Can Rom-Coms Work in 2018?
America in 2018 is in a weird culture struggle. On one hand, PC culture is a real thing that is here to stay, for better or worse. It has infiltrated all facets of pop culture and given a voice to people nobody would’ve heard 10 years ago. On the other hand, we have the least politically correct president in the history of the United States who commands attention anytime he needs it and in 2018, there is serious money to be made as a combatant of PC Culture, as seen by the likes of Clay Travis and Tommy Lahren.
But in the world of romantic comedies, can they work with our new standards of taste? Watching movies like The Breakfast Club with a 2018 lens makes it a remarkably racist and shitty movie. Hell, watching Cruel Intentions in 2018 is uncomfortable and 90s kids grew up on that shit. But let’s see if we can get even closer.
In 2018, When We First Met starring Adam Devine released on Netflix. It’s a great movie and does nothing more than what it sets out to do, which is to laugh for an hour and a half and move on. But when the trailer for it released, there was a tidal wave of backlash, a common symptom of outrage culture, which is a bipartisan phenomenon.
The premise of the movie is that Adam Devine gets friend zoned (more on this in a second) and discovers a way to go back in time to when he met Avery, the girl of his dreams, and try to win her back. People were mad as hell that he couldn’t respect her wishes to just be a friend and tried to alter the course to where they end up together without her having any say. If you watch the movie, you see it’s not even about the friend zone and trying to change it, there’s a larger overall point to the film. But audiences today don’t trust filmmakers to be sensible to the times.
The point being, a harmless romantic comedy was subjected to larger conversations about sexual politics and “nice guys.”
Do romantic comedies have a place in the age of Trump and PC culture? Is there any room for harmless comedies to exist without being held under a microscope? I don’t know. I certainly don’t think movies centered around women being undesirable because they have a career be an acceptable plot point. Nor do I think guys getting out of the friend zone should be revered in the end when he finally gets the girl.
I think if romantic comedies want to make a comeback, they need to adapt to other cultures outside of middle to upper-class white people having white people problems. They need to become more inclusive and tell more stories. The genre is dead in the water, and what does come out of it today is a more realistic and depressing look at the genre of love. But to shut our brains off and go back to laughing for 90 minutes requires a certain amount of sensitivity and awareness. You can make funny movies about people of color, they exist in the same way that white people do. They fall in love and have their hearts broken just like Reese Witherspoon.
The excuse that studios need a white face to sell movies is a farce in 2018. Black Panther, Get Out, The Big Sick, Moonlight and Girls Trip have shown that you don’t need a saltine cracker lead to sell tickets. Respect the culture and the culture will respect you.
