The Big Lie

If romantic comedies do provide nothing more than a big lie, that makes them no different than the any other Hollywood genre films. There may be a big lie of westerns that celebrates a fascist Manichean vision of the old west. There may be a big lie of World War II movies that - in spite of all the horrors of war - still celebrate an idea of war heroism. Romantic comedies promote a hetero-normative vision of romantic coupling, one that proposes marriage as a singular approach to life happiness. Such a "happily ever after" narrative damages gender relations for suggesting that male and female roles must somehow be static.

My own problem with this suggestion is that genres are or can be great things to work with and against. If the standard problem with romantic comedies is that they present static gender roles, what do we do with a film like Adam's Rib, in which Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn are constantly undercutting or reworking the classic marriage paradigm? It's a little easy to write off an entire genre of films, for somehow promoting a problematic vision of gender relations. It's much harder, and much more interesting, to locate irony and self-awareness that exist in even the lamest cultural artifacts.