The Self help Rom Com

When I first saw the poster for What to Expect When You’re Expecting, I thought it was a parody. Surely they did not turn the best-selling guide to gestation and birth into a romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz?

A screenwriter once told me that every movie should raise, and then answer, a question. In this case, I suppose, the question is “How can I tell if my baby is lying the right way for delivery?”

What to Expect isn’t the only rom com to be based on a self-help book. In 2009, we had He’s Just Not That Into You, based on the book of the same name (which was itself based on an episode of Sex and the City). In 2012, we witnessed the cinematic adaptation of Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man, the best-selling dating advice book by Steve Harvey, a man who’s been accused by one of his ex-wives (oh yes, he has more than one) of emotional abuse.

To a lot of people, romantic comedies are mindless, escapist fluff. They’re something you watch when you want to laugh a little, cry a little, and not think a lot. But I take romantic comedies seriously, because I think that like a lot of popular culture, they both reflect and shape our ideas about some of the most important things in life: love, sex, work, and what it means to be a man or a woman in this culture. Romantic comedies teach us a lot, and because they’re so entertaining, we rarely notice that we’re learning. They are the cinematic equivalent of a spoonful of sugar – and social norms are the medicine.

Unsurprisingly, when I say things like that, I often encounter resistance: people don’t like taking rom coms seriously. When I write critically about romantic comedies, one of the refrains I hear most often is, “It’s only a movie – no one watches this stuff to learn about the world” (see also, “Lighten up, it’s just entertainment,” and “People are smart enough to distinguish between real life and a movie”).

 

People certainly are smart enough to make that distinction. But that doesn’t change the fact that romantic comedies are powerful vehicles for values and ideas. And while it makes me weep to think of the three original ideas that were passed over to make these three self-help movies, I can’t help but be grateful for them. Because they’re proof that no, a rom com is not “just a movie.”

 

Romantic comedies are not often explicit about the lessons they’re teaching us. But teach us they do. They teach us that if you really love someone, you should tell them so, and pester and pursue them – show up at their office if you have to! – until they realise that they love you back. They teach us that the way to land a man is to scheme and strategize and, well, lie, about your intentions and interests and anything else that doesn’t fit the feminine ideal du jour. And they teach us that it doesn’t matter how professionally accomplished you are, or how loved you are by your friends and family: if there’s no man in your life, there’s no meaning. Over and over again, we see these ideas on screen, never as explicit “lessons,” but always there.

 

Self-help books, on the other hand, are totally explicit about those lessons, and they present them as the Absolute Truth of How Love Works, even if the authors have limited credentials.

 

“Look, I am not a doctor, neither real nor imagined,” writes Greg Behrendt in He’s Just Not That Into You. “But I am an expert that should be listened to because of one very important thing: I’m a guy – a guy that has had his fair share of relationships and is willing to come clean about his behavior in them. Because I’m a guy, I know how a guy thinks, feels, and acts.” You hear that, ladies? This guy has a penis and has had some girlfriends, so shut up and listen to his expert and universally applicable advice. Steve Harvey’s advanced degrees in psychology, his qualifications as a counselor? He doesn’t have any, but he did host Family Feud for a while, so clearly his word is gospel.

 

Normally, I’m annoyed that these men get to write sexist books and make sexist movies and present their sexist selves as experts with such flimsy qualifications. In the case of the self-help rom com, however, I think there’s a silver lining. When these self-help books become movies, the sense that there are concrete and explicit lessons to be learned comes with them. It’s no longer “just a movie” if it’s a movie based on the best-selling Absolute Romance and Dating Truth.

 

There are some kinds of pop culture that people are willing to take seriously. Most people agree that movies like The Artist or even The Hunger Games can tell us something meaningful about the current cultural moment. Romantic comedies, those fluffy, feminine, sometimes-funny movies, are not taken seriously. People rarely stop to think about what these movies can tell us about the world around us, and what they’re teaching us as we watch them.

 

But with the rise of the self-help rom com, perhaps that will change. Perhaps we can all agree now that since women buy more than half of movie tickets, and since romantic comedies are the only movies made for and about women, we need to start taking them seriously. Perhaps now we can take a good, hard look about the lessons these movies are teaching us about some of the most important things in life.

 

Or, we could keep letting Gerard Butler and Greg Behrendt and their all-knowing genitals tell us what to do.