WANTED: Non-Traditional romcom

This week in class we began Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s exploration of the Romantic comedy. In her book “Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Gril Meets Genre” McDonald analyzes the components of the traditional Romcom. McDonald begins her book by discussing how the Romcom is seen as a generic formula that is so predictable many critics regard this genre as insignificant and trite. McDonald however hopes that by exploring the genre and raising questions she will manage to “problematise the romcom, so that such films become new and strange again, and can therefore open up to analysis.” (5). McDonald makes the point that even though the traditional romcom has a plot so trite that anyone can rattle off the pattern, there’s just something about them that keeps us coming back. As cheesy as many of these films can be they still continue to draw large audiences. McDonald offers her speculations on what it is about these films that keep drawing us in no matter how predictable they may be. McDonald defines the romcom as “a film which has as its central narrative motor a quest for love, which portrays this quest in a light-hearted way and almost always to a successful conclusion” (9). With that definition in mind we were asked to come up with the name of a film we thought fit the description of a traditional romcom and a non-traditional romcom. The list of traditional romcoms was long and included many well known films: Pretty Woman, You’ve Got mail, Notting Hill etc. Personally the thing that stumped me was trying to think of a non-traditonal romcom. After wracking my brain I finally came up with 500 Days of Summer. This film follows the 500 days of Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Finn’s (Zooey Deschanel) relationship. On first thought I considered this film non-tradtional because Summer is the one with commitment issues. In the film Summer is the non-sentimental one who tells Tom that she does not believe in true love and is not interested in a long term relationship. Tom on the other hand is the one who belives that true love exists and he believes that he has found it with Summer. Ultimately Summer ends the relationship and Tom finds himself utterly devestated though Summer had told him from the start that it would probably end that way. The films ending is not the typical happy ending where the boy and girl end up together. I thought that this element made this a candidate for the nontraditional category. But, looking at McDonalds defintion of the traditional romcom I changed my mind. Though the ending is not typical I would still consider it a rom com because it fits the defintion put forth by McDonald. She points out that the films almost always have a successful conclusion, but just because the film ends “unsuccessfully” does not disqualify it from the romcom genre. Though Tom and Summer do not end up together the “central narrative motor” is very much so the “quest for love”.  Even though Summer and Tom go their separate ways they both continue on their quests for love even though it takes them on separate paths. Essentially I am still left wondering if there is truly a romcom film out there that would be considered non traditional….

McDonald Jeffers, Tamar. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Print