The first Bridget Jones film is pretty much about sexual harassment and fat phobia. Photo / Supplied
The first Bridget Jones film is pretty much about sexual harassment and fat phobia. Photo / Supplied
Watch a rom-com from the 1990s or 2000s now, and you'll discover it reflects a very different, often cringeworthy age.
Over lockdowns, my wife and I spent Friday nights rewatching romantic comedies from the 1990s and 2000s. That was when we were the people they make rom-coms about: young anddating, not married and rewatching rom-coms with a curry. They have been a crucial brain emptier. After hours of pandemic news in the week, what better way to unwind than with a vacuous story of attractive people suffering a dip in the second act, before falling for each other by the third?
Yet, like a scene with somebody smoking in a pub, it became apparent that none of these rom-coms would be made today. This is not a plea to cancel anything from the days when woke was what you did when you stopped sleeping. That seems reductive. Instead the more films I watched — from the Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks era, via Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, up to Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler — the more it became clear that rom-coms are a time capsule, storing attitudes of when they were made, for studying, and gawping at, later. Which echoes what Taylor Swift had a pop at Netflix for this week, when their show Ginny & Georgia made a joke about how many men the singer had dated. "Hey, 2010 called and it wants its lazy, deeply sexist joke back," she tweeted. Eleven years, it seems, is a lifetime in pop culture.
Let us start with Hitch — a film that despite being only 16 years old would have less chance of being made in Hollywood today than another Home Alone film with Donald Trump. Written and directed by two men, Hitch has Will Smith teaching men how to woo — bed — women. Smith's apparently charming first monologue? "Basic principles: no woman wakes up saying, 'God, I hope I don't get swept off my feet today.'" This is accompanied by a young woman being leered at by a bald man in a sweet shop. "Now she might say," he continues, "'I'm really into my career right now'. You believe that? Neither does she. You know why? She's lying to you, that's why. You understand me? Lying."
Why is Smith, a man so cool he was once the Fresh Prince, coming across like an incel, the "involuntary celibates" unable to get dates who turn their anger on women? Because that is how Hollywood, in 2005, thought women behaved. Rom-coms do not challenge society's thinking — they are far too lightweight for that. Rather they react to what is normal at the time on the way to making as much box office as possible. The standard had been set a couple of years earlier in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, when it is celebrated that Hudson ditches her dream job to stay with McConaughey.
Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Photo / Supplied
"Any man," a winking Smith wraps up, "has a chance to sweep any woman off her feet. Just needs the right broom." This is really no different from Tom Cruise's volatile sex coach Frank TJ Mackey in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, yelling to an audience: "Respect the cock. And tame the c***." Not every rom-com needs longevity, but it is fair to ask that, within the space of a footballer's professional career, the premise does not end up like a recruitment video for one of today's most notable misogynistic movements.
Tricks, lies and gaslighting — anything goes. Which brings us to (500) Days of Summer, a film written by two men about Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) dating Summer (Zooey Deschanel). He meets Autumn, but that is just one bad idea in a film that, co-screenwriter Scott Neustadter said, was written as revenge after he was dumped. There is one line in which Scott, sorry, Tom, says, "Why is it pretty girls think they can treat people like crap and get away with it?" when said woman has done very little even to hint at a passing interest in him. Even Gordon-Levitt turned against it. "He's projecting and selfish," he has said of the character.
Over and over rom-coms that straddled the start of the century, and beyond, were about what women owed men. Gordon-Levitt pops up again in 10 Things I Hate About You. His Cameron fancies Bianca, and she does not fancy him, but is nice anyway. Cue Cameron yelling, "Have you always been this selfish?" to which she, confused, replies: "Yes." "Just because you're beautiful that doesn't mean you can treat people like they don't matter!" Cameron continues, before Bianca, one assumes out of fear, kisses him.
Incidentally, 10 Things I Hate About You has a blooper of Heath Ledger twice forcing a kiss on his unsuspecting co-star, Julia Stiles. In 1999? An on-set lark. In 2021? Never working in this town again. Similarly the first Bridget Jones film is pretty much about sexual harassment, fat phobia and a man who calls Bridget a "verbally incontinent spinster", but still ends up with her. It is not a film for female self-esteem. Nor is Knocked Up, whose star Katherine Heigl said it "paints the women as humourless and uptight, and the men as loveable, goofy".
This, though, is how the most popular of culture marks time. Friends — the biggest TV show of the 1990s — is being retrospectively slammed as homophobic and too white. Yet the latter was just how TV was commissioned. Once again producers reacted to what they thought audiences wanted. Equally, spotting diversity in most rom-coms I rewatched is a very short game. However, fast-forward to the past five years, and on screens big and small the key work reflects present conversations about diversity. Film? Happiest Season, about lesbians. The Big Sick, about an interracial couple. Crazy Rich Asians, about those of the title. TV? The most successful show runners are Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, a black woman and a gay man, telling stories accordingly.
Friends, the biggest TV show of the 1990s, is being retrospectively slammed as homophobic and too white. Photo / Getty Images
It used to be different. In the journalist Allison Yarrow's 2018 book 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality, she examines how the decade treated women of note, from Monica Lewinsky to Tonya Harding. In society and the media, she argues, vilification was widespread.
"The more women assumed power," Yarrow wrote in Time magazine, "the more power was taken from them via a noxious popular culture that celebrated outright hostility toward women and commercialised their sexuality and insecurity. The '90s bitch bias is so woven through every aspect of the '90s narrative, that it can be tough to spot. Stories of notable women in the '90s invariably suggest they were sluts, whores, trash, prudes, idiots, frauds, emasculators, nutcrackers and succubi. These disparagements were so embedded in the cultural dialogue that many of us have never stopped to question them."
All those tropes are found in female characters in rom-coms from the recent past, an era of lads' mags and men being men and women being women; in glossy love stories with little nuance. By comparison we rewatched When Harry Met Sally (1989). There is an article in The Atlantic that treats the film — written by Nora Ephron — as problematic because Sally (Meg Ryan) is high-maintenance. But I am not sure. Sally's demanding nature is treated as a character trait, not a flaw, and besides, Harry, when talking about sex, is hardly held up as irresistible. When McConaughey, in one of his rom-coms, deals in sexual stereotypes, he is doing so with his shirt off, cradling an American football. He looks desirable, while his friends are more like a Harry (Billy Crystal) — insecure, average-looking, realistic.
Broadly speaking for at least two decades, romantic comedies focused on leads who were as two-dimensional as the posters they were put on, which means films like When Harry Met Sally now have more in common with an indie that Noah Baumbach or Greta Gerwig would make. This is a shame. A daft rom-com at its best is perfectly structured escapism and often very weird indeed. In 13 Going on 30, an "adult" Jennifer Garner hits on a teenage boy. In While You Were Sleeping Sandra Bullock sneaks into a family whose son is in a coma. The issue now, though, is that producers are terrified of making films that deal directly with a man and a woman dating. The subject is thin ice, and whether now or when a couple are watching ten years from now — during the next pandemic — that ice is bound to break.
