has dismissively referred to Linklater’s directorial style as ‘chat,
chat, narrative box-ticking, chat’ (2006: 66), a description which,
whether we like the films or not, can hardly be disputed. By the
time he made Before Sunset the centrality of dialogues was so firmly
established in his oeuvre that it felt almost natural that the action
consisted in no more than two characters talking as they walked
through the streets of Paris.
As has been argued before, the filmmakers’ stylistic and narrative
choices define the boundaries of the central relationship and the
thematic lines along which it can be developed. Because of these
choices, the characters are forced to live out their relationship in
less than eighty minutes of walking and talking. That this eighty-
minute affair may be felt to be culturally relevant by the spectator,
however, is not only a function of the film’s style: the relationship
can only work from the perspective of the spectator if it relates to
her/his experience of contemporary love and desire. Céline, for

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 167

example, admits that when she is in a relationship and the other

person is around all the time, she feels suffocated, even nauseous.
From this perspective, an anxiety-free chat with someone who has
to catch the next flight to the other side of the Atlantic has much
to recommend itself. Other dimensions of the text’s take on inti-
mate matters are equally adapted to the film’s narrative frame and
formal requirements while remaining culturally pertinent. Delpy,
co-writer of the screenplay with Linklater and Hawke, has empha-
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sised the historical immediacy of the film’s discourse in an interview

which is worth quoting at some length:

I wrote [the screenplay] after years of talking with girls and guys my
age. Since sexual liberation, there has been a need to redefine how
relationships are handled. Is it easier or harder to love someone now?
What role does the man have to take? I have a lot of single girlfriends
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who’d like to fall in love with the right guy. They’d like to find
someone who will accept the fact that they are a strong woman. [. . .]
The idea that they felt numb, that they were not capable of being
connected to someone. [. . .] People don’t want to open up these days.
Showing emotions is seen as a sign of weakness. (Julie Delpy, in
Goodridge, 2004: 20)

If the sexiness of its dialogues can be seen as symptomatic of the

text’s position on intimate matters, Delpy’s words guide us quite
proficiently through its more explicit sexual discourse, a discourse
which deals with the construction of contemporary heterosexuality
and with the difficult and painful rearrangement of sexual and
social roles in relationships between men and women after the
second wave of feminism, a historical moment whose consequences
do not seem to have been completely assimilated by men and
women several decades later. The romantic comedy’s attempts to
smooth over these apparently irreconcilable differences and to con-
struct currents of desire on the basis of these differences are classi-
cally carried out through the presence of Paris not only as a
recognisable geographical background but also as the fictional
space of romantic comedy par excellence.

Sex and the city

The confessional comedy derives part of its energy from its capacity
to incorporate into its fiction believable anxieties that the audience
may find it easy to identify with while, at the same time, hoping

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 168 The secret life of romantic comedy

that, at least in the fictional world of the film, those anxieties will
be confronted and overcome. But any final resolution of the con-
flict, if the comic text finally posits one, will not feel relevant or
artistically powerful if the problems to be resolved are not felt to
be close to real people’s experience: no convincing conflict, no
believable resolution. As Jesse confesses that his marriage is disin-
tegrating and Céline reveals that she has been unhappy in all her
relationships with other men, including the present one with an
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almost-always-absent war photographer, the rift between men and

women becomes apparent. Their Vienna romance gradually emerges
as the root of their present dissatisfaction but the dissatisfaction
itself has wider resonances, as Delpy’s words in the interview
suggest. Vienna or no Vienna, contemporary couples are, in Céline’s
words, very confused because men still have the need to feel socially
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superior and women cannot accept that deeply ingrained male

superiority anymore. On the other hand, demands of social equal-
ity, even feminist militancy, do not stop many heterosexual women
from desiring intimacy with men, but it is not easy to find men who
will accept women who are both feminine and strong, that is, the
basic combination of what Jacinda Read has described as contem-
porary popular feminism (2000: 48–9). At the same time, commit-
ment is felt to be repressive or, at least, not too high on people’s
wish lists. Jesse’s ostensible mistake is that he married because he
felt that being an adult meant commiting himself to a person – the
person herself did not matter much – and acquiring responsibilities.
That past urge to commit is about to end in disaster now, while
for Céline even the thought of ‘the day-to-day life of a relationship’
is insufferable.
Freedom is felt to be essential but it does not make men and
women happy. Romance still occupies an important part in con-
structions of love even though the ‘love of your life’ idea is absurd,
even evil, according to Céline. Romance is generally identified with
sex – passion and consuming desire – and that cannot be hoped to
last for very long in stable relationships, but the traditional idea
that something deeper comes to replace the initial passion seems to
have lost ground. Jesse’s sex life has been so poor since his child
was born that he feels that if somebody – a woman, it is assumed
– were to even touch him he would dissolve into molecules. Céline
has become numb because every time she has felt passionately
about somebody it has taken something irrecoverable away from

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 169

her. She says she does not romanticise things too much nowadays
but her cynicism is a thin defence mechanism which quickly crum-
bles down once the conversation becomes honest and personal.
Descriptions of what her love life has turned her into range from
deadened to manic depressive. In general, both their attitudes to
the link between love and sex are recognisably modern but they are
still separated along the gender divide: for Céline, sex, like love,
has been harmful and inhibiting; for Jesse, the ‘horny’ U.S. Ameri-
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can man, women still seem to be mainly in the business of setting

obstacles to men’s sexual pleasure. Céline initially denies that they
had sex in Vienna, because ‘that is what women do’, while Jesse
fantasises about having uninterrupted sex with her for ten days and
dreams of lying naked next to her and reaching out to touch her
(admittedly, a rather tame sexual dream).
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What ultimately emerges from these dialogues is that the distance

between men and women is so great, and the difference between
people’s fantasies and what they are ready to give up for love in
real life so pronounced, that any compromise seems difficult to
envisage. That anything positive may come out of this intimate
climate would seem unlikely, except that the talk of sexual and
gender conflict between Céline and Jesse is, as has already been
pointed out, also the engine of desire, and desire in romantic comedy
will not be stopped, however slim the odds, however dismal the
prospects. Frank Krutnik has argued that postmodern romantic
comedy lovers are perfectly aware of the chasm that has been
created by recent cultural developments and they know that love is
a fabrication, but that does not stop them from once again engaging
in the same sexual games as before (1998: 33). Both the awareness
and the readiness to once again fall in the trap are there in Before
Sunset. Although the transition from real to comic space seems even
more difficult here because the characters are so articulate in the
presentation of the crisis, and therefore hard to convince that the
effort is worth it, this is no Crimes and Misdemeanors: the genre
of romantic comedy is doing its work by once again deploying the
comic space to help them overcome their inhibitions and frustra-
tions. This comic space is geographically identified in the film with
the city of Paris, the city most often associated with romantic love
in the history of cinema. Before Sunset takes full advantage of the
cliché and deftly relates the lovers’ desire for one another with the
background against which it develops. At the same time, however,

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 170 The secret life of romantic comedy

the city’s romantic aura contrasts ironically with the text’s realism
and its concern with showing, through the characters’ wanderings,
a more mundane Paris. Paradoxically, Paris becomes a very realistic
space of comedy, one that transforms the reality of love without
itself abandoning its own reality. In this respect, the use of real
locations in this movie bears certain similarities with the way in
which the United States as a mythical space was constructed in
North by Northwest.
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By mixing generic conventions of romantic comedy, the adven-

ture and the romance film, Hitchcock provided in North by North-
west a type of pleasure that his suspense thrillers had not anticipated:
the pleasure of a geographically recognisable magical land in which
love can flourish and defeat the most formidable enemies. The
famous locations in which the action takes place, especially in the
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climactic scene on Mount Rushmore, are spectacularly transformed

into the space of comedy. These are real spaces but they are not
reality, and the United States of the film is not the real United States
but a mythical filmic space which has replaced the dangers of the
escape narrative by the amenities of love and marriage. Stanley
Cavell concludes in his analysis of the movie that ‘the achievement
of true marriage might ratify something called America as a place
in which to seek it’ (1986: 263). The U.S. is the special place where
love can happen, not because that has any resemblance to reality
but because through the generic cocktail created by Hitchcock, love
and desire become part of the discourse of America as the land of
plenty. North by Northwest turns the modern dream of love and
romance into a very American Dream. The process of spiritual
death and revival undergone by the protagonist couple is facilitated
by their desire and ratified by the United States as the ultimate
Hollywood space of romantic comedy. It is as if Hitchcock, the
European cynic, had, like Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder, finally
given up on his scepticism and had been transformed into an
‘American romantic’, positing his adopted country as the necessary
scenario for the development of modern love.
Several decades later, a reverse process is at work in Before
Sunrise and Before Sunset. These two films have their lovers meet
during a trip in Europe, spend a few hours together in Vienna and,
then, several years later, get together again, for a brief time, in Paris.
It is not only that, as we have seen, the length of romantic liaisons
has been drastically reduced with respect to more traditional

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 171

representations of romance but also that, for them to work, they

need to take place ‘elsewhere’. Europe is, of course, not elsewhere
for Europeans and the crises and diminishing expectations in
modern intimate discourses are similar both sides of the Atlantic,
but these are U.S. films which provide a U.S. perspective. Accord-
ingly, they posit the two European cities as places where love and
desire, however fragile and problematic, can, unlike in the U.S., still
flourish. Significantly we learn, in the course of Before Sunset, that
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both characters lived in New York at the same time for several
years but they never came across each other then. New York, in
spite of its cosmopolitanism, would not have done as a place of
reunion because it would have been too close to home, not so much
the home of the characters (Céline is from Paris) but the home of
the film’s U.S.-centred discourse. Paris, for all its cultural centrality,
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has different connotations within the text’s imaginary: it is not

only the home of Rivette’s Céline and Julie and their invigorating
narrative fantasies but also of many of Rohmer’s lovers and
their recognisably ‘French’, i.e. different, approach to intimate
matters.
It may be speculated that for Linklater, the independent film-
maker, Rohmer’s comedies of manners represent a much needed
release from the conventionality of mainstream American romantic
comedy. Rohmer provides the model but also, indirectly, the loca-
tion for the story. This is not Rohmer’s Paris, either, but rather
what could perhaps be described as a realistic myth of Paris, a
location which, because of its nouvelle vague credentials, may seem,
within the text’s cultural construction, more believable as the setting
of postmodern desire. Besides, there is one more requirement that
Paris fulfils in the ‘American imaginary’ of the film: it is the ideal
place for the narrative of a transnational romance. Again, it is not
that young men and women from different nationalities cannot
meet in the United States, but the country’s ‘melting pot’ potential
may mean that, once transported to the U.S., lovers and intimate
matters become automatically Americanised. On the other hand,
the U.S. traveller in Europe remains quintessentially ‘American’ and
while his contact with other national identities may give him a dis-
tance with respect to his own ‘Americanness’, it will not threaten
it in any essential way.
At the time of release of Before Sunset France was not the most
popular country in the United States. In the wake of the U.S.

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 172 The secret life of romantic comedy

invasion of Iraq and France’s initial opposition to it, anti-French

sentiment was running high in George Bush’s country while anti-
Americanism was also widespread throughout Europe, including
in those countries whose governments had backed the invasion. In
this context, Linklater, Hawke and Delpy’s story of international
romance could not have been timelier and more deeply committed
to the egalitarian and tolerant ethos of the genre. Both Before
Sunrise and Before Sunset excel at the construction of Jesse and
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Céline as recognisably U.S. American and French, respectively.

Popular clichés are undoubtedly used and even turned into elements
of the plot – U.S. optimism and individualism, French political
commitment and cynicism, French women’s sexuality, U.S. men’s
‘healthy horniness’, French (and European) conventional bashing
of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. fear of communism, etc. – but they
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never feel impoverishing or tendentious. If screwball comedy often

turned class difference into one more ingredient of the sexual
dynamic (Lent, 1995: 315), here national difference is at the heart
of the sexual attraction. Gender difference appears to be as wide
as ever, but national difference may be seen here as the supplement
that is needed to turn distance into attraction. In other words, their
national identities are not so much what is protected by the comic
space but part of that space. What Céline and Jesse like about each
other is so linked with their respective national identities that their
desire can only grow in a space that protects and nurtures their
difference. Without this protective space, in a world governed by
irrational incomprehension and intolerance, the conventions of
melodrama would have predominated. Paris in particular and
Europe in general become, from a U.S. perspective, this protective
space, a place where both characters can remain themselves while
being affected by the other in important ways.
In Before Sunset, then, not only walking and talking but also
national identity become eroticised, while the film openly escapes
from the technological sophistication associated with the postmod-
ern era, and its old-fashioned preference for physical travel and
face-to-face communication brings forth a more humane side of
globalisation which contemporary cinema, particularly mainstream
productions, appears to have forgotten. The simplicity associated
with independent cinema, therefore, feeds not only into the specific
development of the genre of romantic comedy posited in this film
but also into its ideological discourse on the cultural conditions of

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 173

postmodern romance. Céline and Jesse have enough things in

common to give them endless topics of conversation through which
to play out their desire, but this desire is considerably energised by
their national difference, not only because it almost guarantees
quick separation but, more importantly, because it places them in
a typical romantic comedy scenario in which the acceptance of
engaging difference becomes the condition and origin of attraction.
That this difference is conceptualised as national difference in
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Before Sunset both identifies the film as a cultural text of its time
and places it within a particularly active line of development of
contemporary romantic comedy. The use of a ‘realistic’ version of
Paris as the comic space to protect and transform the lovers makes
the film’s discourse of tolerance and international romance more
powerful and believable.
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The final scene takes the characters to the end of their pilgrimage
in Céline’s apartment, one more location constructed with a
realistic vocation, deep in the heart of off-the-beaten-track but
still tourist-cute Paris. The characters, particularly Jesse, have
strung one excuse after another to prolong their time together and,
eventually, he misses his flight back to the U.S. How many more
flights he will miss after this one remains open but the ending strikes
the same blend of pure relationship and escape from compromise
that has constituted the film’s particular ‘translation’ of cultural
discourses on intimate matters. The two characters, after their
abstract and personal conversations, seem to have reached a stage
of contentment in each other’s company that makes his immediate
return to New York (and to his wife and child) less pressing. In this
final stage of their mutual seduction, music takes centre stage: not
only the music of the love song Céline has written for Jesse but,
just as significantly, the music of Nina Simone, who had recently
died in France after a long period of self-exile from her country,
the United States. Simone, who had always been outspoken in her
critique of U.S. politics and racism, represents a different type of
U.S. transnationalism, one that links Céline’s political commitment
with Jesse’s European travels but one that could finally not be
absorbed by the system. It is an index of the film’s defence of toler-
ance that Simone’s more abrasive side is ignored now, while the
open sensuality of some of her concerts is comically impersonated
by Céline who, still performing, becomes more sexually forward
than she had been so far. Temporary contentment and impending

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 174 The secret life of romantic comedy
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12 Will Nina make them stop talking? The open ending and the future
of relationships. Julie Delpy in Before Sunset (dir. Richard Linklater,
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2004, Warner Bros.)

physicality, conjured up by the presence of a cultural icon from

another age, mark the end of a film that, even in its apparently
rushed closure, remains reluctant to turn its discourse of crisis of
intimacy and sexy talk into something else. What the future will
bring has never been the concern of romantic comedy as a genre
but it is particularly foreign to a film so ‘naturally’ committed to
the brevity and volatility, but also continuing allure, of modern
love.
To conclude, the combination of romantic comedy with realism
and the discourse of independence in Before Sunset is of a different
kind from the more straightforward intergeneric encounters
explored in previous chapters, but, like them, it allows a glimpse
of the complexity and tortuous paths through which romantic
comedy, like other genres, has developed in the course of its
cinematic history and is still developing at the beginning of the
twenty-first century. In general, the view of romantic comedy as
an ever-evolving genre directly linked with – although not the direct
result of – social changes in intimate matters has allowed us to
start telling a different story: while the purer instances of the genre
during the various ups and downs of its Hollywood history may
be an important part of that story, it is in the interstices of the
genre’s frequent crosses with other comic or non-comic genres and
with modes and traditions not usually associated with it that the

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 Contemporary romantic comedy 175

most challenging developments have taken place. The critically

established cycles of romantic comedy – De Mille’s divorce come-
dies and Lubitsch’s silent film interventions, the screwball era,
the sophisticated and sex comedies of the 1950s, the nervous and
new romances of the 1970s and 1980s – have encapsulated and
attempted to resolve narratively historical moments of crisis and
transition in the institution of marriage, the role of sexuality in
romantic love, the validity of the concept of romantic love itself
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and its replacement by modified versions, and the construction of

gender and sexual identities. At the same time, the secret life of the
genre, which the specific examples analysed in this book have
attempted to unearth, has often engaged with the same social crises
in more unexpected ways, paving the way for more immediate
changes in the mainstream or pointing to discourses which would
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not become socially and generically consolidated until some decades

later, even sometimes, as in the case of Kiss Me, Stupid, leading
nowhere.
In generic terms, the secret life of romantic comedy has consti-
tuted a cinematic laboratory in which conventions, discourses and
definitions have been tested, sometimes accepted and sometimes
discarded, before moving into the genre’s more consolidated and
universally acknowledged representatives. And this is only a small
part of the story: Hollywood and its satellites have perhaps been
the centre of romantic comedy in modern times but by no means
its only space. The genre has existed, in very diverse ways, in other
national cinemas and traditions, not to mention its active life outside
the cinema, even though all of these have fallen outside the neces-
sarily restricted scope of this book. It has been my contention
that only a more flexible and less deterministic approach to the
genre’s main characteristics, one that moves beyond compulsory
heterosexuality and monogamy and the happy ending, can begin to
do justice to and to explain this variety and richness. Given the
contrast between romantic comedy’s capacity for endlessly trans-
forming itself and the immobility and repetitiveness of contem-
porary theories and, further, the still firmly established critical
disregard for one of the genres more consistently associated with
popular culture and the feminine, a lot of work remains to be done.
Desire may be compulsive but never compulsory, in any of its forms
– likewise with its representation in romantic comedy. By limiting
the genre’s role to the perpetuation of romantic love, obligatory

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 176 The secret life of romantic comedy

monogamous heterosexuality and the always and forever, we

have been performing an act of massive repression, similar to what
we have been blaming the genre for. In view of the growing visi-
bility of what has been left out, perhaps the time has come to open
the door and overcome the fear of being blinded by the light
outside.
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DSL04.indd 176 11/17/2008 5:15:26 PM

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(eds), 123–39.

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 Index
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Allen, Woody 48, 51, 54, 128–47, Bringing Up Baby 15, 50, 59, 68,
151–2, 164 127
Altman, Rick 3, 5–6, 7, 11, 14 Brooks, Peter 24
American President, The 38–45, Burns, Edward 155
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152 Butler, Judith 79–81

Annie Hall 130, 151, 164
Apartment, The 22, 83, 95, 97, Capra, Frank 55, 67
127 carnivalesque comedy 21, 32, 33,
Aristotelian categorisation 7–8, 9, 37
10 Cavell, Stanley 48, 64, 103–4,
Aristotelian comedy 19, 25, 35, 109, 170
61, 84 chaos theory 8–9, 10, 52
see also satire; black comedy Christmas in July 49
Awful Truth, The 59, 68 Cluny Brown 57, 68
comedian comedy 19–21, 23, 34,
Babington, Bruce 40, 64, 65, 82, 37, 48, 51, 53, 59, 66, 129
83, 134 comic space 18, 30–8, 39–46, 52,
Bakhtin, Mikhail 8, 21, 33–5, 37 75–6, 85, 92–5, 98–9,
Ball of Fire 15, 58, 69 108–10, 118–22, 126–8,
Beautiful Girls 145, 155, 165 130–1, 132–4, 139–47, 169–74
Before Sunrise 157–9, 166, 170, confessional comedy 165–6, 167–8
172 Conte d’hiver 133
Before Sunset 2, 3, 53, 54, 157–74 Crimes and Misdemeanors 54,
Benny, Jack 59, 61, 66–7, 70, 77 128–47, 169
Big 25, 50 Cukor, George 49
Birds, The 104, 105
black comedy 43, 60–1, 75 Dave 39
see also Aristotelian comedy; Daytrippers, The 151, 155, 156
satire de Mille, Cecil B. 48, 57, 175
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife 67 Decameron 26–7, 30–1
Break-Up, The 25, 144, 152 Delpy, Julie 157, 167–8, 172
Brill, Lesley 103, 104, 107 Derrida 9–11, 12, 16, 52, 60

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 186 Index

Design for Living 59, 63, 64, 67, Hatari! 4, 13

68 Hawke, Ethan 157, 167, 172
Desperately Seeking Susan 151, Hawks, Howard 3–6, 13, 15–16,
153–4 49, 55, 58, 69, 82, 97
divorce comedies 48, 61, 65, 175 Henderson, Brian 82, 84, 164
Dyer, Richard 83, 97 heterosexual desire 36, 43, 51, 64,
115, 122, 124, 128, 138, 154,
Ephron, Nora 50, 156 155
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless heterosexuality 18, 20, 25–6,
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Mind 156 27–9, 44, 47, 68, 97, 107,

Evans, Peter 40, 48, 64–5, 82, 83, 108, 111, 112, 113, 115, 123,
134 126, 127, 128, 137, 144, 147,
Everyone Says I Love You 145 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154,
166–8, 175–6
Faludi, Susan 42, 138 His Girl Friday 15, 68
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fantasy 20, 34, 45, 71, 74, 79, 83, Hitchcock, Alfred 53–4, 58, 67,
86, 88–90, 92–6, 97, 98, 100, 82, 103–28, 129–30, 170
119, 134, 153–7, 159–60 Holmlund, Christine 150–1
female sexuality 76, 80, 84, 88, homoerotic desire 107, 114, 116,
89, 94, 97, 115, 123, 126–8, 123, 128
172 homosexuality 78, 112–16, 124,
feminism 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 51, 149, 153–5
68, 78, 104, 138, 146, 167–8 homosocial desire 16, 31, 51, 64,
femininity 29, 43, 69, 81, 109, 115, 153
122, 124, 128, 146 humour 18, 20–4, 30, 33–6, 40–1,
film noir 7, 11, 58, 68, 120 44, 46, 71, 86, 103, 106, 130,
Foucault, Michel 79, 81 131, 135, 136–7, 138, 144,
Freud, Sigmund 21, 131, 136–7, 146, 147
147 see also jokes; laughter
friendship 18, 36, 47, 117, 144, Husbands and Wives 46, 129,
149, 153–4, 164 135, 143
Friends with Money 153–4
Frye, Northrop 1, 19, 22, 28, 31, independent cinema 50–1, 54,
37, 86 150–7, 164, 165, 172–3,
174
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 13, 97 In Good Company 25, 144
Girl Can’t Help It, The 13, 121 intimacy 1, 24, 28–9, 40,
Greenblatt, Stephen 34–5, 70, 122 117–18, 152, 163, 168,
Grindon, Leger 148–9 174
It Happened One Night 59, 67,
happy ending 18, 20, 23, 24–5, 68
27–9, 33, 35, 101, 126–7, I Was a Male War Bride 13, 15,
140, 144, 175 97

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 Index 187

Jeffers McDonald, Tamar 1, 7, masculinity 16, 29, 43, 45, 81,

22–3, 82, 84, 150, 153, 156, 112, 114–15, 122, 124, 128,
163 137, 146
jokes 20, 23–4, 35, 40–1, 71, melodrama 6, 11, 34, 36, 56, 60,
74–5, 135, 136–7, 138 62, 75, 95, 102, 131, 172
see also humour; laughter Mernit, Billy 25, 29, 36, 51
metafiction 51, 53, 75, 105, 106,
King, Geoff 85–6, 151–2 156, 157, 164
Kiss Me, Stupid 53, 81–102, 175 Mr. and Mrs. Smith 58, 67, 104
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Krutnik, Frank 20, 21, 22, 27, Moglie per una notte 93
29–30, 48, 50, 62, 82, 84, Much Ado About Nothing (play)
129–30, 148, 152, 169 31
multi-protagonist films 37, 52,
Lady Eve, The 48, 57–8, 68, 127 129, 131, 149
laughter 19–24, 30, 33, 34, 35 My Best Friend’s Wedding 25, 42,
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see also humour; jokes 144, 152, 154, 155, 156

Linklater, Richard 157–75
Lombard, Carole 56, 58–9, 61, Naremore, James 7, 103–4
67, 77, 80 Neale, Steve 1, 4, 5, 11, 14, 20,
L’ora della fantasia 93 21, 22, 40, 82, 108–9, 148
Love in the Afternoon 88, 121 neo-conservative discourses 138,
love triangle 56, 58, 60, 61–6, 71, 143, 146, 148
76, 130 nervous romances 17, 38, 48, 129,
Lubitsch, Ernst 35, 48, 53, 55–81, 148, 164
82, 101, 170, 175 new romances 17, 38, 48, 148–9,
Lubitschean comedy 57–8, 61, 65, 175
67, 68, 70 Next Stop, Wonderland 155–6
Ninotchka 35–6, 66, 68
Maid in Manhattan 2, 50, 151 North by Northwest 103–4, 109,
male anxiety 43, 123–8 170
male desire 106, 113, 155
Manhattan 130, 143–5, 152 Object of My Affection, The 25,
Man’s Favorite Sport? 13, 15, 83, 144, 152, 154, 155
97 Opposite of Sex, The 151, 154
marriage 18, 22, 25–6, 27–8, 29, Out of Sight 1–3, 50, 51, 152
48, 56, 61, 63, 64–5, 68, 70,
73, 83, 84, 88–9, 91, 96, 97, Palm Beach Story, The 48, 58
109, 110, 112–18, 120–8, Paul, William 59, 61, 62, 64, 66,
135–6, 138, 140, 145, 170, 74, 75–6, 149
175 performance 2, 43, 67, 69, 71–5,
Marriage Circle, The 63, 65, 68 75–81, 89, 91, 95, 98, 112,
marriage comedy 51, 53, 56, 57, 115, 122, 135, 161
61, 63, 71, 89, 93, 98, 101 Philadelphia Story, The 58, 68

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 188 Index

Pillow Talk 13, 50, 118, 121, see also female desire;
127 heterosexual desire;
Play It to the Bone 1, 6 homoerotic desire; sexuality
Portrait of Jenny 145 sexuality 27–9, 34, 36, 38, 40, 45,
Pretty Woman 2, 50, 151 52, 62, 65, 77, 79, 81, 83,
Prime 25, 144 97, 99, 104, 107, 117, 121,
128, 131, 136, 137, 143, 144,
realism 2, 19, 21, 60, 64, 77, 94, 155, 175
98, 107, 153, 156–63, 170–1, Shakespeare, William 19, 26–7,
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173–4 28, 32, 33, 34, 37, 62, 70,

Rear Window 54, 103–28, 129 72–4, 92, 95, 97, 99, 123,
relationship stories 28, 29, 163 142
Rio Bravo 3–6, 12–17, 50 Shakespearean comedy 1, 19, 28,
Rivette, Jacques 2, 157, 171 31–4, 37, 70
Rohmer, Eric 2, 103, 133, 157, Shop Around the Corner, The 66,
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171 68
romantic love 25, 33, 47, 97, Shumway, David 28, 40, 117,
116–19, 122, 123, 144–7, 163
149, 153, 159–62, 163–4, Sikov, Ed 53–4, 82, 85, 94, 96
169, 175 Simone, Nina 173
Sleepless in Seattle 2, 42, 50, 151,
Sabrina 88 155–6
Sartrean philosophy 130, 140, Smiles of a Summer Night 97
141 Some Like it Hot 13, 35, 83, 97
satire 19, 27, 51, 53, 60–2, 66, Speed 51, 152
69–70, 83, 85–7, 89–91, Staiger, Janet 14
94–8, 100–1, 138, 146 Stranger than Fiction 156–7
see also Aristotelian comedy; Sturges, Preston 48–9, 50, 57–8,
black comedy 103
Schatz, Thomas 12 Sullivan’s Travels 48, 50, 57–8
Science of Sleep, The 157
screwball comedy 15, 17, 48–9, Take a Letter, Darling 58
50, 57–9, 61, 64–5, 66–9, Thomas, Deborah 20, 34, 37, 62,
70–2, 78, 80, 97, 103, 104, 92
123, 128, 172, 175 thriller 1, 43, 45, 53, 60, 75, 102,
Searchers, The 13, 16 103–5, 106, 110–11, 122–4,
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 51, 64, 126, 128, 129–30, 143, 147
153 To Be or Not to Be 53, 55–81,
sex comedy 82, 84, 113 82, 85, 88, 92, 100, 101, 105
sex, lies, and videotape 164–5 To Catch a Thief 104, 121
sexual desire 27, 44, 45, 76, 83, transnational romance 149, 171
93, 95, 97–8, 116–17, 122, Truffaut, François 103, 105
123, 136, 137, 143–6, 164 Tzioumakis, Yannis 151–2

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 Index 189

Unfaithfully Yours 49 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7, 9, 10,

52
Walking and Talking 144, 151, Woman of Paris, A 57
153, 165–6 Wood, Robin 5, 15, 103, 105–6,
western 4–6, 11, 12–13, 15–16 107, 110
White Men Can’t Jump 25, 144, Working Girl 42, 129
152
Wilder, Billy 35, 53, 81–102, 170 Zizek, Slavoj 109–110
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