Love unscripted: The culture industry’s romantic reel dance
Business is business, what else are you supposed to do?
Image credit: Friends With Benefits (2011)
Emma and Adam first met 15 years ago at Summer Camp, but never spoke again. Fast forward to a year ago, they have a chance encounter at a local farmers market, deciding to exchange numbers and catch up, but never speak again. Today, Emma (Natalie Portman) is a successful doctor, and as she consistently reminds audiences: “I work 80 hours a week, I need somebody in my bed at 2am who I don’t have to eat breakfast with.” Adam (Ashton Kutcher), on the other hand, is a production assistant for a teen-musical show somewhere between Glee and High school Musical. When Adam learns his father is sleeping with his ex-girlfriend, he drunkenly calls every girl on his phone before waking up naked on Emma’s couch the following morning. From there, he and Emma agree to enter in a ‘No-Strings-Attached’ relationship. Add some nascent romantic feelings by the end of the first act, some skeletons in the closet driving them apart by the end of the second, and their inevitable reconnection by the end of the third, it’s a universal love story for the ages.
And Sony Pictures seemed to agree. When Paramount released No Strings Attached in 2011 starring Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman, Sony already had its swift response. Starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake, Friend With Benefits (2011), centres Jamie (Kunis), a New York head-hunter, who recruits Dylan Francis Harper Jr (Timberlake) for a position with GQ Magazine. I don’t think I need to spell this out to you. Boy meets girl, boy and girl become friends, they develop feelings, girl is emotionally complicated modern woman. Boy get girl back. There’s a flash mob at the end, and they finally reconcile their long-suppressed feelings.
The details are really not important. These movies are fundamentally the same. The 1990’s and 2000’s were the golden age of the rom-com. From Nora Ephron classics such as 1989’s When Harry Met Sally or youthful, playful classics such as 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) or How To Lose a Guy In 10 days (2003) (note the list formula here), time and time again, the rom-com was both a critically and commercially viable genre of choice for studios. By the 2010’s, where did we go wrong? The creation of the same movie is a laughable fluke. But perhaps it was almost inevitable.
We once found the contrived, fantastical plots of the rom-coms charming. Sure, the premise of 2004’s 50 First Dates is absurd: Adam Sandler, a womanising veterinarian must win over Drew Barrymore who has a form of amnesia where she loses memory of the previous day every time she falls asleep. But at the same time, it feels self-referential to the alternate reality rom-coms exist in; why can’t I fall in love with a woman with amnesia on a tropical island? The blind optimism of these plots made these movies so appealing. With the charismatic leads, and the right chemistry, anything was possible. But what happens when studios try to move the rom-com into the realm of reality?
Take the list of acceptable rom-com careers: pastry chef, journalist, actress, publicist, art-curator. Of course, despite characters often being some hot shot, highly successful up and comer, we never actually see them work. In part this is a symptom of the out-of-touch optimism belonging to the rom-com. It’s important to know that they’re on the grind, but god forbid it gets in the way of plot any more than to frame a meet-cute or provide a one-dimensional comic relief friend. The contrived unreality of the rom-com is what fed into an exhausting predictability and growing cynicism of audiences.
And the audiences weren’t alone. In the mid-to-late 2000’s, studios found them neither critically nor commercially viable. This can otherwise be known as the ‘Avatar-watershed’. With the advent of IMAX, 3D cinema, and CGI and SFX technology becoming increasingly commercially viable, many commentators noticed a turn in the industry. As author Scott Meslow puts it, unlike big box-office grossers like Avatar, “[rom-coms] were never going to make $1 billion worldwide, and critically, they were never going to get the awards applause that studios are hungry for… So there was a sense that they weren’t serving the purpose the studios needed them to.” Romantic comedies were ‘formulaic’, and their predictable storylines were no longer as appealing. With lower budgets, and a turn to represent ‘real’ people with ‘real’ lives, our doppelganger rom-coms were born. So sure, these films were just a pragmatic reinvention of the rom com for the era of casual sex, however, it more precisely reflects the current zeitgeist of our culture industry.
Image credit: No Strings Attached (2011)
In their 1947 essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer hypothesise that mass culture has homogenised art into a system ideal for the ideological indoctrination of a passive consumer towards the mode of production. The culture industry encompasses all forms of mass media, created with an industrial logic that prioritises mass profit in a monolithic, homogenous cultural voice. To put it simply, it’s not just business, but an exponentially proliferative system of power. Adorno and Horkheimer remind us: “The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimise the trash they intentionally produce”. The absorption of an industrial lexicon is simply a means to delude us into the social necessity of their content. Business is business and these rom-coms are simply one slice of the pie-chart of studio projected revenue.
But it’s not just business. It’s a parasitic relationship that begs its consumer’s fixation. The assimilation of culture by industry amplifies its authoritative apparatus. Mass culture becomes enmeshed with every other sector of industrial life, taking on “the deceptive form of a disinterested, impartial authority, which fits fascism like a glove.” I’m not the first to identify that on at least one level, the genre has some level of didactic function; its perpetuation of antiquated gender relations, the American dream, with its token gay best-friends and sassy but wise black women to give the delusional lead a reality check. Rom-coms play a fine line between fantasy and mimesis. It's human and relatable enough that you believe that perhaps one day, you too will find true love – after all, who wouldn’t, right? But its luxurious closets, big New York apartments, and dream executive job all uphold a warped ideal of the protestant work ethic and neoliberalism.
As a cultural commodity, the rom-com is created solely to satiate predetermined consumer needs. Films are made with particular demographic insights in mind. Without women, the rom-com would be obsolete. Yet, as feminism has emerged at the forefront of mainstream cultural discourses, how do studios ensure the same engagement? In No Strings Attached, Portman is a Mr Darcy for the contemporary age, aloofly rejecting the doting Kutcher, as an emotionally complicated 21st century career woman. In Friends With Benefits, the archetypal gay best friend is replaced by Woody Harrelson, who offers his sage advice to Timberlake. Mila Kunis cries “I miss sex! I mean sometimes you just need it”: a beacon for the sexually liberated 21st century woman. In case you haven’t gathered, these aren’t the archaic rom-coms where the camera pans to the twin towers in every stock New York landscape shot. It’s cool, modern and edgy.
Business is business, what else are you supposed to do? Adorno and Horkheimer observe: “That life could continue without the whole culture industry is too certain; the satiation and apathy it generates among consumers are too great”. We are not only happy to consume these films; we do so with an almost bathetic awareness of their homogeneity. The stars certainly didn’t just happen to align to give us these films. It was an inevitability of the mechanism of a well oiled, and calibrated industry designed to send us into a media fervour. If anything, No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits was the culture industry’s ultimate Freudian slip. But we were too engrossed to care.