RomComs: Guilty Pleasures and the Need to be Different

This is the first in our series of guest articles. We like getting your feedback and hearing your opinions, and after all, movies are something everyone knows about and can discuss! If there's anything you want to write about, just DM us on Instagram! Here's our friend Milady on romantic comedies.

In what is probably widely considered the sovereign film of romantic comedies, When Harry Met Sally, title character Sally has an emotional moment when she finds out her ex-boyfriend of 6 years is engaged to his new partner. "All this time I've been saying that he didn't want to get married. But the truth is he didn't want to marry me. He didn't love me,” she cries. If this line and its premise sound eerily familiar to you, maybe from a more modern film, than you would be correct. In the 2009 film He’s Just Not That Into You, Jennifer Aniston’s character Beth echoes the same sentiment about exes claiming they do not believe in marriage, “and then six months later he's married to some 24-year-old that he met at a gym.” As much as I always got a good chuckle out of the latter film’s take on this dating trope, I always just assumed it was paying homage to the great When Harry Met Sally. 

When we think of films paying homage to each other, almost every genre is mentioned before romcoms, which are usually grouped together as being all the same. Better yet, if romcoms are mentioned as favorite films they are usually only so in the context of being “guilty pleasures” in the same way we often become bashful when a bubblegum pop song pops up on our Spotify when we have company in the car. Why is that? Why are we so embarrassed to enjoy simple storylines, likeable (most of the time) characters, and somewhat neat, happy endings? 

I know that a popular stance on social media regarding all things categorized as trite is “let people enjoy things,” so I am in no way presenting a groundbreaking perspective on this topic. But what always fascinated me about romcoms and the public perspective on them is how often they are left out of the conversation when it comes to discussing great “films” (and do not even get me started on film Twitter) DESPITE the fact that a good romantic comedy is always two things: 

Memorable and Quoteable. 

I think about the coffee table fight scene from When Harry Met Sally more often than most people to be perfectly honest, almost as much as I think about the part in High Fidelity when John Cusack muses if whether at one point he listened to pop music because he was miserable, or if he was miserable because he had listened to pop music. Much like Rob and his employees who believe that liking underground and indie music makes them superior to the “normal” masses, we want to believe that we are different. We want to believe our tastes make us different. It is so easy to claim we have good taste in movies, and while listing our favorites of all time we home in on the indies, the foreign films, the classics, and then we throw in a Tarantino film for good measure. We want to be able to say in conversation that of course we think about Clarence and Alabama from True Romance before we think about Pat and Tiffany from Silver Linings Playbook when we think of insane movie couples. 

But this isn’t always the case is it? 

We want to be able to say we don’t believe in romcoms as great cinema, like Sally’s ex-boyfriend said he didn’t believe in marriage. And just like how Rob realizes in High Fidelity that the problem in most of his past relationships was his expectations along with his overall insufferableness, it is okay to admit when we’re being a little pretentious for the sake of seeming misunderstood. So go on, put on Moonstruck for the 15th time, we know you want to.