Genre, Gender and the Effects of Neoliberalism

Betty Kaklamanidou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135090036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The romantic comedy has long been regarded as an inferior film genre by critics and scholars alike, accused of maintaining a strict narrative formula which is considered superficial and highly predictable. However, the genre has resisted the negative scholarly and critical comments and for the last three decades the steady increase in the numbers of romantic comedies position the genre among the most popular ones in the globally dominant Hollywood film industry. The enduring power of the new millennium romantic comedy, proves that therein lies something deeper and worth investigating.

This new work draws together a discussion of the full range of romantic comedies in the new millennium, exploring the cycles of films that tackle areas including teen romance, the new career woman, women as action heroes, motherhood and pregnancy and the mature millennium woman. The work evaluates the structure of these different types of films and examines in detail the ways in which they choose to frame key contemporary issues which influence how we analyse global politics, including gender, class, race and society.

Providing a rich understanding of the complexities and potential of the genre for understanding contemporary society, this work will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural & film studies, gender & politics and world politics in general.

1

Introduction

‘Plotless and pointless’, ‘soft and sweet as a marshmallow and about as interesting’, ‘scatterbrained’, ‘a comedy of exhaustion’.¹ These are a few examples of how film reviewers in major American publications characterized the millennial romantic comedies Sex and the City (2008), Hitch (2005), The Switch (2010) and Couples Retreat (2009) respectively. The above negative adjectives and phrases are no ‘strangers’ to the genre of the romantic comedy, which ‘has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity’ (Mindy Kaling 2011). Similarly, contemporary scholars tend to also treat recent productions quite sceptically. For instance, Diane Negra (2009, p. 8) supports that ‘the 1990s and 2000s chick flicks [speak] from and to a neoconservative cultural context’ while Hilary Radner (2011, p. 4) argues that these films ‘have [ … ] a limited scope and perspective’. However, despite the doubts that surround the genre, romantic comedy has started to become the subject of systematic scholarly work in the last two decades. Examination of the genre can be divided into two broad categories: The first mainly focuses on analysis of cycles of the past, such as the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s and the sex comedies of the late 1950s and 1960s (see Ed Sikov, 1989, James Harvey, 1998, Christopher Beach, 2002, Wes D. Gehring, 2002, and Kathrina Glitre, 2006, among others), which are today considered paradigmatic cinematic instances of gender and/or class articulation. The second category focuses on the romantic comedies of the last three decades (Peter Williams Evans and Celestino Deleyto, 1998, Tamar Jeffers McDonald, 2007, Celestino Deleyto, 2009, Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn, 2009, and Claire Mortimer, 2010). The books in the second category are part of an important scholarly effort to extort the stigma of superficiality that continues to accompany the genre by providing methodical historical information, but also insisting on the importance of the examination of the genre's significant contribution to gender politics in recent years, considering its enduring popularity in the twenty-first century.

Citing information from the In Hollywood website Frank Krutnik (2002, p. 131) underscored the fact that

[i]f even half the projects picked up this year actually get the greenlight, the first decade of the next millennium may be known as ‘the Romantic Comedy Decade’. Sales totals for the genre surged ahead of former rivals Action-Adventure and Science fiction, landing squarely in the coveted fourth spot [below Comedy, Drama and Thriller].

The above hypothesis was confirmed as rom com have been steadily produced and enjoyed considerable box-office success worldwide from 2000 to 2010, while the second decade of this millennium does not seem to decelerate the genre's momentum. The number of romantic comedies during the first decade of the new millennium, their global appeal, the emergence of new and interesting cycles, along with the continuance in the production of old formulae with a modern twist led to this book, whose exclusive focus is the Hollywood romantic comedy of last decade.

Genre and Hollywood are two concepts that have gone together ever since the very first decades of the invention of the cinema. However, this is not just a book about genre theory or a specific genre history in the twenty-first century—although genre theory and history will assist in the analysis of the film narratives included in the ensuing chapters. This is mainly a book which will endeavour to look into how the neoliberal climate of the decade influences the politics and ideology produced by the films themselves and help shape ‘our own personal narratives’ (Lincoln Geraghty, 2011, p. 8). This is a book which will offer a comprehensive description of the genre in the last decade by grouping romantic comedies in thematic cycles. This is finally a book which will explore what Hollywood romantic narratives have to ‘say’ about gender politics and identities, and how they use and/or alter the genre conventions to echo, support, promote and/or subvert the American social climate regarding romantic relationships, and more specifically, working women, the institution of marriage, the wedding industry, male and female friendships, children and sexuality in maturity.

One of the main theoretical premises of the book is that the new millennium Hollywood produces film texts which are part of the global popular culture and as such have an even more pervasive influence on the world than in past decades. I contend that just as ‘culture is always in a process of negotiation, with positions and identities shifting, with official voices being parodied and satirized, with power being contested’ (Neil Campbell and Alasdair Kean, 2000, p. 15), new millennium romantic comedies are part of an ongoing dialogue regarding romantic and/or sexual relationships, adding therefore significant insight into the world of gender politics. Films have always been a popular form of entertainment. Louis Giannetti and Scott Eyman (2001, p. 112) underline that

[t]he American cinema was the most democratic art form in history, reflecting most of the strengths and failings of the society that nurtured it. To guarantee their continued employment in this expensive medium, fiction filmmakers had to be sensitive to the demands of the box office.

Giannetti and Eyman's remark remains true in the twenty-first century. Even though the film industry has undergone many changes from the establishment of the powerful studio system in the 1930s and the 1940s to today, the fact remains that the business of making films is primarily exactly that – a business. And as such it has to be profitable in order to survive. The paradox, however, lies in the fact that the film business produces works of mostly popular art and has always been influenced by and also influences politics worldwide. As Alan Parker astutely observes: All of our European influences have been American films because American society has been sold to the rest of the world with the greatest propaganda machine any nation ever invented – the Hollywood movie’ (cited in William J. Palmer, 1993, p. 9). The history of the Hollywood industry proves not only the American worldwide domination but its intricate mechanisms which combine a ruthless profit-making politics with the production of a vast number of film narratives which reflect, promote, support and/or criticize, subvert the sociopolitical climate in which they were produced. In other words, there is a definite affinity between each film narrative with the era that gave birth to it. For instance, the screwball comedy emerged in the 1930s, in the context of the powerful studio system, as a means of escapism from the harsh reality but was also a way for the filmmakers to cleverly avoid the Production Code regulations and use those seemingly light films to criticize the wealthy and also empower women.

Another basic premise of this book is that all films are political in the sense that ‘they offer competing ideological significations of the way the world is or should be’ (John Storey, 2008, p. 4). Even though Hollywood has always been accused of superficiality and light treatment of serious sociopolitical issues in favour of the greatest profit margin, I agree with both Palmer (1993, p. 9) and Bruce Babington and Peter Williams Evans (1989, p. vi) who respectively observe that American movies are always made in terms of those modes of discourse that will attract the widest possible audience yet those films still are able to subtextualize those surface modes of discourse with potent socio-historical messages’ and that ‘Hollywood cinema is not [ … ] a simply monolithic, oppressive and conservative force, but [ … ] a multi-levelled and contradictory phenomenon capable of producing from within its contradictions works of art that are worth our constructive as well as deconstructive meditation’. I will therefore determine and examine the various cycles and specific texts of the romantic comedy genre of the last decade, as individual instances of specific meanings about love, intimacy and romance that result from their specific sociocultural production and/or promotional context and that may reach and/or be understood by the global audience. The romantic comedy is one of the most durable film genres in history. However, the Hollywood that produced the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s is not the same as the Hollywood that welcomed the new millennium. Drawing from the work of Russian formalists Mikhail Bakhtin and Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev, Robert Stam (1989) argues that just like literature, film too can be read within the ideological and sociopolitical environment it is born. It will therefore be necessary to place the romantic comedies in their context of production and discuss what Thomas Schatz (2009, p. 19) calls ‘Conglomerate Hollywood’.

Hollywood in the new millennium and the popularity of the romantic comedy

Thomas Schatz considers the first decade of the new millennium as the era of conglomerate or millennial Hollywood. He outlines seven major ‘key advances over or distinct departures from the New Hollywood of the 1990s’ (2009, p. 20) which include

the culmination of an epochal merger-and-acquisition wave and the consolidation of U.S. media industry control in the hands of half-dozen global media superpowers; the related integration of the U.S. film, TV, and home entertainment industries, a far more coherent system [ … ] the enormous success of DVD […], the surging global film and TV markets, [ … ] the emergence of a new breed of blockbuster-driven franchises specifically geared to the global, digital, conglomerate-controlled marketplace, which spawn billion-dollar film series installments [ … ] the annexation of the ‘indie film movement’ by the media conglomerates, [ … ] and the rapid development of three distinct film industry sectors […] – traditional major studios, the conglomerate-owned indie divisions, and the genuine independents – which generate three very different classes of movie product (ibid.).

Although the franchises Schatz mentions are primarily male-centred – from the Harry Potter series to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise – romantic comedies generated impressive revenue (eighteen new millennium romantic comedies surpassed $200 million in admissions worldwide and combined brought more than $4.7 billion)² and proved why the genre remains among the most popular choices of the Hollywood industry. The genre's popularity is also confirmed by the fact that the top ten most commercially successful worldwide romantic comedies of all time comprise six new-millennium romantic comedies (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, 2005, Sex and the City, What Women Want, 2000, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, 2002, Hitch and Enchanted, 2007).

In the context of millennial Hollywood and the new globalized marketing strategies and synergies Ashley Elaine York (2010, p. 4), observed that two female-centred films, Mamma Mia! and Sex and the City (both, 2008) constitute a landmark point as they had a great impact on ‘the types of women's films that are produced in the future’. These ‘women's blockbusters’, to use York's definition, ‘present a focused package of image, advertising, and text beyond the chick flick audience of 18–34-year-old heterosexual women.’ Mamma Mia! and Sex and the City appealed to a wider demographic ‘that brought older and younger heterosexual women, lesbians and gays, heterosexual men, and transnational viewers together to transform what was once a small domestic following into a large, sutured, global audience’ (ibid. 5). What is more, these two films, along with many romantic comedies that preceded or followed also confirmed that it is not just teenage boys that go to the movies. As Melissa Silverstein (2011) notes, ‘Hollywood lives and breathes on the narrative that young men drive the box office. That is just not true. There were 4.2 million 18–24 year old female frequent filmgoers compared to 3.3 million male frequent filmgoers’ in 2010. Although women bought more tickets in 2009 than in 2010, both sexes bought ‘tickets in equal amount [in 2010] and women made up 51% of the moviegoers in 2010 compared to 49% of men’ (Silverstein, 2011).

What is more, conglomerate Hollywood is not so much dependent on the domestic market anymore as it is on the international audience. This is a trend that began in the 1980s resulting ‘from the upgrading of motion picture cinemas, the emancipation of state-controlled broadcasting, the spread of cable and satellite services, and pent-up demand for entertainment of all types’ (Tino Balio, 1998, p. 59). As evidenced by the Motion Picture Association theatrical market statistics for 2010, the US box office was $10.6 billion while the international box office was $21.2 billion making up for 67 per cent of the total revenue.³ What these numbers show is that not only the biggest slice of the profits comes from foreign markets – even hits such as What Women Want, Along Came Polly (2001), Two Weeks Notice (2002), and Sex and the City earned more money overseas than domestically – but films that are considered failures in the USA can recuperate if they are successful internationally. About a Boy (2002), 40 Days and 40 Nights (2002), The Sweetest Thing (2002), Intolerable Cruelty (2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The Heartbreak Kid (2007), Made of Honor (2008), Vicky Christina Barcelona (2009), The Bounty Hunter (2010) and Sex and the City 2 (2010), are among some of the romantic comedies whose profits came mostly from the international market, confirming not only its power and its influence on the Hollywood film industry but also the global popularity of the genre in the first decade of the new millennium, a decade with particular sociopolitical parameters which affect the genre and will be now discussed.

Twenty-first century neoliberalism: Masculinities and femininities

The first decade of the new millennium in the USA will be forever associated with the attack on the World Trade Center, George W. Bush's eight-year presidency, the proliferation and increasing importance of social networks which changed our communication habits, the 2008 stock exchange crash and the subsequent global recession and the first African-American president in the White House. This time period will also be associated with the consolidation of neoliberalism and its ‘extension of market-based economic integration across all local, regional and national borders’ (George DeMartino, 2000, p. 1) which was championed in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA. These two countries, ‘by embracing neoliberal ideas, both as a critique of existing institutions and as a guide for their replacement, reorganized their economies in such a way as to redistribute from bottom to top, weaken the power of labor, and delegitimate state interventionism’ (Mark Blyth, 2008, p. 122). According to Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff (2007, p. 5), after its rise to prominence in the 1980s, neoliberalism

expanded its economic reach globally through international organizations such as the IMF, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. Equally significant as its geographical reach, however, was its expansion across different spheres of life to constitute a novel form of governance.

Gill and Scharff (2007, p. 5) note that ‘[n]eoliberalism is a mobile, calculated technology for governing subjects who are constituted as self-managing, autonomous and enterprising’, and that it can no longer be associated ‘with Republicans in the US or Conservatives in the UK but was as central to the Clinton administration as it was to New Labour's period in office in the UK until mid-2010’ (ibid. 6). Although neoliberalism is a system which sees the individual as its driving force, it is also a system which brought great inequality in the USA since it led to ‘an upward redistribution of wealth, increased labor market “flexibility” (growth in low-paid jobs without benefits and with rapid turnover), and longer hours’ (Blyth, 2008, p. 126). This social inequality and its dramatic consequences (increase in unemployment, decrease in paid employment, deterioration of health care and loss of benefits), along with a post-9/11 climate, which augmented sentiments of insecurity and fear, and a president who for the better part of the decade promoted the image of ‘old masculinity’, could not help but bring about changes in both gender politics as well as imbue the film narratives Hollywood produces.

According to Michael Kimmell (2010, p. 7), the Bush-Cheney years promoted a ‘militarized masculinity’, in a way emulating and reworking the ‘traditional masculinity’ promoted by Reagan in the 1980s, ‘that proudly proclaims the United States not only as the world's only true superpower, but the axis of an emerging global empire, beholden and accountable to no one’. Hollywood responded to the re-emergence of the ‘real man’ with the production of an impressive number of superhero films, and by becoming ‘more of a dream factory than ever, embracing fantastic escapism at a time when audiences needed it most’ (David Germain, 2009). At the same time, the continuing release of romantic comedies and their commercial success added to the audience's escapist need while also exploring various models of masculinity. From the playboy, funny millionaire Hugh Grant in Two Weeks Notice (2002), the older rich womanizer Jack Nicholson in Something's Gotta Give (2003), the unscrupulous top lawyer George Clooney in Intolerable Cruelty, the spoilt film star Josh Duhamel in Win a Date with Tad Hamilton (2004) and the renowned photographer Matthew McConaughey in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009), to the middle-class law student Mark Ruffalo in View from the Top (2003), the lonely widower Steve Carell in Dan in Real Life (2007), the ambitious assistant Ryan Reynolds in The Proposal (2009) and the hesitant best friend Jason Bateman in The Switch (2010), romantic comedies included both ‘traditional’ and ‘softer’ male representations corresponding to recent theoretical work (Christian Haywood, and Máirtín Mac an Ghaill, 2003, R. W. Connell, 2005, and Donna Peberdy, 2011), which views masculinity as a complex concept with many facets and strives to avoid reduction ‘to monolithic and universal categories’ (Raya Morag, 2009, p. 25). At the same time, the new millennium romantic films negotiate different...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Genre, Gender and the Effects of Neoliberalism
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Series editor's preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The battle of the sexes rom com: to be continued?
• 3 The ‘new’ career woman rom com
• 4 The fantasy rom com
• 5 The action rom com
• 6 The teen rom com
• 7 The ‘mature’ rom com: heroines and heroes ‘of a certain age’
• 8 The baby-crazed rom com
• 9 The man-corn cluster
• 10 The indie rom com
• 11 Romantic comedy and the ‘other’: race, ethnicity and the transcendental star
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index