When I was a slip of a boy, I watched a fair number of Disney films (I never saw The Lion King, don’t judge me). One of the things that stuck in my febrile and contumacious mind was the idea of the “Happy Ever After”. Attempting to resolve the cognitive dissonance between the “Happy Ever After” with the relationships I saw as a child made me immensely suspicious of relationships in general.
With a “Happy Ever After”, you see, the protagonists (strong, dynamic male; vacillating and weakened female – but of course, this was Disney in the 90s) go through trials and tribulations and eventually fall in love, whereupon they get married and the credits roll. When the “Happy Ever After” rolled onto the screen, my verdant young mind was left wondering, “what then?”
The relationships I saw as a child were of two adults negotiating the spaces in between each other. Don’t get me wrong, I grew up in environments with a lot of love, but it was a love that is rarely depicted on screen. Some Twitter wag years ago described all grown-up relationships as being “two adult humans asking each other where they would like to eat”. I recognised that kind of love. I didn’t see much love of the twitterpated and dotty kind.
Netflix and chill?
This may explain why I have such a grounded – one might call it mercenary – understanding of relationships. I was, regrettably and briefly, a fan of Ayn Rand in my early adulthood, and she described relationships – both platonic and deeply emotional – as transactions: “what can you do for me/what can I do for you?”. While I am more than happy to admit that my brief and nonlucid appreciation for Ayn Rand is very much a thing of the past, I do recognise that the transactions of relationships are a component, even if they aren’t the whole picture. We do for others, and by doing, we show them how much we love them. From folded towels to a complement of orgasms, we are what we do: we love by doing loving things.
Which brings me to my central conceit: I hate romantic films. I really, really hate them – almost as much as I hate ABBA, and for similar reasons. Unfortunately, the reason I hate them has been well-trodden by various garbage websites like Cracked and Buzzfeed, with their “20 ways the cast of Love Actually would end up on the Sex Offenders Register”-type articles. Yawn. Boring. It’s been done. End the blog post.
Except it hasn’t, because while we can talk about Prime Minister Hugh Grant abusing his position of power to sleep with cleaning-lady Martine McCutcheon, effectively replicating Bill Clinton’s peccadillos in a charmingly befuddled British setting, we fail to talk about the “what then?”. Yes, it’s a film: it has to end. But why don’t we ever, ever talk about how the characters can possibly move forward from a grandly stupid and one-sided gesture of intent?
We see this a lot in the world. People – men and women, I’m bipartisan – think that getting married will paper over the cracks in a relationship. Or that having a baby will fix things. Or that moving in together is a good idea. Or that the new job, new promotion, new car will somehow fix things, make everything better, make two sentient bodies colliding in empty space somehow easier and more enjoyable. The grand gesture is what matters – the movies tell us so!
Old wives know this – you should listen to old wives about everything but medical matters, ironically – and they will tell you that relationships are work. Sometimes you have to, in the words of Bill Hicks, “slap on a big fake smile and plough through this shit one more time”. Sometimes you have to go to a baby shower or a work function and pretend, like everyone else is doing, that you’re having fun. Honeymoons end, new baby excitement ends, and everything settles down to something that many people are not prepared for: spending a large quantity of time in a room, with a person you can never truly know, talking about snacks.
This is why I hate romantic films: when all is said and done, and John Cusak has stopped lifting his boombox in the rain, or Andrew Lincoln has stopped videotaping Keira Knightley without her knowing, what the fuck happens then? Are they supposed to have a normal relationship? A grand dramatic gesture is all well and good, but you still have to live with it. And ten, twenty years down the line, when you’ve gotten fat and bald, your partner is going to look at you and think, “I remember when he creepily showed up at my dorm with a boombox”. And they will sigh, and you will sigh, and gradually circle the drain together.
“Hello, police please?”
We don’t adequately prepare people for the post-honeymoon period, and that is why, to a degree, I think that so many marriages fail in this country. And not to sound like a disgraceful, reactionary Boomer, but I think that romantic comedies have a big part to play in that. You might well say, “well, come on, it’s a film,” – as if we don’t worry about the influence of violent films on the youth of today. There were protests and denounciations when Joker appeared on the silver screen. Yet nobody is protesting whatever guffs out from Richard Curtis’ flap these days, and in my opinion that man is responsible for more emotional distress than any number of superhero films.
We applaud Thor’s deft hammer-ship and Superman’s punching, but we know it’s not real: we talk about it all the time. What we never talk about is how unrealistic our romantic narrative is. We imagine worlds in which figures collide and entertwine, forming a perfect union, but we never really discuss how wrong-headed our very concept of love is. Oh, I know woke bloggers talk about the rape culture inherent in 16 Candles and Sleepless in Seattle, and more power to them, however pedestrian their observations may be. What they fail to spend enough time on is how dumb-fuck our whole approach to love is.
In my job I often see videos of someone proposing to someone else in a public place. The whole grand gesture, as well – down on one knee, pre-prepared speech, impeccably-sourced ring – and every single time I feel an immense burden of guilt and sympathy for whoever is being proposed to. He or she is surrounded by attentive strangers, all waiting for an answer. The weight of social pressure bows their shoulders. If you reject me, you’re the arsehole! These people will boo you for having denied them a glimpse of a happy ending! Submit, submit!
In much the same way that people who watch Law & Order think they know how the justice system works, so too do young boys and girls watch romantic films and form an impression as to how to relate to other people. Often they end up thinking that the big gestures matter. They follow the OJ approach: every time OJ Simpson gave Nicole Brown a black eye, I seem to recall, he bought her a Porsche (and then he murderered her – sue me). This is what the media tells us. The reality is, as I’ve tried to say, that it’s the small gestures that actually matter. They may not make good television, but that’s how we interact with each other – we love by doing not once, but many times.
James Rayneau 