50 First Dates (2004) Isn’t a Rom-Com, It’s a Gothic Horror Movie
My 3-Step Guide to an Enthusiastic Misreading of Segal’s Sandler Flick
In classic rom-com tradition, Peter Segal’s 50 First Dates (2004) is about a beautiful “girl next door” and a douchebag womanizer. The boy falls in love with the girl, even though the boy wasn’t intending on settling, ever. But 50 First Dates’ twist is that the girl, Lucy (Drew Barrymore), suffers from short-term memory loss brought by a gnarly car accident— her memory resets every 24 hours or so and she replays the same day, every day.
Henry (Adam Sandler) is a Sea Life Park employee who “never dates locals” because he doesn’t want the women he sleeps with to get too clingy. One day, though, he sees Lucy playing with her waffles at a diner and falls head over heels for her. After he learns that Lucy is in fact a local, he learns of her memory loss.
But he doesn’t care. Even if it means he has to go on “50 first dates” with her, he wants her.
The movie obviously frames Henry’s ability to execute these “first dates” as an over-the-top gesture of funny and outlandish love. It’s definitely not a movie to take seriously, and Segal didn’t market it as one either.
But just for fun, I decided to take it seriously. Or, as I was watching, I couldn’t help but try to, on purpose. The ingredients were all there for me.
1. Review the gothic
Watching this film gave my face a full workout because I was raising an eyebrow at every other scene.
And after a quick Google search, I was pleased to see that some viewers had made the same observations that I did, talking about the ways in which this was a horror film in disguise or calling attention to the many tone-deaf moments scattered throughout the film.
Though a full conversation on all the ill-judged depictions in this rom-com would be fun to have, today I’ll just be talking about all the things that made this film a gothic horror film.
According to iconic scholars like Robin Wood, the gothic genre is a sub-genre of horror and can be characterized by a set of elements. Some of those elements are:
a) Dark and macabre imagery: easily the most identifiable gothic quality is its darkness. Be it literal or metaphorical, gothic stories tend to be characteristically somber or imminent.
b) A strained relationship to the past: gothic characters often have a difficult, traumatic, or dramatic relationship to their past. The past predicates their present, no matter how much they don’t want it to.
c) A binary between private and public spaces: there’s a clear division between private and public spaces. Private spaces can be represented by people’s homes or intimate spaces, while public spaces are often defined by social, outdoor settings.
d) The in-between: gothic work will explore themes of the liminal. For example, a common gothic trope you may see is a female protagonist who isn’t allowed outside, and thus suffers stagnation between the public and private sphere — queue the canonical short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, for instance.
e) Excess and repetition: gothic pieces are often hyperbolic and might use repetition as a tool to induce haunting, dizzying, or confusing qualities. They don’t shy away from exaggerated imagery, settings, and emotionality.
f) Uneven knowledge: there’s an emphasis on the unequal degrees of knowledge between characters. Typically, men or those of higher social stature have access to more information than women or those of lower socioeconomic status.
The list goes on, but these are all the ingredients we’ll need for today.
2. Gather the facts
If you haven’t guessed it already, 50 First Dates plays with all the above gothic characteristics.
The movie’s premise alone, if you think about it, is pretty horrific: we’ve got a female protagonist who, because of a traumatic accident, is perpetually stuck in between the past and present. The only way she can make sense of her world is through everything her friends, family, and this one guy who’s trying to win her over, tell her is fact. And the whole film is presented with comedic excess via hyperbolic (and problematic) gestures, dialogue, and imagery.
Lemme elaborate — for Lucy, this liminal space between past and present is also simultaneously housed between the public and private. Since her accident, Lucy’s private life has always been orchestrated and maintained by the public: they’ve agreed to repeat the same routine for her, every day. And which day did the public decide to repeat for her? That same day she got into an accident.
Now, I get that Lucy wouldn’t actually have to re-live the car crash, but if we know anything about trauma, it’s that often the body remembers what the mind can’t fathom. (And we actually have proof of this when, at the end of the film, Lucy shows Henry her studio filled with paintings she drew of Henry’s face, despite her not “knowing” who he is when he shows up to profess his undying love.)
Something just doesn’t sit right with me about the physical repetition Lucy’s body is made to go through, and our not knowing if it’s actually harming her at the somatic or neurological level.
But, of course, we all understand her loved one’s motives — they just want to “protect” Lucy. So first, we see the people closest to her reenact a routined day for her. But what raised my eyebrow was that Lucy’s life is dominated primarily by male characters who think they know what’s best for her — her father and brother repeat that “same day” for Lucy to withhold the truth of her tragedy, but they also mold her narrative by giving her “facts” about her present. A notable example of this is when Lucy is told that Henry is her boyfriend, even though he didn’t have any reason to be any more than a friend at the moment that Lucy asks her dad and brother who Henry is.
Even if we were to try to gloss over the ethical glitches and highlight the moment Lucy finds out about the public charade and feels utterly lied to, what follows isn’t a Lucy storming off or a Lucy giving an empowering speech on independence. Instead, we see a hurt Lucy. And seeing how hurt Lucy is, Henry decides that he wants to tell her “the truth” instead — by showing her videotapes that he and Lucy’s friends made explaining Lucy’s condition to her. He shows these to her every day.
But these orchestrations — both by the public and by Henry alone — are a project of committed repetition based on uneven knowledge. Anyone who knows Lucy will always harness more knowledge about her than she herself will ever know. Talk about the most terrifying form of “uneven knowledge” — you don’t have ownership of your own past, but others do.
And that brings me to my final point, which also happens to be the most terrifying aspect of this whole movie: Lucy’s amnesia will always be both her enemy and her hero.
Enemy, obviously because she can’t remember anything, but hero, also because she won’t remember anything. In other words, a question of ethics lies at the core of the actual, serious concerns presented in Segal’s film, as we’re consistently made to wonder what Lucy wants. And what’s most horrific is not that we won’t ever know, but that neither will Lucy.
And one last thing to ponder, just to top this all off. Could it be that Henry only ends up pursuing Lucy precisely because she’s a perpetual one-night stand?
3. You’re done.
Congrats — we’ve successfully completed our misreading: 50 First Dates is actually a gothic horror film.
Conducting a purposeful misreading (deeper-reading) is fun. It makes you think of whatever is in front of you differently, and if your reading involves taking a non-serious thing seriously, sometimes it can show you a whole new genre-flipping world. My 50 First Dates misreading is full of gimmicks turned into screams, very real ethical conundrums, and a concoction of fear and disgust.
Can’t have your cake and eat it too? When it’s a horror film disguised as a rom-com, you definitely can.
Thanks for reading. This piece is part of the Hot Takes segment of the publication, No Hierarchies, where we’re pushing for new, inclusive, and creative ways to talk about arts & culture.
