There was a lot of information packed into this post:
https://kit10phish.wordpress.com/?s=Problematic+RomCom&submit=Search
So I'm going to do a series to split it up into smaller chunks.
She's Not Like the Other Girls
But as comforting and engaging as these love stories can be, the truth is that most reiterate a problematic theme: The female protagonist is often quirky or different from other girls in some way, and her relationships with men are usually connected to the protagonist’s rejection of femininity. Given that this genre is so heavily marketed toward women, this common theme seems like something we should question. From the title of “chick flick,” the rom-com genre has become a quiet voice in how women should act.
“how to lose a guy in 10 days,” or to show women what not to do in a relationship. Notably, Andy takes on an overly feminine persona to lose Ben quickly; she installs a pink fluffy toilet seat in his bathroom and is extremely emotional during a meal, for example. While dramatic at times, Andy’s behavior plays into the idea that for a man to like a woman, she can’t be an emotional girly girl but has to be “different” — i.e., more masculine. The idea that women need to reject femininity to be desirable to men is problematic because it suggests we should reject traits assigned to our gender because they’ve been assigned to our gender. Women don’t always need to be feminine, but our gender expression shouldn’t be a determining factor in our relationships. These stereotypes still very inconspicuously advertise the ideal gender roles that should be taken to be in a successful relationship.
Gender Stereotypes and LGBTQ
The genre has always been majority white, at least in the mainstream (Soraya Roberts wrote a brilliant longread on how black rom coms have been culturally segregated), fat people are often crammed into the label of 'funny' or 'best friend' and trans and non-binary people are essentially non-existent. In other words, the very essence of rom coms are reliant on narrow conventions – like old fairytales, but with Jennifer Anniston as the constant lead.
It says a lot about Hollywood and how much influence and power it has over the world, society and culture. Rom-coms to me is the most subversively political genre because it teaches us who gets to be loved and who doesn’t. It teaches us who is deserving of a certain kind of love and a certain kind of partnership. So if we’re constantly centering cis and white and heteronormative, then we’ve just been telling Hollywood or the industry, through this media, has just been influencing and telling the world that these very specific type of people are deserving and are worthy of being loved or being in a relationship or having a happy ending, and, basically, trans people don’t.
There’s an obsession, in a way, to trans people’s origin story, like the transition and the struggle and how that creates an explosive dynamic with their family or their work or whatever, but they can’t seem to fathom that there’s more story to tell beyond that. So we never really get stories about love or healing, or even starting from there and seeing what else is beyond that, because there just isn’t that belief that that’s even warranted. It’s really hard for people to recondition that thinking and get past that.
“What we deserve and what should exist does not exist.” So, I’m curious, we could talk about what we think this absence represents for society’s views of us, and what it means to be denied this wish-fulfillment love story.
There is a handful of trans rom-coms that do exist. Maybe we can disagree about whether they should be considered rom-coms or trans, maybe I forgot things, but I just want to start off by listing them off. So, first, Adam, then Alice Júnior, Better Than Chocolate, Boy Meets Girl, Girl Stroke Boy, Holy Trinity, Victor/Victoria, and Some Like It Hot.
Trans people represent this notion of someone who defied all odds, who deviated from culture and from what the world wants and expects, and people just want their white picket fence, their spouse with the 2.5 kids, and with the dog or a cat. The fact that there aren’t a lot of trans rom-coms, or just even the idea of trans dating being this constant topic of debate, scrutiny, says a lot about how people value transgender people and how they don’t want to think of us in that way. I mean, they do, obviously. There’s debates about it on Fox News every other day. People, they want their perfect idea of whatever, and see us as wrong, as deviant. When people go to see some happy, perfect movie about love, they don’t want to have all of the questions running through their mind that trans folks bring up. It’s a really deep thing.
Trans-Adjacent Content
Oftentimes the cross-dressing is played as a joke, and feels really bad. It’s a lot of what I think of growing up with, like even just cross dressing in Monty Python and stuff like that. But Some Like It Hot, for me, whenever I revisit it, the joy that Jack Lemon has being a woman makes it feel so trans to me. I’m like, I don’t know if it’s supposed to be played as a joke, but it doesn’t feel like that’s the joke.
Billy Elliot, the movie about the boy who starts dancing. His best friend, Michael, would play with gender and dress. I watched that movie when I was 10 and I always thought that Michael would grow up to be a trans woman. In the last scene, when they’re 10, 15 years older, he isn’t. I don’t know, that’s just something I’ve always seen as… I don’t know. There’s just different moments where I saw someone assigned male at birth, who was super feminine and it was kind of hinted that they were struggling with gender one way or another, and then either they “manned up” at the end or they were just like a cis gay man in the end.
They don’t die at the end, but they don’t get their love. Or actually that’s not true. They do… I guess I’m sort of misspeaking. They get the girl, get the guy, but they have to go back to the way they were before. It’s sort of a unhappy ending. It’s annoying for us as trans people, that was what we grew up on.
There are a lot of old classics that can be seen through a trans lens because there’s always this high-concept conceit. There’s always this ruse or a lie or something. These high-concept rom-coms somewhat rooted in identity that has a little bit of a shame to it, but then ends up being aspirational. Because of that high-concept conceit, transgendered people can level up, use their imaginations and kind of see themselves in them.
Pretty Woman was very trans allegorical, because any trans woman who’ve seen that movie can relate to Vivian Ward or Kit De Luca. Maybe because they’re sex workers, which is a narrative that we haven’t really quite seen before in terms of that genre, and having it also be aspirational. And because they weren’t specifically cis, a viewer could imagine Julia Roberts is playing a trans woman. The whole conceit is they’re doing this thing for a week, but then also they don’t want anybody in the Beverly Hills circle to find out what she really is. A transgendered person might be able to relate to that, and then having a little bit of shame when people do start to out to find out. She started to… Well, she got angry about it and she almost left the whole thing because of that sense of betrayal of him saying something to his lawyer friend about what she is.
The Little Mermaid, for example, I don’t know if that’s a rom-coms necessarily, but it kind of is, even though it’s Disney and it’s animation and it’s… Ariel is the ultimate trans girl, because she identified… Well, she was born a mermaid, but identified as a human and did everything she could to become that person, and ended up having a better life because of it, or at least a happy ending.
The most frequent depiction for people like me is the trope of the doomed lesbian romance where one of them dies. When it comes down to it, lives like mine are completely invisible in films like these. They always have been. And while that doesn't diminish my enjoyment, it can also feel lonely, in a much larger sense, and in a way that feels harder to describe.
I think it essentially takes some film gate-keeping financier people to green-light something and go for it. I think that the audience is ready. The audience obviously is champing
Sources:
https://www.thealinemag.com/entertainment-socialmedia/the-toxic-reality-of-rom-coms
https://womensmediacenter.com/fbomb/the-problem-with-rom-coms
https://movieweb.com/romantic-comedies-popular-why/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/gallery/highest-grossing-romantic-comedies-419302/10-confessions-of-a-shopahloic-108333222/
https://www.34st.com/article/2021/02/romantic-comedy-diversity-bipoc-hollywood-representation
https://bouqs.com/blog/valentines-day-statistics-survey
https://business.yougov.com/content/45117-how-will-americans-spend-valentines
https://today.yougov.com/entertainment/articles/45146-americans-relationship-romantic-comedies-poll
https://www.movieguide.org/news-articles/who-goes-to-the-movies-4.html
https://www.jonathanwstokes.com/blog/2015/04/18/are-romantic-comedies-profitable
https://skoobywatchesmovies.com/recent-movie-news/2019/3/16/rom-com-bracket-vote-on-the-sweet-16-kj8bk-bg7nl-87f6x
https://www.mindlabpro.com/blogs/nootropics/neuroplasticity-rewire-your-brain-for-learning-memory-and-mood
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.630829/full
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-16592-y
https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kxzpv/rom-com-queer-viewer
https://www.autostraddle.com/queering-the-canon-where-are-all-the-trans-rom-coms
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