Note to self: It's only a movie

A study by a Scottish university has concluded that watching romantic comedies can spoil your love life. Brilliant! And if you walk in the rain without an umbrella, raincoat, or waterproof epidermis, you will probably get wet.

It is obvious to anyone who is not required to publish research papers that a moviegoer who expects real life to unfold along the lines of You’ve Got Mail, Maid In Manhattan, The Wedding Planner, and While You Were Sleeping (movies cited in the study) will believe just about anything. It is not watching the rom-coms that spoils her love life; it is the fact that she’s a dolt. For starters, these are terrible movies made to be consumed like popcorn and forgotten. If a movie is terrible, it is a dead giveaway that its message must not be taken seriously.

According to the study, these romantic comedies “wrongly suggest that trust and committed love exist from the moment people meet, whereas these are qualities that normally take years to develop.”

The trouble with the rom-coms of the last 15 years is that they present highly improbable situations, and then they suggest that “This could happen to you.” They cut the characters down to life-like dimensions so that anyone sitting in the theatre can imagine that she is the heroine of the story. Consider these heroines: a tollbooth collector in love with a comatose man, a chambermaid in love with a would-be senator, a wedding planner in love with her client, a bookshop owner in love with her e-mail correspondent. There’s nothing extraordinary about them: the viewers can “relate” to their dilemmas as single women, which usually means bigger box office. Why would you want to alienate your audience by showing them what they cannot have?

And yet the classic Hollywood romantic comedies of the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s did just that: dazzle moviegoers with impossibly glamorous characters they could not hope to meet in real life. They could dream of them, but they knew it wasn’t going to happen. You’d have to pickle your liver in alcohol before the object of your affections even remotely begins to resemble Greta Garbo in Ninotchka.

The old rom-coms built a wall of glamour between the movies and real life: they were sophisticated escapist fluff. Today’s rom-coms are escapist fluff pretending to be grounded in reality.

This impression of plausibility is abetted by today’s stars, who are more accessible to their public than their predecessors ever were. You can conceivably meet someone who not only looks like Tom Hanks or Jennifer Lopez, but is in fact Tom Hanks or Jennifer Lopez. The stars have come down to earth. Thanks to relentless media coverage, we know everything about them; they might as well be our next-door neighbors. They’ve been demystified. Whereas the old Hollywood studios (and the local LVN and Sampaguita Pictures) kept their stars hidden and private, unknown and desirable.

In the rom-coms of the ‘30s and ‘40s, everyone was constantly imbibing alcohol and nicotine. This sent a clear message to the audience that these characters were drunk, ergo their judgment was impaired, and that they perceived their romantic partners through a thick haze of cigarette smoke. Even if their romances had apparently happy endings, the protagonists would soon expire from cirrhosis of the liver or emphysema. If they stopped drinking and smoking when they got married, the scales would fall from their eyes and they would see each other for what they really were. End of romance.

Thus they could make a romantic comedy like Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), in which Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant are brought together by a leopard. Everything about the movie is implausible, beginning with its characters. We don’t know many paleontologists, but even assuming that one of them looks like Cary Grant, could he be so absentminded as to be unaware that he looks like Cary Grant? And to get engaged to a square who insists on not having a honeymoon?

Lucky for the clueless scientist, bony patrician Katharine Hepburn decides — after stealing his golf ball, his car, and causing him to fall flat on his back — that he is the only man for her. Her decision made, she tears his tailcoat, gives his would-be grant sponsor a concussion, and hijacks him on the way to his wedding to deliver a leopard to Connecticut.

Hepburn’s heiress is one of the most exasperating romantic heroines ever. She is bossy and inconsiderate. She casually gets everyone into trouble and expects to be forgiven. And she is, because someone so sure of herself must be of a superior species.

The dorky hero is aware that life with this woman will be manic, frantic and chaotic. He will no longer have time to devote to his research. He will experience constant aggravation. He knows, and the audience knows, that he and she are probably not going to live happily ever after. But the audience roots for this pair because they know something today’s rom-com fans tend to forget.

They know that It’s Only A Movie.