Abstract
While the romantic comedy depicts a popular form of love story, it is not the only romantic-focused genre that is produced in Hollywood and well-received by audiences. The genre has weak explanatory potential when examining love in Hollywood cinema as a whole, notwithstanding Mark Rubinfeld’s contention that ‘the Hollywood romantic comedy is currently the only popular Hollywood genre that focuses exclusively on romantic courtship and romantic love’.1
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Notes
Mark D. Rubinfeld. Bound to Bond: Gender, Genre and the Hollywood Romantic Comedy. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2001: 178. Rubinfeld’s italics. He suggests that ‘the romance and the musical’ no longer hold prominence in Hollywood (here, Rubinfeld uses the term ‘romance’ where I would use ‘romantic drama’).
Figures: Box Office Mojo. ‘All Time Box Office’ November 2010. Accessed 1 November 2010. boxofficemojo.com/alltime. When adjusted for inflation in domestic total gross Titanic was placed sixth (US$943, 342, 300).
Laurent Jullier. Hollywood et la difficulte d’aimer. Paris: Editions Stock, 2004; Jean-Loup Bourget. ‘Romantic Dramas of the Forties: An Analysis’ Film Comment 10, no. 1 (January/February 1974): 46–51; Catherine L. Preston. ‘Hanging on a Star: The Resurrection of the Romance Film in the 1990s’ in Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays, edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon, 227–243. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000; Shumway. Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis. New York: New York University Press, 2003.
Ralph Cohen. ‘History and Genre’ Neohelicon 13, no. 2 (September 1986): 91.
Mike Featherstone. ‘Love and Eroticism: An Introduction’ Theory, Culture and Society 15, no. 1 (1998): 3.
See Steve Neale. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge, 2000: 14, 28, 197, 212, 204; Neale. ‘Melo Talk’ 73–74.
Deborah Thomas. Beyond Genre: Melodrama, Comedy and Romance in Hollywood Films. Moffat: Cameron and Hollis, 2000.
See John C. Lyden. Myths, Morals and Rituals: Film as Religion. New York: New York University Press, 2003: 164–178. Lyden says that melodrama ‘came to mean a drama with a certain emotional effect on the viewer … Over time, however, its meaning narrowed to be focused primarily on sentimental films directed towards female viewers that featured narratives about women and their sufferings’. See also Tania Modleski. ‘Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film’ Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 24. Modleski states, ‘Women in melodrama almost always suffer the pains of love and death [… ] while their husbands, lovers and children remain partly, or totally unaware of their experience’.
Janet Staiger. ‘Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History’ in Film Genre Reader 3, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 185–195. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Jeanine Basinger. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993: 8.
Janet Staiger. ‘The First Bond Who Bleeds, Literally and Metaphorically’ in Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, edited by Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer, 16. New York: Routledge, 2011. Staiger briefly mentions Casablanca as an example; Janet Staiger. ‘Film Noir as Male Melodrama: The Politics of Film Genre Labeling’ in The ShiftingDefinitions of Genre:Essays onLabelingFilms, Television Shows and Media, edited by Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich, 71–91. Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland and Company, 2008.
Robert C. Solomon. About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times. Indianapoiis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006: 103.
Robin Wood. ‘Ideology, Genre, Auteur’ in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy, 477. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Stanley Cavell. Pursuits ofHappiness: The Hollywood Comedy ofRemarriage. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981: 82.
Anthony Giddens. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992: 38.
Dark Victory, directed by Edmund Goulding (1939; Burbank, CA: Turner Entertainment, 2005), DVD.
Ian Gordon. ‘Nostalgia, Myth, and Ideology: Visions of Superman at the End of the “American Century”’ in Comics and Ideology, edited by Matthew P. McAllister and others, 1010. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
David Lowenthal. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Helen E. Fisher. Anatomy ofLove: The Natural History ofMonogamy, Adultery and Divorce. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1992: 48.
See Cavell. Pursuits ofHappiness. 49; Katharina Giltre. Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of Union 1934–1965. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
Shumway. Modern Love. 112. See also Mary Ann Doane. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987: 96–97.
Tamar Jeffers McDonald. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London: Wallflower, 2007; Kristine Brunovska Karnick. ‘Commitment and Reaffirmation in Hollywood Romantic Comedy’ in Classical Hollywood Comedy, edited by Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins, 123–146. New York: Routledge, 1995; Deborah A. Moddelmog. ‘Can Romantic Comedy Be Gay? Hollywood Romance, Citizenship and Same-Sex Marriage Panic’ Journal of Filrn and Television 36, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 162–172; Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn. ‘Introduction: A Lot Like Love’ in Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn, 1–8. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009.
See Cavell. Pursuits of Happiness. 84, 172; Stuart Voytilla. Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films. Michael Wiese Productions: Studio City, 1999: 212.
Virginia Wright Wexman. Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage and Hollywood Performance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993: 3.
Robert J. Sternberg. ‘A Triangular Theory of Love’ Psychological Review 93, no. 2 (1986): 124.
Torben Grodal. ‘Love and Desire in the Cinema’ Cinema Journal 43, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 29.
Allan Bloom. Love and Friendship. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993: 281.
Maria Lauret. ‘Hollywood Romance in the Aids Era: Ghost and When Harry Met Sally’ in Fatal Attractions: Re-scripting Romance in Contemporary Literature and Film, edited by Lynne Pearce and Gina Wisker, 29. London: Pluto Press, 1998.
See, for example, W. F. R. Hardie. ‘Aristotle’s Treatment of the Relation between the Soul and the Body’ The Philosophical Quarterly 14, no. 54 (January 1964): 67.
Diane Ackerman. A Natural History of Love. New York: Vintage Books, 1995: 12.
Peter L. Allen, The Art ofLove: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982: 3.
Ralph Harper. Human Love: Existential and Mystical. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1966: 49.
Maureen Turim. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York: Routledge, 1989: 12.
Barry Keith Grant. Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology. London: Wallflower, 2007: 24–28.
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© 2014 Erica Todd
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Todd, E. (2014). Passionate Love in Hollywood and the Romantic Drama Genre. In: Passionate Love and Popular Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295385_2
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