Illustration by K. Wroten
On a podcast the other day, the comedian Andrew Schulz, one of the stars of the new Kenya Barris-directed romantic comedy “You People,” dropped a bomb of sorts. As the movie’s climactic scene was being shot, Schulz alleged, the two romantic leads, Lauren London and Jonah Hill, stopped short of locking lips. The kiss we saw onscreen, Schulz said, was actually simulated via C.G.I. Regardless of whether his description of the “You People” situation was accurate, his words—and the flurry of online commentary that followed—indicated a broader issue. The connection between love interests, once a central element of the rom-com, has in recent years seemed secondary at best; now it’s actually plausible that someone might try to add it in post. And while shows like “Love Life” and “Starstruck” have brought the genre to the small screen, successful features are increasingly few and far between. Is the romantic comedy in crisis?
In their heyday in the eighties, nineties, and early two-thousands, rom-coms—from “When Harry Met Sally” and “Pretty Woman” to “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”—dependably provided us with a just-realistic-enough fantasy of what the path to a modern relationship could look like, teaching us not only about love but also about the particular social and cultural conditions in which it blooms. Stalwarts like Jennifer Lopez have continued to churn out variations on familiar themes, and new issue-centric romantic comedies such as the race-relations-focussed “You People” and Billy Eichner’s “Bros,” billed as the first gay rom-com from a major studio, have attempted to engage with the politics of today. But have chemistry, wit, and pleasure been lost in the process? I recently sat down with my fellow-critics Vinson Cunningham and Alexandra Schwartz to take stock.
—Naomi Fry
Naomi FryThis is a really interesting time to talk about romantic comedies, which we as thirty- and fortysomethings grew up watching, because in many ways the rom-com as we used to know it is a dying breed. We had movies like “Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “Annie Hall”; it’s not in the same medium, but even “Sex and the City” arguably draws on the tropes of the genre, which is so familiar it’s like an old sweater. It’s so definitive to growing up, and to our cultural understanding of relationships generally. But I want to hear from you guys, Vinson and Alex. Why do you think that the rom-com as a form is important?
Alexandra SchwartzWell, first of all, who doesn’t love love? I don’t think that romantic comedies are as much about learning about what couples are as they are about the process of attraction—and ideally, in the process of attraction, something about self-discovery. Not in a heavy, hard, belabored sense, but, you know: you’ve been in love with the wrong person; you’ve mistaken someone’s identity; you’ve been attracted to this one and you should be attracted to that one. What does it say about you? Someone like Nora Ephron can take us on that process over the course of twelve years, in “When Harry Met Sally,” or over the course of a few months, in “You’ve Got Mail,” which I’m very prepared to argue are both crucial films of the twentieth century. So, the joy and delight in that gives one a hope for the future. And just like with the end of a Shakespeare comedy or the end of the Jane Austen novel, you don’t really see the couple together, so you don’t have to actually get into the nitty-gritty of what that might look like. You can leave with this ideal version of them in your head, feeling high on love and hopeful about love for yourself.
Vinson CunninghamYeah, I think the hope thing is really big. Because we don’t see the couple together, but what we do see is somebody fuck up really badly, right? The classic end-of-Act II break of the rom-com is, like, somebody crosses the line, and now they don’t talk anymore, and now so-and-so has gotten into working out, or whatever. They’ve moved on, they’ve gotten better on their own, and they come back together. It shows that this love that we all, on one level or another, try to experience in our lives can withstand the great drama, trauma, rupture that has to happen in a movie like this. The form helps us understand the architectonics of love. Also, by the way: rom-coms are good for seeing hot people. I don’t know how to say that any better. It’s just, like, I want to see this person in a rom-com because at some point they’re going to take off their shirt or something, and that’s fantastic.
O.K., but are they? Let’s turn to the figure of Billy Crystal in one of the truly great rom-coms—
Excuse me!
Do you want to say something on behalf of a shirtless Billy Crystal? I have nothing against it, but that’s not what’s getting me into my seat.
Well, the analogue is Billy Crystal in a very fall-appropriate cream sweater.
Now you’re talking.
For some of us, these things are also erotic. Look at him standing by that window, all bundled up!
Exactly. But the sexuality of these movies and the explicitness—or lack thereof—is another thing we might want to think about. Explicit sexuality is not necessarily more radical or less radical, but the conservatism of the genre and its tropes is almost drawing from Code-era Hollywood, right? Like, oh, we’re going to show them kissing, but we’re not going to show too much tongue. Or the man might take off his shirt, but the woman won’t. Stopping a step before actual sex is something that this genre is perhaps known for. But, before we get into all of that, is there a rom-com that really either delighted you or baffled you or horrified you as a young person? Was there one movie or even a single scene that was especially formative?
I grew up watching “Sleepless in Seattle,” but in the years since, having become not only a fan but a deep reader of the Nora Ephron canon, I have gravitated to “When Harry Met Sally” and “You’ve Got Mail” as the truly great films of that period. “Sleepless in Seattle,” to me, has faded away, maybe in part because the couple never meet: Tom Hanks is sleepless in Seattle, Meg Ryan is maybe sleepless in New York, and then they have their whole Empire State Building thing at the very end, and there’s a lot riding on that particular fantasy. But I like movies that are much more about people learning who they are through the process of attraction to another person, and those two other movies, for me, every time, fit that bill.
“You’ve Got Mail” is one of the greats, I agree. My favorite rom-com—and this is hard—is “Love & Basketball,” with Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan. One of the greatest romantic scenes ever, because it’s so incredibly stupid, is when they finally reach this moment in their relationship where they realize that something needs to happen, and Sanaa Lathan comes up to Omar Epps and very solemnly challenges him to a game. He says, “For what?,” and she says, “Your heart.” And then they play basketball. What’s hilarious is that he just whoops her ass. He’s not trying to lose so he can get the girl—it’s one of the absurdities of all movies to me. I still don’t understand his motivations for basically dunking on her after she’s laid out her heart in this basketball-inflected way. I also really love a sort of ensemble rom-com in the same vein, and with many of the same people—Taye Diggs comes into this—called “The Best Man,” which is about a group of people coming together at the wedding of two of their friends. One of them, who’s gotten famous as a writer—so of course I was already projecting myself into this a little bit—wrote a book that’s about his friends. And then, at the wedding, they slowly realize through the veiled fiction that he once slept with the woman who’s getting married, and they have to work through that. In some ways, it’s more of a rom-com between friends who need to fall back in love with each other.
I don’t know if we’re all intentionally blocking it out, but any discussion of ensemble rom-coms has to include “Love Actually,” which I think in terms of box-office was a high point but also the death knell for the genre. There are couplings, there are breakups, there is weeping, there is celebration—there’s kind of everything! “Love Actually” has become a real hate object online over the years, but it’s still enormously popular, and it’s a real Christmas-movie staple—you know, all of the sentimental feelings are poured through that movie.
To your point about how “Love Actually” has become an object of derision: Do rom-coms need to be “good” for us to enjoy them? Or can they be kind of ridiculous or unsatisfying on an aesthetic level and script level, and yet there’s still something about them?
It doesn’t have to be a great movie, but you have to believe that these two people want to be together, and you have to buy in. It can be schlock all around—but, if you can’t believe, I think the whole thing falls apart like a bad soufflé.
Yeah, they can be bad as comfort, but that’s it. The genre has its own conventions, and you can succeed or fail by them.
For this conversation, we had decided to have at least a couple of very recent rom-coms as a shared corpus to discuss. And the question that I want to ask you guys that arises from this is: Do you remember when rom-coms used to be fun to watch? [Laughs.] Because it doesn’t feel that way anymore. And I don’t know if I should blame my age—
It’s not you. It’s them. We are a culture in crisis!
And, if you were to define this crisis of the rom-com for us, how would you describe it?
O.K., I’m fearful of sounding like David Brooks, but I think this society appears not to know what love is! I would argue that the movies that we’ve watched for this purpose are not romantic and are not funny. So, we have a double category fail. The unfunniness—fine. There are a lot of movies that try to be comedies and fall flat, and maybe it’s our taste in humor, et cetera. But aside from that: Where is the romance? Where is the attraction? Where is the interest in love? Love is something that transforms an individual, that then transforms two people, that can build you up, that can destroy you. I mean, love is a foundation of the human experience. I will go so far as to say that some of these lighthearted movies that we love—the classics of the genre—address these questions in profound ways. And these newer movies don’t even know what the question is. The question has not even occurred to them.
Yeah. One of the things that I used to love about a rom-com, whether it’s “When Harry Met Sally” or “Pretty Woman”—which I just rewatched a couple of weeks ago and I think holds up—is that they had enough grounding in reality to be “relatable,” but they also created a fantasy of what love can be: a template for attraction, a template for romance. I think, recently, that has completely been forgotten. I know we all watched Kenya Barris’s “You People,” a movie that at least aspires to be a rom-com and which just premièred on Netflix. I felt that the coupling between Jonah Hill, who plays the male lead, and Lauren London, who plays the female lead, was almost an afterthought. It’s just an excuse in order to build up other things—but the chemistry was nil. I was, like, “What is the connection between these two people?”
I think the need to build up “other things” is precisely the problem here. In the classic rom-com period to which we’re all referring, you always got the sense that the first order of business was to get two people that we believe had chemistry, and the movie was a vehicle to get them together. So, it’s, like, O.K., we got Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan: What are we going to do with that? We got Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal: What are we going to do with that? And the situation around it was a whole mechanism, a whole unbelievable grandfather clock designed to put them together. Whereas it seems like, for example, in “You People,” it’s the other way around. It’s, like, What’s the scenario? A Black Muslim woman and a white Jewish man, and all of the racial trouble that might ensue. Jonah Hill had a hand in writing this, so he’s the lead—so it becomes, “Let’s find somebody that might work for the other role.” You can see the joint interests of Kenya Barris—who, in his “Curb Your Enthusiasm”-style vehicle “#blackAF,” always talks about his obsession with clothes and snazzy dressing—and Jonah Hill, who is the fit god all of a sudden. He probably had a contract stipulation in this that he got to keep the bleach-blond hair he’s been rocking—
He didn’t change a thing about himself to play this character! He has a tattoo for his sister that says “Beanie” on his arm!
Exactly! And he meets his love interest, Lauren London, because he mistakes her for an Uber driver, and they have one date in some hip L.A. place, and then they go to some hypebeast boutique that looks suspiciously like Supreme and pick out the same sneakers. It’s, like, is that the moment when they fall in love? The movie just says “Six months later”—it moves ahead because it won’t show us the thing that we all want, the slow attraction and repulsion and the agony and what it takes to get together, because the movie doesn’t have the courage of those convictions. That’s not part of its makeup. Whereas, in the rom-coms that we like, that’s what it all is for: getting these people together. Like, imagine “You’ve Got Mail,” but if it really wanted to be about the challenges of life on the Internet or the horrors of electronic communication—and, by the way, there’s a love plot. It’s just ass-backward.
I totally agree with you about the charms of watching people fall in love. Both “You People” and another recent romantic comedy we watched, “Shotgun Wedding,” share the fact that you don’t see the courtship unfold. Maybe that just seemed like too heavy a lift for these filmmakers, in that it would require the leads to display even an iota of attraction towards one another. But “You People” is an issues movie—it’s about the “culture wars,” and theoretically about how a couple thinks their love is going to transcend them, gets mired in them, and then does transcend them. So I could see a version of the movie where we take the courtship for granted, as unbelievable as it is—where we let the sneaker be the semaphore for whatever the hell is going on there—and we just say, “Oh, you like Gucci slides; he appreciates your Gucci slides. Unfortunately, you both deserve each other.”
But the thing that really pisses me off, if I may say so in print, is that once this couple is faced with a challenge—which is that the cultural problem is real, that the barriers between them are serious, that each family is alienating the other member of the partnership—these are not issues that affect their relationship in any way until they very unbelievably break up on the eve of their wedding because they just can’t handle it anymore, and much more unbelievably come back together because the movie needs to end. If you want to go there, go there! And let’s look at the very interesting question of what it’s actually like when love is challenged by society. You know, when the Capulets and the Montagues actually have a problem with each other, what happens then? But there’s no interest.
What you were saying about these real issues as a potentially rich playing field for a movie made me think all the way back to Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever,” which came out in 1991. It’s not a romantic comedy, although it has some funny moments in it. But that’s a movie that goes there and actually talks about the obstacles to having an interracial relationship. It’s commendable in a way to do what “You People” is doing, and it has a lot of potential, but it’s not romantic and it’s not funny. It’s also not an “issues movie” in a way that that Spike Lee movie was, for instance—if we put romance and comedy aside, it’s also not doing the third thing.
The word “commendable” really stands out to me, because I don’t want to watch a movie that is commendable. I want to watch a movie that goes there. If it’s going to get to these issues about how race affects intimate relationships, and especially romantic relationships in 2023 America, then I want to see a movie that explores that either through drama—as you’re saying, Naomi—or through comedy, which is a great way to tell the truth. But I’m coming back to the word “commendable” because, to me, the movie wore its desperation to get credit for “going there” on its sleeve. It almost seemed like the dialogue was written by politically angry, sincere tweeters. . . . There are two cases in the movie where characters give, essentially, a Twitter-scripted apology. That’s not how people actually speak to each other in life or deal with conflict or think about things.
Speaking of going there, what I kept thinking about was the genre of movies that are made today but want to be like “Caddyshack”—that want to really throw stereotypes into things and gleefully transgress. There’s a scene in “You People” where both sets of parents come over for dinner and, in maybe five minutes, they bring up slavery, the Holocaust, and Louis Farrakhan. It can be done, and it can be funny—but it’s either got to be way more fucked up or just not brought up at all.
In the newer rom-coms that we watched together, whether it’s “You People” or “Shotgun Wedding” or “Bros,” a lot of stuff is displaced onto the parents. Obviously “You People” is a flip of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” so it’s not like relationships within a birth family vis-à-vis your significant other are unexplored territory in movies, but there seems to be a much heavier emphasis on it in these more recent movies, where the conflict finds its root not so much organically within the couple, but with the in-laws. And I wonder if that has to do with what we’ve been talking about, the lack of chemistry between the leads, where the main thing isn’t, like, Oh, my God, when are they going to kiss? Oh, my God, when are they going to have sex? Oh, my God, what kind of conflict will they have between them that will be an obstacle to this relationship working out, and then how will they work it out? This is all displaced onto in-laws. And is there anything less sexy than that?
That’s so true. Even though “Bros” has a lot of explicit sex and pats itself on the back for being explicit, to be honest, I could take or leave it—it didn’t make one bit of difference to me in terms of the movie itself. But definitely the chemistry issue seems to be salient. I had a huge problem with the lack of chemistry in “Bros,” where it just felt like the Billy Eichner character is setting himself up to be a stereotype of the loudmouth cultural New York Jew, and falls in love with a very milquetoast, bland, hot non-Jewish white guy. And then nothing convinced me that they were actually attracted to each other on a physical or indeed spiritual level. But I also wonder if it has to do with immaturity as a fact of these rom-coms. I am thinking about some of the classics from the genre—those people are adults. I’m not saying they’re hugely functional adults, but something in the culture has changed. There have been infinite opinion pieces and trend pieces written about how millennials, for instance, were living at home with their parents for much longer periods of time—unlike in the past, where you either stay very close to the family unit and never leave your home town, or you go to New York City, place of promise, and never call your family again—so I’m willing to believe that a thirty-five-year-old in Los Angeles is sort of weirdly still attached to his parents. But the Jonah Hill character also acts like a teen-ager. He’s embarrassed by his parents; he’s constantly telling them to shut up; he hasn’t learned at all how to navigate that relationship into adulthood, and there seems to be no incentive, either coming from within or coming from them, to do that, so no one has cut the parental-child bond at all. This is really a cross between “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “Meet the Parents,” and the whole thing with “Meet the Parents” is, you know, Daddy loves his little girl and wants to protect her. That’s very much what is going on with Eddie Murphy and Lauren London—but this movie hasn’t figured out a way to make its characters plausibly engage with the idea of love as something that’s desirable in adult life. It’s all about the fear of loneliness.
But, Naomi, you were talking about the fantasy element, which has a huge role in rom-coms. I think “Working Girl” is one of the great fairy-tale movies. It also calls back to the classic rom-coms of the thirties; it’s an issues movie, but in a way that works with comedy and fantasy, the issues being class and women in the workplace. But some of my favorite rom-coms actually are more realistic than not, and one that I’m thinking of is a very underrated movie from the early nineties: “Forget Paris,” which Billy Crystal directed and stars in, opposite Debra Winger. Billy Crystal wonderfully plays an N.B.A. ref, so there are a lot of height jokes. His character’s father had been part of the D Day invasion during World War Two and so wanted to be buried in France; when his body is lost on the flight there, Billy Crystal meets Debra Winger, an executive who works for the airline, and a romance ensues. It involves the difficulties of two people’s professional aspirations clashing; infertility troubles—there’s a wonderful scene with Billy Crystal on the way to get his sperm delivered from the sperm clinic without it going bad after the allotted number of hours when he’s in traffic—problems with location; problems with caring for elderly family members—Debra Winger’s dad is old and senile, and has to live with them for a period of time, and it strains the relationship—et cetera. Those are huge adult issues that the movie makes hilarious and delightful. And I just think this comes back to this immaturity problem. Part of what I would argue the point of the rom-com is is to have fantasy go up against life to some degree, because that’s what love is. All love is a fantasy. You are imagining the best version of yourself; you’re imagining the best version of the other person; you’re imagining that everything is going to go perfectly. And life does not happen that way. But where can you still find the fun and the comedy in actual reality? I think that’s often when rom-coms work best. And movies like “You People” want to plunge us into our debased reality and rub our noses in it—I think it gets the reality and what’s at stake there wrong and gets the fantasy element wrong. And then, on the total opposite end, movies like “Shotgun Wedding” are pure fantasy. It’s taking place on an island in the Philippines, and there are a bunch of pirates who turn out to come from Bali who are doing a hostage thing. It’s just a kind of comic cartoon action-adventure with a squabbling couple thrown into the middle of it. And the only thing I think is particularly notable is that I keep seeing these rom-coms that are set in these Instagrammable locations. It takes place, like a destination wedding itself, outside of the realm of reality, so you never have to actually think about what real romance means.
What I’m gleaning from what you said, and I think it’s really true, is that there needs to be a nice balance of fantasy and reality. It’s not so far out of the realm of possibility for us to imagine ourselves in these situations, but it’s heightened. “Pretty Woman” is a movie that I’ve seen a trillion times in the years since it came out, in 1990, and it’s still extremely enjoyable. It has the Cinderella element, where someone is lifted from the squalid reality into another realm—and a key thing here, too, is that the chemistry between the two leads is off the charts. It is very economical in the way it’s told, and the jokes hit, and it’s a little bit sexy, and everybody looks great, and it’s not too heavy. I mean, just imagine a movie like “Pretty Woman”—it couldn’t have been written today. A sex worker and a multimillionaire. It would be weighed down before we even began by the politics of the whole thing. Impossible!
Yeah, it’d be a different kind of story. “You’ve Got OnlyFans.”
Let’s write it, you guys. I’m ready to take on the challenge.
We keep coming back to this issue of chemistry and how there is no chemistry. Why do you think that is? Because a year ago we all gathered with our wonderful colleague Doreen St. Félix to talk about the fact that movies aren’t sexy anymore. Now we’re back, talking about why movies aren’t romantic anymore. Are these things connected? I mean, again, I don’t think you need explicit sex scenes in rom-coms at all. But does that have something to do with it? Is there something going on here where we can’t deal with attraction? What is at the root of these terrible casting decisions?
Well, this is interesting because it connects to “Shotgun Wedding,” which is a vehicle for the sexiness of Jennifer Lopez. There’s a scene where she’s trying to get Josh Duhamel to have sex with her, and she strips down to her panties, she turns around, she reaches up to a high shelf, and . . . things happen, all right? This is a family Web site.
The famous butt, suffice to say, is on display.
It’s there! There are these moments, right? But it’s not a movie like “Bros,” where the showing of sex—specifically, gay sex—is part of the logic of the movie. It’s part of its politics; it’s almost part of its reason for being. In “Shotgun Wedding,” sex wasn’t at all an engine of the plot; it was just, like, Oh, this part exists for this person to be sexy. And I found myself actually surprised. It was like reading a nineties-era magazine profile where the writer’s, like, “And there she sat, eating her salad with her breasts.” I was, like, “Is this O.K.?” And maybe my queasiness reflects a new politics, in reaction to the excesses of that kind of filmmaking thirty years ago, when there were instances that we could point out that really were dehumanizing. But in “Shotgun Wedding” Josh Duhamel’s character is trying to make a perfect wedding, and J. Lo’s character has had a failed engagement before and is less enthusiastic about the pomp and circumstance. On the day of their wedding, the pirates come, and now it’s an action movie. They’re ludicrously—and it’s supposed to be ludicrous—working out their relationship as they’re killing these bad guys. The other thing that I found myself clutching my pearls about was, like, they’re really killing people in this. But, in between all that, they’re, like, “I promise next time to listen to you.” It’s tonally everywhere. But J. Lo is so good. I feel like she has finally figured out what being J. Lo in movies looks like and can just do it.
She is good at it, and her production company is behind both this movie and another J. Lo rom-com from 2022, “Marry Me,” in which she plays a version of herself—a hugely successful pop star—who’s supposed to get married onstage to her pop-star boyfriend, only to discover that he’s cheated on her, and so at the last minute she chooses Owen Wilson, who looks like a wet washcloth.
I saw the trailer for that, and I was, like, “What happened?”
She picks him out of the audience, they get fake-married, and then end up forming a real relationship in a way that neither actor can believe in at all. Good for her for putting herself front and center, I guess, but I can’t really let her off the hook for not going one notch above this.
It is interesting. You were talking, Vinson, about the sexiness of J. Lo, and for me the weak link was Josh Duhamel, honestly. The performance was quite wooden, and, as we’ve been saying about everything, the chemistry was not there. I was, like, “What’s the connection between these two people?” They met yesterday and there’s nothing there. I thought it would have been a more interesting movie if Lenny Kravitz, who is treated as the real sex god, was the other romantic lead. Let’s give it some juice! Let’s get Lenny in the lead!
And the only costume we’re gonna provide is a very long rope of pearls.
I’m just rampantly speculating now, but is part of what’s going on that there must be one white lead, either because of the culture-clash element or because of the studio? What is Owen Wilson doing in “Marry Me”? Of course, they get the comic mileage, just like with “You People,” out of the difference in culture. In “You People” there’s a more specific culture—a certain kind of oblivious, Angeleno privileged Jewish culture that’s getting satirized in a way that I found absurd—but in “Shotgun Wedding” it’s Midwestern whiteness. I actually very much appreciated Jennifer Coolidge’s turn as Josh Duhamel’s mom, because it did bring some comedy to the movie for me. And, you know, in “Marry Me,” the Latino ex of the J. Lo character refers to Owen Wilson as “albino.” So maybe it’s a cynical thing where the studio needs a white lead; maybe it’s because whiteness works as a kind of lazy comic premise at this point, in a way that’s pretty played out. Because otherwise why wouldn’t Lenny Kravitz have been the love interest?
Right. By the way, Lenny Kravitz could have been a godsend for “You People”—both Black and Jewish. Let us not forget that those people exist! [Laughs.]
Of course! Oh, my God—what if Lenny had performed the wedding?
It might have been one of the better scenes. This goes back to the point about the growing-up aspect of the rom-com. And this is the marriage plot, too, right? What it usually means—and this is problematic, but it is also part of the rhythm of our lives—is that love and marriage are the ways that we fully join our communities. The way we fully become members of whatever it is that we have, yes, struggled with in the Oedipal sense, but also inescapably loved because we’ve grown up into it. And the monocultural rom-com, let’s call it, zeroes out the thin comedy of “You do this and I do that!” and says, “No, we’re growing together into something that we both recognize.”
So, for example, “The Best Man,” which now is a saga. The second one came out in 2013, and now Malcolm D. Lee, the director, has come out with a miniseries—another, like, four hours in this universe. And it’s taking them through their lives. In the first movie, they must be in their mid-twenties, and now they’re coasting into their mid-forties, so it really is about growing up, and it’s about success; they’re all ambitious in their own ways. Nia Long—again, a type—is the very driven Black woman who’s at the top of a news organization. And, because she’s so driven, she doesn’t have time for love. Terrence Howard realizes he’s got heart problems and has to stop drinking because he has a heart attack. So even though it’s very interested in the love part, you get all these different themes—and they’re all Black people who are probably ten years older than me, and I have known and admired and sort of envied them all my life. They’re the kind of people that lived in Fort Greene right when Spike Lee was becoming a thing, right? And they’re of that milieu, you know—they listen to Erykah Badu in their homes, and they have tasteful African masks on the wall. I wanted to be one of these people my whole life, and I came along a little bit too late. And it really is, besides its corniness, a chronicle of a certain kind of Black Gen X experience unlike any other that I’ve seen. But, to your point, you have to be willing to grow up to do that! You have to be willing to, like, not be mad at your mom to make that movie.
Yeah, totally. This goes back to the question of, what are the parents doing in these movies? Love and romance do connect us to our communities and ask us to ask ourselves, “How are we different than the way we grew up?” Both on the individual level—how do I want my life and my relationship to look different than my parents’?—and on a broader level: How will the community I’m part of be different than the one I came from? That’s why the rom-com can be a kind of wish fulfillment that touches reality enough to reassure us that some of these things can work out—that you can navigate those questions, whether or not they’re explicitly raised in these movies. “You People” wants so desperately to be relevant to the culture, and of course, in that desperation, confines itself to feeling passé instantly. It wants to ask the big questions but doesn’t want to look at what people do to navigate them. That sounds so serious that it’s hard to imagine a comedy doing it, except that’s what comedy does all the time. And the reason why comedy and love go so well together is that love is all about finding out that you aren’t who you thought you were and that dignity will get you nowhere and that trying to tell a consistent story about yourself is impossible. You’re two atoms colliding, and you’re both going to be changed in the process. And that can either be tragic, because you lose your sense of yourself completely, or it can be wonderful and hilarious, because you gain a new one. No one was changed in “You People.” What happened in “You People” was that the two parents were changed, but in that Twitter-esque way of “I know how to apologize to a crowd and not to an individual. I know how to make an apology that will check the boxes and show that I did the learning.” All of that utterly generic posturing actually doesn’t bring us closer together. It puts on more masks than it takes off. Comedy takes off the mask! And I wish the people making these movies would just strive for that.
I know it sounds like we’re asking a lot. But Jonah Hill clearly wanted to make a character who was as aligned with himself as could be, and I found this to be the case with “Bros” as well. A big issue I had with that movie was that both the film itself and its promotion seemed so invested in allowing Billy Eichner to declare that he was a serious creative force, and it lost a sense of fun and delight in the process. Maybe it’s just that these characters are too close to the people who play them, and these people can’t really laugh at themselves. That’s worked wonderfully in the past for various comedian auteurs, but something is wrong here, where the comedy is not really coming from within. It’s all about dealing with others in some way. These are all vehicles for one star instead of a couple: “I love myself. I want you to love me.”
This is where I think the influence of Judd Apatow is most apparent—the one star as an avatar for the kind of person that they are, going back to Amy Schumer in “Trainwreck.” Even “The Big Sick,” which I liked, was very much, like, “Here’s Kumail Nanjiani!” They’re all semi-autobiographical and closely implicated with the persona of the star and therefore basically just reinforce what we think about them while putting them into some romantic situation. We’re definitely post-Ephron and in the middle of the Apatow thing.
I found “The Big Sick” to be funny and delightful and romantic, and I think it has a few things going for it. One is that it’s based on an actual story of two people falling in love. You’re right that it’s Kumail Nanjiani, who is playing himself—he and his wife, Emily V. Gordon, wrote it, and the female lead, played by the great Zoe Kazan, was based on her—but it’s about real attraction. And it’s also about navigating huge cultural, racial, and religious differences between families, and it does a great job of it because it is real about what those challenges are. Kumail Nanjiani’s character’s parents are Pakistani and want to set him up with a Pakistani woman, and a big criticism of the movie at the time was that the Pakistani women were treated as kind of an afterthought and not as viable love interests—and what was interesting about that was that it was true to the character. It wasn’t sugarcoated. There was a real conflict there for the viewer to think about and deal with.
I feel like I’m officiating a weird wedding in making these comments. I’m, like, “Love is epistemological.” [Laughs.] But it’s true! It’s about knowledge of the self and the other. It’s about building up the ideal, only to find that the ideal can’t be sustained and preferring what comes after the ideal is washed away. That is what love at its best is, and that’s what rom-coms can give us.
Which is why not taking off the mask but putting on another mask—the Twitter-esque “I see you, I hear you”—is not working. People aren’t revealed to each other in their frailty and their desperation and desire. It’s complete falsity.
I also think that the rom-com has been a stealth genre to discuss social evolution because, for all the reasons we’re talking about, romance means dealing with the individual, with the family, with the society—those are the three big categories, and romance brings them all into question. A major part of the social change in the eighties is that you’re dealing with a generation of women who, for the first time, it’s not assumed that they will get married—and if they do get married, marriage is going to be in conflict with their careers. And that’s in the background to movies like “Working Girl,” or to “When Harry Met Sally” in another way. Do we focus intently on Sally’s career as a journalist? No. But it’s still this social anxiety. She’s sitting around with her best friend, played by Carrie Fisher, and they’re looking through Carrie Fisher’s Rolodex, trying to find someone that Sally can date after her relationship breaks up, and it’s, like, yeah, the biological clock is ticking. Before, they would have been married off by twenty-two—and now they’re in their thirties, they have careers, and it’s time to figure out if romance has a place in their lives. It’s really the can-I-have-it-all generation, and so the rom-com explores that. And I think that that is where Billy Eichner was positioning “Bros”: now that marriage is available to everyone, gay and straight, can we fit into a conventional rom-com, too? And my feeling is, yeah, the rom-com is open to anyone! You have to be prepared for it not to be great, just in the way that marriage is not gonna be great, necessarily. [Laughs.] But I think if the social change is not worn on the sleeve—in the way that it is in “You People,” where that’s the whole point, and the actual character and romance is neglected—that’s a very promising way to look at a rom-com.
This might be simplistic, but I would say, let us not forget about enjoyment as the first step. This shouldn’t be a punishing endeavor to watch. If lessons are learned, they should be smuggled in under the guise of laughs and kisses. [Laughs.] That sounds gross, but you know what I mean! We’re not here to suffer.
No, we’re not here to suffer! If you get the fun in, the rest will follow.
Right. There’s a big difference between reflecting social change and trying to, like, discourse about it. In some ways, the rom-com is a consequence of a new social possibility; it doesn’t need to comment on it.
Totally. And I guess what I was trying to get at also is the idea that these changes—the changing role of women, the changing social status of gay couples—produce conflict in the arena of romance that then can yield comedy. So, a flowering could occur. But, yeah, enjoyment! Hello!
We want our hearts to thrill to a kiss depicted onscreen!
Or even just the satisfaction of a couple—Vinson, you turned me on to “Love Life,” and then I went and watched Season 2, with William Jackson Harper. It’s a show, it’s not a movie, but it was a great rom-com. He and Jessica Williams, who plays his on-again, off-again romantic interest, are both great. But it’s about navigating adult life, the workplace, finding someone you really like but you’re not sure if they like you, and how to deal with all that stuff. It just kept it real and was sweet and fun.
That’s what we want! It may have skipped a generation, though. We might just have to wait for the great Zendaya rom-com.
She’s ready! And, yeah, enough with J. Lo rom-coms like “Marry Me,” where she’s referred to as a star “over thirty-five.” It’s, like, we’re pushing it now.
The vagueness is troubling. Like, I would love a rom-com for the fifty-plus set.
Yes! Let her be a version of herself where she has children from a previous marriage. I mean, the wonderful thing about J. Lo is that she’s lived the rom-com in front of us and can’t make a movie to match her experience. What she’s done over the last twenty years is glorious—she had the guy, lost the guy or vice versa, had a whole other romance in her life, and now they’re back together again. That’s a great romantic comedy.
Come on. Let’s do it!
The Ben Affleck–J. Lo documentary will be the rom-com that we all deserve. ♦
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