Conforming Passions?: Contemporary Romantic Comedy

Abstract

Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, edited by Steve Neale, presents a wide-ranging collection of new critical assessments of the shifting role of genre within Hollywood production of the last 20 years. With chapters from such eminent scholars as Tino Balio, J.P. Telotte, Andrew Tudor, William Paul, Karen Hollinger, Roberta Pearson, Peter Kramer and S. Craig Watkins, the book offers fresh perspectives on a range of generic forms, including animated feature films, action-adventure blockbusters, Shakespeare adaptations, war films, neo-noirs, teenpics, westerns, musicals, horror films, ghetto action films, parody and other forms of comedy. Krutniks chapter provides a new contribution to his much-cited work on romantic comedy that was inaugurated with the acclaimed 1990 book Popular Film and Television Comedy, co-written with Steve Neale. The starting point for the chapter is an original survey of films that have been designated as romantic comedies in a range of sources (newspaper reviews, the trade press, internet sites, etc) from the 1980s to the early 2000s, which is used to explore the range of trends, forms and tendencies encompassed by romantic comedy as a discursive category. Besides charting this proliferation of romantic comedies, the chapter also provides a fresh and insightful analysis of the distinctive operating procedures of how romantic comedy operates within contemporary cinema. In particular, it examines how these films seek to reconcile traditional ideas and ideals of romantic love with the much transformed contexts and expectations of contemporary life and society, contemporary gender politics and contemporary sexual culture. Providing close textual analysis of selected films, the chapter suggests that the contemporary romantic comedies display a distinctively self-conscious deployment of generic and romantic conventions while at the same time revealing a passionate conformism to traditional protocols of sexuality and gender.