Romantic comedy was once a noble genre, a place to work out not only will they or won’t they, but why or why not, and should they or shouldn’t they? The Lady Eve may be a goofy romp about a conwoman and her beer-heir mark, but Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda’s spiky courtship is all about how much we can overcome deeply ingrained prejudices about class and sexual experience. In When Harry Met Sally, the two main characters talked their way through what makes a good relationship for a decade—and worked out their attitudes towards their careers and themselves as friends—before they got together. And movies like Annie Hall defied the traditional meaning of comedy—it ends with a breakup, not a marriage—to acknowledge both the power and potential for heartbreak of modern relationships.

But in recent years, romantic comedies have gone timid. In the quest for PG-13 ratings, they can’t say much about sex. And in their desire to rake in dollars, an interchangeable array of blonde or blondish heroines with disposable jobs in PR and fashion have spent ninety minutes resisting an similarly dull assortment of disc jockeys, television producers, and businessmen. A few R-rated romantic comedies from Judd Apatow and the creators in his orbit have broken the mold, but they haven’t been enough to change the conventional wisdom of the industry.

All of this is the reason Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria, about Mortimer Granville’s (Hugh Dancy) invention of the vibrator in Victorian England, is simultaneously a delight and a relief. There is a will-they-or-won’t-they couple at its heart, of course: when Mortimer, who believes in the germ theory of medicine, takes a job with women’s physician Dr. Charles Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), he meets Dr. Dalrymple’s very different daughters, dutiful Emily (Felicity Jones) and Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a socialist feminist who runs a London settlement house. While Mortimer plans to take over Dr. Dalrymple’s practice and becomes engaged to Emily, he’s drawn to Charlotte, whose ideals appeal to him even as she rejects the diagnosis of hysteria, which gives Mortimer his living, as an attempt to disguise the true dissatisfactions women experience. And when her political work gets Charlotte put on trial and branded hysterical, Mortimer must decide if he will let her be institutionalized and subject to an involuntary hysterectomy or maintain his devotion to the diagnosis that’s made his career. I spoke with Wexler about the declining stakes of romantic comedy, the importance of careers and values in successful relationships, and how she ended up making romantic comedy for men. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things you brought up was the decline of the romantic comedy, and this is very much a romantic comedy. I was curious if you thought that reflected the inevitable homogenization of any genre when Hollywood gets their hands on it, or whether consumers have actually backed away from romantic comedies where the issues are larger than will they or won’t they?

I think a lot of romantic comedies revolve around will they or won’t they. And yes, will they or won’t they get together is where ours is, but it’s not quite the central question. It’s more how will they? I think a lot of the better writing in romantic comedies these days has tended towards the R-rated romantic comedies, Knocked Up, Bridesmaids…I think Knocked Up, they take the characters, you put them in really hard situations, and you see how they deal. I think that’s a good thing. But the kind of witty banter, the kind of Hepburn-Cary Grant stuff is just not around as much, and it just felt right for this story, with this quirk of history.

It seems like in a lot of romantic comedies, the characters don’t really get treated like adults. Their careers raen’t particularly important to them. It’s a little infantilizing. One of the things that’s fun about Charlotte is whoever she ends up with has to share her values.

And her passion for her work. I think that’s where they connect first and foremost is they’re passionate about their work and what they believe in. They’re both true believers in their own way…I think one of the things you try to figure out is what kind of movie you’re trying to make. And I knew, on a very core level, I was making a romantic comedy. In that, I think the fundamental kind of question is about how and who you fall in love with, what draws you to people.

The movie is a lot about progressives in different ways. Mortimer, his character is a medical progressive. The rest of his life, he kind of fits tidily into the box. It doesn’t make sense for him to buck the system because it’s set up for him. But in the end, he can’t deny the truth in front of his face. His friend Edmund, played by Rupert Everett, is a progressive in science and technology, and he also doesn’t fit neatly into the box as a gay character. But he is part of the aristocracy, and he’s wealthy, and has ways around it. And Charlotte is the girl who can’t help it. She knows it would be easier not to raise her hand in the back of the classroom, so to speak, but she still has something she has to say. She knows it would be easier for her, but she doesn’t know how to be anything else. She’s a truth-teller.

In this kind of film, what their job is illuminates their character’s journey. It’s also important because it’s how it all happens. Because he’s a doctor who gets a job treating women for hysteria, that’s how he meets her. I’ve been looking at a lot of other films right now, and we’re always trying to get away from anybody’s job because it’s about the relationship. And sometimes it can be very cheesy and stupid to resolve something about the relationship through they achieve something at work. It’s kind of sideways. But in this case, I think so much of the film is about acknowledging the truth that’s right in front of you even if culture wants you to pretend it’s something else. And the only way these two are ever going to get together, the big obstacle between them is their differing opinions about what the truth is and what’s acceptable. Until they can find a way to each other as passionate people who are true believers, they’ll never be together. And they’re not even trying to be together…It’s when he wakes up that their relationship starts to work out.
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There’s been a lot of buzz about a new study in Psychological Science which suggests that people of both genders view men as people but women as objects. It’s a small sample size, and so worth taking with a grain of salt. But the science behind the study’s setup is interesting as a potential explanation for some of the more distorted depictions of women we see in popular culture.

The study, conducted by Philippe Bernard, Sarah J. Gervais, Jill Allen, Sophie Campomizzi and Olivier Klein, is based on a fairly simple idea: we can recognize objects easily when we see them upside down, but not people. So “if sexualized women are viewed as objects and sexualized men are viewed as persons, then sexualized female bodies will be recognized equally well when inverted as when upright (object-like recognition), whereas sexualized male bodies will be recognized better when upright than when
inverted (person-like recognition).” When the researchers briefly showed subjects pictures of a man shirtless but wearing shorts upside down, they correctly identified him as a human man 73 percent of the time, while they recognized an upside down picture of a woman in panties and a bra correctly 83 percent of the time.

Apparently, part of the reason women are easier to recognize even when presented upside down is that “analytic processing, which is involved in object recognition, does not take into account spatial relations among the stimulus parts.” That would explain why comic book artists can get away with drawing hugely distorted images of women’s bodies—as long as the “stimulus parts” are all there, we’re getting the basic message that this is a lady. Fascinatingly, the researchers also cite a study that suggests that “focusing on targets’ appearance, rather than on their personality, could diminish the degree of human nature attributed to female targets but not to male targets.” I wonder if that’s because, as we’ve discussed some this week, showing men as strong implies capability and capacity, which can be extrapolated back into personality. But showing women as consumable tells us things about how we perceive them and what we want from them, not about who they actually are.

I’m excited for Lee Daniels The Paperboy, which explores a wrongful conviction in Florida, and I was intrigued by this little tidbit from The Hollywood Reporter’s Cannes review of the movie: “Working from the well-received 1995 novel by Pete Dexter (Deadwood, Paris Trout), Daniels and Dexter have stuck closely to the book’s storyline in their adaptation but have amped up the racial element by making one major character and two secondary ones black rather than white. This doesn’t create any fundamental differences but does thicken the deck with extra tensions and innuendo.” The value of black directors isn’t just their authority to speak about race in certain ways, but the fact that they can present challenges to default whiteness in a way that white writers or directors may be unable to see. Default whiteness isn’t just lazy. It can flatten a story, or remove opportunities for tension and conversation. If white directors turn characters of color white because they want to cast a certain actor, they may end up with movies that don’t just look more generic but are less powerful.

Dan Solomon follows up my post on D’Angelo and what happens to men when they find themselves treated like women with an important reminder that men talk about wanting to be objectified in a way that isn’t really supported by their behavior:

If they don’t put on a lot of weight, they do other things to mess with the way they look. They take on roles that reward them for looking unattractive, maybe, or they grow stupid beards, like Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp, if they’re able to let these things roll off their backs a bit. But it happens a lot, in any case, to men who are treated the way that women are — as objects, whose sexuality and appearance are public property…So much of the rhetoric from dudes who talk about the way women are objectified is that they’d love it if they were sexualized in the same way. And it sounds like a dumb hypothetical, something that has no real connection to reality, because there’s no real equivalence between the way society does (or even can) treat men and the way it treats women. Except, kinda, there is — and the way the men who do get treated that way tend to do whatever it takes to get out from under it. That’s probably worth considering, fellas, the next time you try to make that argument.

I don’t write about the way men’s bodies are portrayed in the media as much as I write about women, if only because women are treated so much worse. Women’s bodies are dressed up for others’ use, whether it’s to bring visual pleasure or physical pleasure to the people who see them or touch them. Men’s bodies are presented as being for their own use, as sources of strength they can use to save the world, to fight injustice, to perform feats that are impressive and valuable in their own right. Now, of course, there are all sorts of culturally conditioned ideal bodies: a skinny Jewish nerd’s dreaming his way into Superman’s body and Superman’s tights is having a different experience from a black man raised in the Pentecostal church who is grappling with the connection between body and soul. But I’m intrigued by those self-perceptions, varied though they may be. I’m used to the constant struggle to think of my body as something that belongs to me, but I’m not personally familiar with my body not performing up to an arbitrary set of standards set for it. I can imagine there are difficulties I simply can’t fathom.

Amy Wallace’s profile of D’Angelo in GQ is fantastic, and not least because it breaks down how the video for “Untitled,” one of the sexier things ever produced, contributed to his unraveling. In other words, D’Angelo got treated like a woman, and it was not exceptionally good for his mental health:

But as D began to fall apart, the video would be the only thing many fans remembered. “The video was the line of demarcation,” says Harris. “It sent him spinning out of control.”…The trouble began right away, at the start of the Voodoo tour in L.A. “It was a week of warm-up gigs at House of Blues just to kick off the tour, draw some attention, break in the band,” says Alan Leeds, D’s tour manager then and now. “And from the beginning, it’s ‘Take it off!’ “…

D’Angelo felt tortured, Questlove says, by the pressure to give the audience what it wanted. Worried that he didn’t look as cut as he did in the video, he’d delay shows to do stomach crunches. He’d often give in, peeling off his shirt, but he resented being reduced to that. Wasn’t he an artist? Couldn’t the audience hear the power of his music and value him for that? He would explode, Questlove recalls, and throw things. Sometimes he’d have to be coaxed not to cancel shows altogether. When I ask D about this, he downplays his suffering. Watching him pull hard on another Newport, I realize that he finds it far easier to confess his addictions than his insecurities about his corporeal self. Self-destructing with a coke spoon—while ill-advised—has a badass edge. Fretting over what Questlove has called “some Kate Moss shit” seems anything but manly…

What’s fascinating about that Questlove quote is that it implies that you shouldn’t be affected by how other people perceive your body. It’s a perspective that makes men feel better about ogling, about demanding. If it’s flattery, there’s no ugly undertone to it, no sense that the person you’re telling to take it off owes you, that you could turn on them if they don’t comply. But when a man experiences, gets driven crazy by it, it’s not really “some Kate Moss shit” anymore, and it’s not complementary. So much of pop culture is like this. When a man experiences objectification, or stays at home with his kids, suddenly, this arena that women have been playing in for decades is a revelation. How does it feel, indeed?

Abigail Breslin may have come up as a precocious little girl in Little Miss Sunshine, and have honed that act in movies like No Reservations and Definitely, Maybe where she’s up against more experienced adult stars. But it’s exciting to hear that she’s moving into a new phase of her career by taking an action role, specifically in a movie called Final Girl where, according to Deadline, she gets to fight off a pack of feral teenage boys who want to use her in a weird initiation ritual.

It’s incredible and inspiring to me that there is a generation of teenage female actresses who are making their bones this way, whether it’s Chloe Grace Moretz playing vampire and superhero or Saorsie Ronan playing the result of an experiment in Hanna and a human hijacked by an alien in The Host. Growing up, I loved movies like The Babysitters’ Club, the Winona Ryder-anchored adaptation of Little Women, and Ten Things I Hate About You, but I know how hard I would have been cheering for girls who were allowed to be ferocious and strong instead of simply smart and creative. It’s not enough to have smart movies for and starring teenage girls if they’re all smart in the same way. Not everyone is a bookish budding feminist like Jo or Kat Stratford, and that’s absolutely fine.

And what’s particularly interesting to me about Breslin’s path is that she’s embodied all kinds of alternagirls. In Little Miss Sunshine, she’s defiantly weird, close to her grandfather, totally uninterested in the standards she’s supposed to meet. As Valentine Wiggin in Ender’s Game, she’ll get to be cerebral and loving. And as the Final Girl, further proof that Joss Whedon created our pop culture world and we all just live in it, she’ll get to fight. The idea that someone like Breslin could just keep going and not have to make a teenaged romantic comedy to continue working feels liberating, even though it’s entirely new. I’m all for letting a thousand Jodie Fosters bloom, and with Moretz, Ronan, and Breslin going strong, we might just get them.

By Dennis Farr

Science fiction is an odd beast, asking us to suppose and imagine a world that is often based off our own, with little bits and bobs changed. When set in the future, there is a certain level of world building that must occur, and to which we must then be introduced. While we will still bring our own thoughts and assumptions into that story, they do not necessarily feed into the story itself, depending on the skill of the author (whose own short-sightedness may make an appearance instead). However, with games, this line becomes incredibly difficult to separate, as the player also becomes part of the authored experience. The writers and designers of a game that entails some level of decision-making can answer many of the typical questions: how, when, where, etc. Ultimately, I am the one who decides why, however.

The idea of this dissonance came via playing Mass Effect, where the male Shepard I played was quite gay in my mind. It was not until the third game that he was able to express his love for a squadmate, however. By this time, it seemed obvious he would have been in the closet, though the game’s writing about its universe makes it clear that being in the closet seems an outdated notion. Unfortunately, I, as the player, was playing in the here and now, and retroactively writing that bit of world building in did not stop what bits of the story I had already filled in for the series.

This idea can be problematic in many regards: talking of a futuristic setting where people are of mixed heritage, because Earth’s default is multicultural, and nationality is no longer really a concern, offering the option to have a POC as the protagonist, and then finding yourself surrounded with white people. If a game is telling my character that she is the norm, but then finds herself not, it is a bit jarring, and leads to the player coming up with explanations—explanations that will conflict with the lore of the game.
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This is the week when the television networks announce their fall lineups and try to persuade advertisers that they should spend bunches of money to sell products during their new shows. It’s also the time when those of us who care about the white dudely domination of Hollywood get to see how many—or how few—women and people of color will be creating and headlining new shows. Here are the basic numbers on who’s creating and starring in what you’ll see on your television this fall.

39: Number of new shows ordered by NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC, and the CW.

12: Number of those 39 shows created by women.

2: Number of those 12 shows co-created by a man and a woman.

5*: Shows from creators of color, including Michael Cuesta on Elementary, Ajay Sahgal on Groupon comedy Friend Me, Mindy Kalin’s self-titled The Mindy Project, Alessandro Tanaka’s Animal Practice, and Toni Trucks’ Do No Harm.

3: Number of new shows with African-American leads, Andre Braugher in Last Resort, Meagan Good in Infamous, and Jessica Lucas in Cult.

2: Number of new comedies with people of color as sole leads or parts of core ensembles—Anthony Anderson in Guys with Kids and Mindy Kaling in her sitcom (also per the Deadline item linked above).

*Calculated to the best of my ability given scanty availability of pictures of writers.

Maureen Ryan on how irritating it is when television shows like, apparently, USA’s Common Law, feel the need to constantly reiterate that two men who happen to be close aren’t gay:

It’s past time to stop treating gay, lesbian and trans characters as The Other. When “Seinfeld” introduced the phrase “not that there’s anything wrong with that” in connection to the possibility of a character being gay, GLBTQ characters were a rarity on TV and thus that joke may have served as a sort of crude but useful enlightening tool.

Now that kind of joke — “We’re close friends, but we’re not gay!” — feels like a distancing technique, something that draws attention to gays and lesbians as something out of the norm. That feels wrong for a lot of reasons.

And honestly, who cares? In this day and age, are you telling me that two men who are best friends would constantly have to deal with the assumption that they’re gay? I just find the whole idea fairly preposterous. Who doesn’t know straight men who hang out all the time without anyone thinking about or guessing about their sexuality? How is drawing attention to not-gayness, at this point, anything but a representation of lingering shreds of mild but unmistakable gay panic

This seems like a relic of a transitional moment when lots of folks were starting to come out and straight people who previously had been unaware of the potential existence gay people started to get worried that they didn’t have valuable information they could use to keep from embarrassing themselves. Now, it’s true that said information remains relevant—no one wants to hit on someone who’s unavailable, be it because they’re gay or because they’re married. But we’re really at a point where even straight folks should have learned what makes for reliable gaydar and what doesn’t. Sharing a friendship or a roof with someone of your same gender doesn’t make you a homosexual: it makes you a person who craves connection with other people or who doesn’t have enough money to live alone. And the best way to find out someone’s sexual orientation is to get to know them.

Three weeks ago, The L.A. Complex debuted on the CW to the lowest ratings for a broadcast drama, ever. It’s too bad, because this spiky little Canadian show about a group of actors, comics, producers and dancers who live in the same run-down Los Angeles apartment complex is great fun, an improvement both on standard aspiring-starlet stories like Smash, and on theoretically sophisticated takes on modern romance.

Smash‘s biggest problem all season has been that the competition between Ivy and Karen hasn’t felt realistically heated. With Ivy’s experience and her resemblance to Marilyn, it seems obvious that she’d be cast in the lead and Karen was the understudy. The show’s had to spend a lot of time giving Karen chances to sing and showing audiences reacting to her like she’s the Best Thing Ever and giving Ivy the silliest drug problem on television since Saved By The Bell to gin up any sort of drama.

The L.A. Complex, on the other hand, has conflicts that are actually rooted in Hollywood double standards. Abby Vargas, a young aspiring actress who’s been living in her car and making a lot of other bad life decisions, ends up competing with Raquel Westbrook, an older actress on the downswing played with a beautiful bitterness by Jewel Staite. When Abby beats out Raquel for a part, it turns out to be not much of a prize at all: her big break turns out to be playing a dead hooker on a crime show where her lines and her pay cut get cut correspondingly. The fights are so big because the stakes are so small, as when Nick Wagner, an aspiring stand-up comic whose material is flopping finally gets applause by viciously insulting a more successful female comic with whom he had an embarrassing one-night stand.

The relationships have the same kind of heft that Smash, which has recycled through tired affairs, starlets sleeping with directors, and the standard idiot pop-culture move of someone proposing after cheating, lacks. Sure, when Abby sleeps with Connor, the most successful actor of the bunch who’s beginning to shoot his new pilot, we’re not surprised when she catches him sleeping with someone else. But L.A. Complex, rather than making the arc solely about her naivete and vulnerability, has focused on Connor’s self-hatred and destructive tendencies. Other than Rescue Me, there’s not another show that’s dared to depict a male character self-harming, a practice typically reserved in pop culture to signify female teenaged angst (Jess’s cutting joke on the season finale of New Girl was an uncomfortably off moment, I thought).

The show’s subverted our expectations in other ways, too. When Alicia, a talented young dancer, clicks with a former child star who covers for her at her job at a strip club so she can make auditions, we expect to see them date. In a subsequent episode, he sets up for what seems like it might be an entirely-too-soon proposal. Instead, he asks her to make a sex tape with him to jump-start both their careers. And once they’re shooting, he’s shy, and awkward, obsessed with lighting and unable to actually get started. It’s Alicia who takes the lead in a moment that’s neither do-me feminism nor slut shaming: this is the best of the bad options, and she’s making the most of it.

And perhaps the best part of L.A. Complex has been that it’s put a gay couple with actual sexual chemistry on television. Brian Stelter wrote at the New York Times yesterday that pop culture appears to have accepted gay couples completely. But the truth is that’s more narrow that it seems: television loves married, settled gay couples, but it doesn’t actually treat gay people like straight people, giving them heated romances, sex scenes, and love interests with whom they have actual sexual chemistry. On Modern Family, established couple Mitch and Cam have essentially no physical sparks whatsoever—the show even had an episode that attempted to explain that the couple isn’t fond of public displays of affection as a way to explain away their lack of heat. I love Happy Endings, which gave schlumphy Max a hot love interest in the form of James Wolk, but the show still stopped far short of their bedroom door. Even Game of Thrones, which gave its gay king and loyal knight and lover hot makeouts wouldn’t go where it’s gone with almost everyone else on the show, and let them have on-screen sex.

But on The L.A. Complex, gay men get treated like everyone else. When Tariq Muhammad, an up-and-coming hip-hop producer gets assigned to work with superstar rapper Kaldrick King, the older man spends a day testing Tariq as they meander through Los Angeles. And at the end of that day, Kaldrick makes a veiled invitation to Tariq. The staredown between them before they kiss and fall into bed is one of the more sexually charged moments to appear on television this season. As commercial as it is, that moment does something that almost no pop culture does: treats gay people as if watching them fall in love and have sex is as interesting and as natural as seeing them as sexless, domesticated marrieds.