In the past few years, quite a few film critics and commentators have written about the demise of the romantic comedy. The latest volley is Christopher Orr’s article in The Atlantic, bemoaning the quality of the genre. His main argument is that it’s played out because none of the traditional obstacles to romance exist any longer: class conflict, parental disapproval, money problems, etc. Since I’ve been thinking about this topic for many years now, I was all set to write a post about the only obstacle that’s left in modern love that DOES keep people apart: internal conflict. But Slate’s Alyssa Rosenberg beat me to it, penning a great post about how modern romance has changed, but modern romcoms haven’t. I’m not going to rehash her insights, so I’ll come at the same idea from a different angle: How can screenwriters improve the modern crop of romcoms?
The first thing, like Rosenberg suggests, is to stop creating ridiculous situations that keep the two leads from coming together, and focus instead on your characters’ very real fears and doubts. Inner obstacles are just as difficult to overcome as external ones, if not more. They’re also difficult to depict onscreen. If you’re able to pull it off, though, you’ll immediately have the audience in your corner — who can’t identify with the fear of heartbreak? Seeing someone struggle with these makes him or her instantly relatable.
Of course, this means that you have to be brave enough to allow your character to be flawed and weak. Won’t this make your character unlikable or pathetic? Well, it all depends on how you frame his or her weaknesses. Let’s take as an example, a scene in which we see a guy blowing up at a little old lady who’s stepped on his foot. You think, “What an asshole!” But let’s say we first encounter him as he hops out of bed in the morning and immediately steps on a beer bottle at the foot of his bed. Cut to him at the doctor’s where the nurse taking his blood sample is a newbie who keeps missing his vein. Gritting his teeth and trying to keep his cool with her, he then gets a call from his boss, reaming him out because they have a meeting with an important client in 30 minutes and he hasn’t even shown up at the office. And so on. By the time he gets on the bus and the little old lady steps on his foot, we see why he blows a fuse. There’s a context for his unacceptable behavior, making us understand, if not condone, his reaction.
Film gives us the luxury to see why people do the things they do. Like Jean Renoir famously said, “The terrible thing about life is that everyone has his reasons.” Show us what your character is afraid of and why. Yes, the challenge in a 90-minute movie is to give backstory in an elegant and economical way. But this is not an impossible feat. All it means is that you have to work harder at coming up with fresh ways of showing the backstory. This will only work if you go deep, by the way, which means that just about every scene has to reinforce who the character is and how his fear holds him back. If you just have another character explain this without setting it up, you’re under-serving your script (ie, “He’s terrified of commitment because his fiancee died”, etc.).
In other words, the audience has to clearly see the emotional costs of staying within his comfort zone. For great examples of how to do this, study Rosenberg’s two examples: The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Bridesmaids. To that list I’d add Pitch Perfect and Silver Linings Playbook.
Lastly, contrary to popular opinion, plenty of classic romantic comedies also use a character’s internal conflicts as the main obstacle. But that’s a post for another day.