The End of Romance: The Demystification of Love in the Postmodern Age

Abstract

We focus on the changing understanding of romance in contemporary American society. Through an analysis of romantic comedies and dramas produced in Hollywood between 1930 and the present, we demonstrate how the decline of the romantic drama is due to significant social and cultural change, the most important of which is the weakening of norms governing the choice of romantic partners. The romantic comedy, however, has more than compensated for the decline in dramas, with the decade of the 1990s seeing more romantic films produced than in any previous time in the history of filmmaking. Although the contemporary romantic comedy almost invariably reinforces the most conservative tendencies in our culture, we argue that these films nonetheless work effectively to reinforce a usable cultural script governing romantic behavior. By depicting ideal culture as a real possibility, the romantic comedy nurtures the utopian wish of “slipping one over on modernity.”