Two Weeks Notice

The romantic comedy genre is full of really, really bad movies featuring douchie male leads and women who can be politely described as harpies. Think Made of Honor in which Michelle Monaghan berates Patrick Dempsey for his sex-toy bridal shower (an accident on his part) like a prudish little schoolmarm instead of a sophisticated 30-something woman living in New York City. No woman I know . . . and let's be honest I know a lot of freaks and perverts, you know people who vote Democrat so my point of view is clearly skewed. . . would ever have a hissy over something that silly, especially something that was so clearly a mistake. They'd probably love it.  But then, I don't know very many harpies.

It isn't very often you get a rom com these days with lots of witty banter and the sort of classic sexual chemistry of opposites at odds that you find in older films. In fact, the romantic comedies of the 1930's and 1940's (It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby) tend to have strong female leads and charming heroes whereas in modern romantic comedies, as I stated above, the tendency is adhere to gender stereotypes like something out of a Parade magazine or Andy Capp comic strip;  misogynistic gender roles in which the man is a semi-retarded, ugly little doofus and the woman is mega-hot but total naggin, manipulative bitch. The fact that these sorts of comedies out number the witty-banter ones 10 to 1 is rather disturbing.

Two Weeks Notice, however, is an exception to this rather depressing rule. It features Hugh Grant playing my favorite of his roles, the lovable cad and Sandra Bullock as a type-A lawyer with a social conscience.  However, Hugh Grant always comes across as intelligent and never dumb and Sandra Bullock is sweet, if neurotic. There's a great deal of back and forth but it is never cruel or mean-spirited. Moreover, nobody's fiance gets dumped at the end (number one rule of modern romantic comedies is that anyone who is engaged/married at the beginning of the movie will not be so at the end unless they are the quirky side-characters), nobody tries to date three different people at once, nobody interrupts a wedding at the last minute to make a declaration of love, and nobody learns a very important lesson about the true meaning of Christmas or whatever.

Instead you have Hugh Grant doing his best to channel Cary Grant at his goofiest and a plot based on the coming together of opposites.  I think, though, that it is Sandra Bullock's character that really makes the movie.  She plays Lucy, an intense, politically liberal, do-gooder. She's honorable and kind and a little manic but never really a bitch. She wants the world to be a better place and she's determined to make it that way. When she gets stressed out she over-eats (one of the few heroines, movie or otherwise who does. Who the hell stops eating when they are stressed? Answer: No one, that's why Americans are fat, because they are stressed out and poor.  I hate heroines who don't eat. It is a lie!) until she makes herself sick. She's an overachiever but she doesn't nag or manipulate. She's just blunt.  I find this very refreshing. I like her. I know her. She's a character who is more like the women I actually meet than the majority of female characters in romantic comedies who are caricatures of certain aspects of female traits. Take for example the excerable He's Just Not That Into You.  Now I have three sisters, the majority of my friends have been and are women (I went to a small liberal arts college. The straight male population was minute), I have worked in female dominated fields most of my life and I have rarely come across a woman as desperate as the character Gigi or a little ho like Scarlett Johannsen's character or a nagging, frigid bitch like Jennifer Connelly's character.  Nor do I encounter very many women who define themselves totally around their relationships with no outside interests or concerns. These are not the women I meet. Sometimes the women I know occasionally act like one of these stereotypes but these behaviors are not their defining characteristics nor the a representation of how they are the majority of the time. The fact that women are depicted in such a consistently awful light in romantic comedies is just disheartening. Therefore, I love the fact that Sandra Bullock's character is nothing like any of these. She may be intense and dutiful and a workaholic but she's not a bitch, at least not in the bad sense of that word. She's flawed but likable and realistic nor does she spend the entire film punishing Hugh Grant for some absurd mistake. It is more a film about them coming to the realization that they love each other. One of my favorite scenes is one in which they go to a lunch, order the same salad and proceed to switch, whilst carrying on an entirely separate conversation, various pieces of food from their plates. George takes all of Lucy's beets and then dumps all his ice cubes into her water. She stills all his croutons. Its very charming and the sort of thing very close friends, family or married people do.

I would like to see romantic movies go back to the old-fashioned sexual tension of something like a Katherine Hepburn and a Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, a Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, or even a Woody Allen and a Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery. It is curious that as gender and sex roles have changed and become much more loose and malleable, as women have gained power socially and politically that the heroines of romantic comedy films have become less charismatic, less powerful and more and more bitchy and weak.  Seriously, what's up with that?

I leave you with a clip montage from Two Weeks Notice brought to you by some person on YouTube

Rake-Tastic

The trouble with rakes in romances is that the author is constantly telling us that they are ever so bad and ever so nototrious and oh so dangerous but then they don't actually do anything rakish except throw out a few sexual innuendoes and maybe get the heroine to try oral sex.

The topic for this post has been brewing for some time but I realized I really needed to write about it yesterday. What happened yesterday? Well, I was on a plane. The romance selection in the JFK Hudson News is crap . . . . although not as crap as the selectionin the Phoenix airport. So there I was, waiting for a flight and I needed something to read. I had read all the books I brought ith me so I was lacking distraction. The book I wanted The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie was not there. So I got Always A Scoundrel by Suzanne Enoch. Now I had heard good things and I really enjoyed London's Perfect Scoundrel. So yeah!

Now I finished the book on the plane which either tells you how fast I read or how long the plane ride was.  I liked it. It wasn't a stand out in my brain but that's not the point. The point is that the hero, Lord Bramwell Johns, is not a rake. Oh it says he is, everyone says he is but he really doesn't do anything particularly rakish. I mean, the villain, the Marquis of Cosgrove was definitely a rake of the debauched variety. Now there was an interesting fellow! Clearly a sociopath and yet I found myself wanting him to be the hero because he was actually a rake so there was something to reform.

This is not a lone problem, isolated to Ms. Enoch's lastest book. Most of the time in romances we are told that so and so is The Most Vile Rake In Christendom and yet he doesn't do anything particular vile. I have decided that this is a threefold problem because I like things that come in threes.

First off, it is a problem of world view. The author relies too much on her audience knowing about Romanceland, the Regency period etc. She does not establish, separtately within the confines of her book the social mores and taboos of that world. This is not easy to do. One has to show how people view class, race, gender, and morality. This is hard because there is not one view on any of these things. Let's take JK Rowling for example. There are many weaknesses in the Harry Potter books but the one thing that Rowling did brilliantly was to establish how the world functioned not just on a practical level (with Quidditch and brooms) but on a moral level with the way that different wizards and witches related to and regarded Muggles, Voldemort, the non-human personages like golbins and so on and so forth. Rowling consistantly displayed what the standard, status quo approach was and what the violation of those standards were whether they were the Klu Klux Klan like activities of the Death Eaters or Hermione's SPEW (The House Elf Liberation Front).

The thing is you can do this with a few sentences or with a character's throwaway comments. Not every activity or dialogue needs to go back to the plot.  World views need to be presented.  Part of this is an historical issue because people tend to think of history as static rather than dynamic. Of course, there were certain standards by which the London ton operated but not everyone held to these standards. The standards that we read about are a middle ground, a mainstream status quo. The ideal of behavior and social interaction, not the actuality.  An aristoicratic Tory family is going to have a very different view from even an aristocratic Whig family of how the world should be. A Lord interested in science is not going to have the same regard for manners as a Lord obsessed with fashion. Therefore there has to be some establishment either by a description or dialogue, secondary or passing characters that defines how the world is and whether the main characters are violating that is.

The second problem is that I don't believe that anyone actually knows what  a rake is, because we don't have them anymore. They are extinct. 

An Open Letter to A Romance Novel Hero: Resurrecting the Idea

Grey aka Robert Fordham
c/o Joanna Bourne
The Spymaster's Lady

Dear Robert,

Thanks for not being a dillweed. I apprecitate that. I don't know if you've noticed (you probably have. You are very observant.) but romance novel spies tend to be intensely retarded. By intensely retarded I mean, if they were actually spies they would be dead by now on account of failing to 1) comprehend human behavior 2) not noticing the holy fucking obvious and 3) generally acting like a 14 year old boy having a hissyfit, although that is probably quite insulting to 14 year old boys.

My point, Robert, is that you behaved like a spy. Early on you had some wacky ideas about Annique but you didn't let these notions override what your senses observed, as a good spy ought. You noted the behavior of this woman and then concluded (correctly) that she was not the sort to do the kind of killing you had initially thought she had. Moreover, you realized that as a French operative she was duty bound to try to escape and you didn't hold that against her. In fact, you admired her for that. I appreciate you Robert Grey Fordham. I appreciate the fact that you aren't an asshat. Well done, sir, well done!

An Open Letter to a Romance Novel Hero

Bastian Toussaint

c/oAnne Stuart

Black Ice

March 4, 2009

Dear Bastien,

But for the whole spy thing, you totally remind me of my ex-boyfriend. I am not exaggerating. You are him, down to the refusal to actually give a straight answer to even the most innocuous of questions. In fact, I have a deeply held suspcion that Anne Stuart may have actually based you on my ex-boyfriend. I have no proof of this because such evidence couldn't possibly exist. Yet, there you are . . .  or he is . . . or whatever, on the pages of a book. Dude, you even fuck like him. It's kind of scary, I'm not going to lie. Maybe Anne Stuart dated my ex-boyfriend or knew somebody who did. This is actually plausible since the ex is the living embodiement of the Duke of Slut. How he hasn't contracted syphillis is a wonder. Perhaps he, and you, too, has some sort of deviant immunity to sexually transmitted diseases. That would make sense as I'm pretty sure you are both Scorpios and as everyone knows, Scorpios are in league with Satan. It isn't a very good league. The Scorpios just exchanged their immortal souls for the superhuman ability to whore-it-up without any consequences and to succeed in their revenge plots against all would be detractors.

You're Kind Of A Douchebag, Devon.

This post is all about the ever popular and extremely beloved novel The Windflower by Laura London aka Sharon & Tom Curtis. Currently, this book is out of print, gosh darnit.

I've been thinking about Devon Crandall, erstwhile pirate and Duke of Earl. I've decided Devon's kind of a douchebag. 

Before I go any further I would like to take this opportunity to discuss the word "douchebag" which I feel is one of the most useful words in the English lanaguage when describing personages of adverse character. A douchebag has many definitions being a slang term. The way in which I define it is as follows: a person, usually a man, who is arrogant, entitled, and smug. These qualities are inspite of the fact that they regularly behave with a moronic stupidity usually only associated with the mildly mentally retarded or people who have consumed too much beer. A person can act like a douchebag (such as when they have too many of said beers) and yet not be a douchebag. Douchebags are often victims of fashions, victims of fads, and members of fraternal organizations. Often they can be spotted by the smirk on their face (see George W. Bush) and their inability to understand irony or sarcasm.

Heroes

I have just finished editing the paper I gave at the 2008 PCA. It went from an 8 page speech into a 15 page writing sample for graduate school applications.  It was through this process that I came across Lilian R. Furst's The Romantic Hero, or is he an Anti-Hero? ¹ an article that was published before I was born (frightening!) and has led me into contemplation on what makes a romance novel hero or to put it another way, what makes the romance hero different from the Byronic hero, the anti-hero, or the epic hero?

Furst says of the traditional hero that his

"essentially outward-looking orientation, his role as leader of men, his readiness to sacrifice himself to the cause he has espoused: all these traditionally heroic features are in diametric oppositon to the Ichschmerz that is the core of the Romantic hero" (57).

The Romantic hero she refers to is the one I have always thought of as the Byronic hero but I suppose that is a more specific version of the same.  Regardless, it is not the heroes of romance novels she speaks of but the heroes represented in the literature of the Romantic time period.  Later Furst differentiates the Romantic hero with his modern counterpart, the anti-hero, saying:

"What is lacking in the Romantic hero, however, is the modern anti-hero's ironic self-detachment. It is not only that the Romantic hero takes himself too seriously and too solemnly.  His very idealism raises absolute standards and lofty expectations which preclude the spiritual flexibility, the willingness to shift position and even to compromise inherent in an ironical attitude" (66).

This leads me to ask the question: If the traditional hero is defined by his relationship to the external--that is the tribe, the group, the gods and his duty to them; and the Romantic hero is defined by his relationship to the internal--that is his idealism, his freedom, his soul and the actualization of his ego; and if the anti-hero is defined by his irony, his pettiness, his ordinariness and the glorification of the mundane world; then what defines the romance hero? A very confusing term and since it is so easily conflated with romantic let me coin a term for convenience's sake and call the hero of the romance novel the erotic hero since he owes a debt to Eros.

It seems to me that what these heroic literary models have in common is that their definition of self, of character is created in the tension between the "I" of ego and "the world" of the group.  That the hero, regardless of his type, is in conflict with both himself and the outside world. Whether he battles the Trojans or the his own inner demons, the hero's glory, his fame, his heroism is dependent upon his individual actions and in-actions--what he does and how he does it. The continuation or rebirth of the group relies upon the personal actions of the hero and the glory of the hero offers immortality both to his own name and to that of his tribe; but it is a glory always earned in the defeat of, or the flight from Otherness. Ernest Becker talks much about the hero in his book Escape from Evil ² as a process by which the heroic action makes immortal the symbolic systems of the tribe so that while individuals do not live on their meaning does. In this way, heroes, whether they  be the monster-slayering heroics of the epics or the humanistic and ego-centric exploits of the Romantics,  share the commonality that their heroism is based upon a singular individual who is the primary focus of the story and who, through a journey either external and internal, meets the Other and defeats it; it is the heroic character alone which the reader follows on the transcendent journey.  The encounter with the monstrous Other is either resolved through their defeat in battle, as in the epics, or in the tranformation of Other into an mirror that reflects back the hero's own soul as in the existential wanderings and tragic deaths of the Romantics who are not unlike an angst-ridden Narcissus.  Other can be many things--opposite creeds, religions, races or nationalities--but the ultimate Other is always the female, is always woman and she is made either monstrous or a mere Echo of the male ego.

The erotic hero, unlike his cousins, is not defined by his defeat or transformation of the Other but his exchange with the Other.  So that while all heroes encounter Otherness, the romance hero is the only one who is defined by his realtionship to that Otherness in a meeting which is neither fight nor flight.  Rather he falls (as in falls in love, falls from grace), a word that I hope connotes the slipping of certainty, an action that shifts the all encompassing  "I" from subject to object.

But what does it mean to fall? What does falling do to the hero? How does falling help to satisfy the inequity that seems to inevitably arise between "Self" and "Other"?

In my next post, I hope to examine the nature of falling.

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¹ Furst, Lilian R. "The Romantic Hero, Or is He an Anti--Hero?" Studies in the Literary
Imagination 9.1 (1976): 53

² Becker, Ernest. Escape from Evil. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1975.