I’m glad we’ve got the first trailer for Don Jon, the directorial debut of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, because it gives me an opportunity to talk about something I’ve been thinking about since I saw it at SXSW this year. As romantic comedies have hit a financial and creative rough spot, one of the best responses to that lacuna has been a crop of movies about failed relationships and the things we learn from them that could be termed unromantic comedies:

The unromantic comedy isn’t precisely new territory for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who starred in one of the most resonant examples of the genre, Marc Webb’s 2009 hit (500) Days of Summer in which Tom (Gordon-Levitt) pursued Summer (Zooey Deschanel), falling in love with her in defiance of her repeatedly stated lack of seriousness about him. When they inevitably broke up, Tom was devastated and blindsided, especially when it turned out that Summer was capable of being serious about someone, just not about him. But the movie ended with him meeting another woman and sensing the prospect of a new relationship. The triumph in the film, and the indicator of Tom’s growth, wasn’t that he got together with Summer, but that he got over her.

Don Jon, which explores what happens when Jon (Gordon-Levitt), a porn junkie pickup artist with some serious road rage, meets Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), who appears to be the girl of his dreams, but in a parallel to his own addiction, aspires to live out one of the romantic comedies she loves. It’s evident almost from their first meeting how terrible Jon and Barbara are for each other. Jon’s the kind of guy, as he tells us, hilariously and profanely in voiceovers, who believes things like “In real life, if you want to get head, you have give head. I know there are guys who like to eat pussy, but the thing about that is, they’re f—–g crazy.” Barbara, by contrast, measures her power over Jon by seeing how much she can get him to change his life and behavior for her, asking him “You take one class for me, just one little class?” when they make out at her doorway, and luring him to a ridiculously girly princess party for one of her relatives. Part of her behavior-modification program includes insisting that Jon give up porn and taking him to rom-coms with her instead, including a truly brilliant parody starring Channing Tatum and Anne Hathaway under assumed names. As Barbara puts it “Movies and porno are different, Jon. They give awards for movies,” a distinction that’s both wrong in fact and ignores the extent to which romantic comedies have shaped Barbara’s worldview, and not for the better. The tension in Don Jon comes not from the idea that Jon might be unable to overcome his addiction to porn and as a result, lose out on Barbara, but that these two horribly mismatched people might end up together because it’s what they expect they’re supposed to do.
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When Fox announced that it would be airing The Mindy Project, a sitcom by The Office star and writer Mindy Kaling, based in part on Kaling’s own mother’s work as an OB/GYN, I had high hopes. Like many freshman comedies, particularly its timeslot partner New Girl, The Mindy Project had a first season that involved throwing a lot of elements at the wall to see what stuck and what didn’t. Last night’s finale of The Mindy Project, though, contained a near-perfect sequence that united the series’ two core elements, the practice of medicine, and the pursuit of romantic comedy perfect, and provided a terrific template for how the show can follow New Girl‘s lead and level up dramatically in its second season.

Pulled out of a party to celebrate Mindy and Casey’s moving to Haiti for a year that had become an utter disaster after Danny’s ex-wife had praised his androgyny in a photograph, Mindy had tried to get Casey to break up with her by demanding that he propose, and Casey, unaware that he was playing relationship poker, called her bet and asked her to marry him on the advice of “the Notorious G.O.D.” and she freaked out, Mindy, Danny, and Jeremy ran off to deliver triplets. Their display of extreme competence, set, in a flashback to the premiere, to M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls,” not only gave Mindy a professional win and the ensemble a nice character moment, with Jeremy bragging that the triplet that he was responsible for “had the highest Apgar score.” But the willingness of Mindy’s patients to embrace the chaos of triplets also gave her a critical insight in what she needs to have a grand romantic comedy moment, and it isn’t a checklist of compatibility, or a meet cute in an elevator: it was courage. She rushed to Casey’s apartment, delivered a demented speech on the gap between her aspirations to be in a serious relationship and her actual ability to handle her dream scenario, revealed her chopped-off hair, and reunited with her pastor boyfriend.

This is The Mindy Project‘s sweet spot, the interaction between Mindy’s role as an expert in the mechanics of what it takes to have safe sex or deliver a health baby, or what makes an individual moment cinema-worthy, and her total lack of understanding about how two people get to a point where they want to have a baby in the first place. The finest episodes of the show’s first season were the ones where Mindy’s work helped her realize important things about her approach to dating and relationships—and ultimately made a sly argument that even if Mindy has to run out of dates and parties to deliver children, her commitment to her career is actually one of the things that’s helping her make incremental progress towards a healthier personal life.
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This is a depressing statistic, crunched by writer and comedian Diana Wright: of the top-grossing 20 comedies for each of the last ten years, women have directed just 4.5 percent of them. Of those movies, all but one of them were directed by Anne Fletcher, Nancy Myers and Nora Ephron. And all of them are romantic comedies: there’s not a parody, an action comedy, road trip story, or buddy picture in the mix.

NPR’s Linda Holmes, who clearly is my main source of inspiration today, wrote in her very smart assessment of 30 Rock as that show wrapped up, that:

30 Rock may not have undone years and years of gender imbalance in running shows, and it may not have changed hiring practices, but it’s hard to remember now that before it came along, the entire idea of a woman having a comedy brand that translated to comedic opportunities for people other than herself was depressingly shaky as a public proposition. Again, that doesn’t mean women couldn’t do it or weren’t writing comedy — there were women writers from the very beginning at Saturday Night Live and elsewhere. But comedy’s creative centers of gravity in the public imagination were not generally women.

And one of the great things about 30 Rock was that romantic comedy was just one of the few things it did, whether the person with romantic troubles was Liz, Jack, Jenna, or even Tracy and Pete within the confines of their marriages. It did race comedy, class comedy, rural v. urban comedy, workplace humor, and political and cultural satire. We may be making progress in the kinds of comedy women can do on television. But clearly we’re a long way from women who can successfully build comedy empires in the movies based on multiple styles, much in the way that Adam McKay’s parodies are also both social commentary and effective romantic comedy.

In a (not surprisingly) depressing post railing against equal marriage rights over at National Review, Maggie Gallagher, the founder of the misleadingly-named Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, quotes an anti-equality speaker who argues that “Only one creature has been known to calm men down into faithful and stable relationships since the dawn of time — a woman.” What makes that attitude so sad is the low estimation in which it holds men, an attitude reflected in the hysterically angry reaction to the idea that men can play a role in stopping sexual assault. To different degrees on the same spectrum, these views both agree that men are not particularly in control of themselves, and that if they are to be tamed into monogamy and consensual sex, women will have to do a sometimes enormous amount of work, at great expense to their own expectations and personal liberties, to bring about those outcomes.

These views are very sad, but part of what’s depressing about them is that they aren’t necessarily exceptionally marginal. The idea that it takes a woman to tame a man is at the core of an enormous amount of popular culture—particularly culture aimed at women.

One of the most prevalent arenas for the idea that men need to be tamed by good women, and one of the places where that trope has evolved most, is in romance novels. As I wrote at Slate last week, that genre’s evolved from its earlier reliance on character arcs in which the heroine would be seduced, ravished, or outright raped before winning over the heroine to one in which the rakish hero, whether he’s seducing opera singers in the Edwardian era or dating hotties in contemporary Cleveland, meets the woman who makes him realize that monogamy isn’t just socially acceptable—it will make him happier than he’s previously been tomcatting around. These men in contemporary romance novels are rarely as repulsive as their earlier counterparts, or as profligate as Gallagher and her ilk might make them out to be. But there’s still an air of condescension operating there: it seems to have never occurred to any of these otherwise smart, handsome, and professionally adept men that their own behavior might be causing their unhappiness. And often, rather than being truly responsible for their romantic and sexual choices, romance novel heroes are broken in a certain way that can only be fixed by the ministration of heroines whose value was previously overlooked: often they had cruel or absent parents, particularly fathers, who damaged their ability to connect, and rather than seeking out therapy or staring their own deficiencies straight in the face, its up to women to give them the love they were previously denied.
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Whether you’re coupled or single, Valentine’s Day can be pretty stressful. Restaurants are crowded. Flowers are overpriced. And like New Year’s Eve, another constructed holiday that’s supposed to be the best night ever, it’s actually impossible to do much more than meet basic expectations. But if you’re doing the wise thing and staying in for the evening, but still want to entertain yourself, you can actually have a pretty good time. And thanks to the wonder of streaming video, you can do all of it without any advance planning.

If You Want To Celebrate Friendship, Not Romance: If you’re celebrating your female friends, Ann Friedman makes the case for Parks and Recreation‘s season-two episode “Galentine’s Day,” and for living every day as if friendship is just as important as love. But best friends don’t always have to be same-gender, and if you’re a guy celebrating a female friend or vice versa, I recommend the terminally-underrated TBS sitcom My Boys, which stars Jordana Spiro as a Chicago sportswriter with a group of male poker and bar buddies. And if you’re dealing with a happiness imbalance in your best friendships, The Trip, a road trip involving comedians, amazing food, and Michael Caine impersonations, is incredible.

If You’re Exhausted By Valentine’s Day Commercialism: The good people over at Vulture are debating Sleepless In Seattle v. You’ve Got Mail. But they’re both wrong! The best Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic comedy is the deeply weird Joe Versus The Volcano, in which a disgruntled factory worker gets asked by a wealthy industrialist to jump into a volcano so he can continue mining a valuable metal, and along the way to his fiery death, ends up dating three different Meg Ryans. It’s delightful. Or if the king and queen of romantic comedies aren’t your cup of tea, there’s always The Jonses, in which David Duchovy and Demi Moore play a fake family whose job is to model an aspirational lifestyle and to ramp up spending in whatever neighborhood they’re moved in to. It’s less lighthearted, but much sharper about the recession!

You’re Working On Your Work-Love Balance: It’s been a rough couple of years for romantic comedies, but Morning Glory is the rare bright spot. It’s the slightly surreal story of Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams), a workaholic morning news show producer, who is rewarded for being awesome at her job with Patrick Wilson and the sight of Harrison Ford making her a frittata on national television. From the back catalogue, there’s Soapdish, the weirdest, best workplace romantic comedy of all time, which features Sally Field as a soap opera star, Kevin Klein as her ex-husband doing dinner theater, Robert Downey Jr. as an easily-manipulatable network executive, and Whoopi Goldberg as a deeply put-upon writer.

You’re Feeling Totally, Sentimentally Romantic: I’m all for fighting the romance-industrial complex if you feel like it, but that doesn’t have to mean that love is dead! If you’re in the mood to give in, here are two ways to go. You could dig into Baz Luhrmann’s back catalogue and watch Strictly Ballroom, his lush, but comparatively low-fi movie about competitive ballroom dancing competitions in Australia, Spanish immigrants to the continent, and the power of “Time After Time.” And if you want a little film school to go with your heart-warming, watch The Lady Eve, if only for this scene:

And the fact that every woman should want to be as tough as Barbara Stanwyck in this movie, and every man should be cool enough to want to date her.

I don’t remotely agree with my sometimes-Slate colleagues David Haglund and Daniel Engber that this week’s episode of Girls, in which Hannah hooks up with a handsome doctor whose trash cans she’s been misusing, was “the worst episode of Girls ever.” But something that the two of them said that struck me as particularly truthful in a revealing way:

Engber: I felt trapped by my unwillingness to buy into the central premise. Narcissistic, childish men sleep with beautiful women all the time in movies and on TV, so why should this coupling be so difficult to fathom? I think it’s because Hannah is especially and assertively ugly in this episode. She’s rude (“what did you do?” she asks Joshua, referring to his broken marriage), self-centered (“I’m too smart and too sensitive”), sexually ungenerous (“no, make me come”), and defiantly ungraceful (naked ping-pong). In sum, the episode felt like a finger poked in my guys-on-Girls eyeball, or a double-dog dare for me to ask, How can a girl like that get a guy like this? Am I small-minded if I’m stuck on how this fantasy is too much of a fantasy and remembering what Patrick Wilson’s real-life partner looks like?…

Haglund: resumably there are things that Hannah would not, in any world that resembled our own, get. Such as Patrick Wilson, for instance. I want to suspend my disbelief—just as viewers have, for generations, imagined that Al could get Peggy and Homer could get Marge and Jim Belushi could snag Courtney Thorne-Smith. But the show needs to work harder to make that seem feasible. And not pile implausibility upon implausibility.

Why is it that we believe that Jim Belushi could plausibly be married to Courtney Thorne-Smith? Or that Katherine Heigl’s character in Knocked Up, a beautiful, upwardly mobile entertainment reporter would end up with pre-weight-loss, unemployed Seth Rogen, simply because his character stepped up by performing the basic adult human task of obtaining a job? And why is it that we don’t believe a sexually available weirdo like Hannah Horvath could have a several-day fling with a depressive, divorcing, lonely doctor because he happens to be played by Patrick Wilson? Is it that in men, being funny is considered the equivalent of being beautiful for women? Are male characters are required to have one positive characteristic, whether it’s a sense of charm, or the expressed desire to not be a a deadbeat, where women need to be both a certain level of hot, as well as be desirable in other ways? Are movies and TV that feature pairing between schlubby guys and attractive women really doing the equivalent amount of work it would take to make long-term relationships between those characters credible that it would apparently require folks to believe that someone might want to keep Hannah around for a couple of days?

I can see how Hannah’s hookup with Joshua might not have been plausible for everyone in the audience. After all, who invites random strangers into their living room for lemonade, as Joshua did when Hannah showed up at his door after spotting him at Grumpy’s? How many of us kiss random strangers simply because we’re on a quest to have dramatic experiences that will be fodder for later fiction writing? But I think there’s a strong case that we’re simply more used to seeing men date and marry above themselves, at least when it comes to looks, in popular culture. That doesn’t mean that those pairings are, themselves, more credible, or that more work’s gone into making them credible, just that we’ve had more training in suspending disbelief when it comes to them.

It’s Friday, and it’s been a long week, and it’s snowing in DC. We all deserve something that will make us happy, in this case, Disney’s Oscar-nominated short movie Paperman:

It’s a great illustration of what’s wrong with most romantic comedies. It’s one of the most predictable genres in movies, because of the inevitable union of the two main characters. But even though Paperman fits squarely in that genre, in six minutes, and entirely without words, it does more to introduce tension and a sense of wonder that the two participants have found each other than most features. Love is a miracle, not a natural force like gravity that we’re all subject to. And there’s a lot more drama in acknowledging that, than in throwing up any number of phony idiocies and obstacles between your main characters.

Waiting for results on Election Day can be an agonizing process–even before polls start closing. If you’re climbing up the walls waiting for news (your humble blogger is mainlining The Good Wife), here’s the definitive guide to how to distract yourself until the buzz about exit polls has died down and hard data starts coming in, depending on what flavor of Election Day Crazy is plaguing you.

If you’re: Getting burnt from your GOTV efforts.
Watch: You’re probably pretty busy, but grab S2E22 of Parks and Recreation
Why: If Leslie Knope can gut out the worst block of a diabetes telethon in Pawnee, all while Tom Haverford’s absconded with Detlef Schrempf, we can make it through a single day of turnout when the stakes are higher and where people only have to sacrifice their time, not their money.

If you’re: An atmospherically disillusioned Obama voter.
Watch: Definitely, Maybe
Why: I know, I know. Definitely, Maybe is my personal Swiss Army Knife of romantic comedies. But seriously. If you were swept up in the hope-y, change-y thing and are considering staying home today because you’re discouraged (rather than because you are, say, disappointed in Obama on an issue area and yet inexplicably see no daylight between him and Mitt Romney: I have no ideas for you), watch Definitely, Maybe as a reminder that the road of apathy runs through terrible Chinese food, jobs in the advertising industry, and ill-advised marriages. Save yourself. Watch this. Then hit the polls.

If you’re: The racialized run-up to Election Day drove you nuts
Watch: The Man (1972)
Why: James Earl Jones starred in this TV movie, available from Netflix that addresses the question of what it would take for a black man to convince America of his legitimacy as president. The movie’s more optimistic than reality, set in a world where a black president could intervene in apartheid, for example, as part of that legitimizing campaign. But post Jay-Z’s appearance on behalf of the Obama campaign yesterday, it’s a nice thought experiment in what this election would be like if we’d started this work forty years earlier.

If you’re: Sick of horserace coverage
Watch: Marathon the British miniseries of State of Play
Why: Actually, there are a lot of great wishful thinking reasons to want to watch State of Play. There are Britishly excellent lawmakers calling BS on climate scientists who’ve been bought by the energy industry, political flacks telling the lawmakers they represent how disgusted they are by them, and lots of parliamentary note-passing. But most importantly, it’s a look at what it might be like to cover a scandal that actually has implications for the character of the people involved. Also, it’s six hours.

If you’re: Wondering how Hillary Clinton would be doing if she were fighting for her second term.
Watch: Catch up on Political Animals
Why: I’m sorry we’re only getting one installment of the USA Network miniseries. But Sigourney Weaver is great as Elaine Barrish, a former First Lady who lost her shot at the Presidency to a younger, hipper flavor of candidate, then swallowed her pride, went to work in his administration, and dumped her husband’s cheating ass. Silly? Sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s not brain candy.

If you’re: More worried about Congress than the Presidential election
Watch: Wait until Friday and see Lincoln
Why: At its best, it’s an incredibly impressive, funny movie about what it takes to get ephochal legislation passed, with, among other amazing bits of casting, John Hawkes and Jame Spader as the first lobbyists. And as brilliant, hardline Republican Thaddeus Stevens, Tommy Lee Jones will make you wish that the House of Representatives was both less civil and much, much more articulate.

This post discusses plot points from the first episode of the second season of Homeland.

“Tonight is Thursday. I make dinner for the family on Thursdays. I’m making vegetable lasagna with vegetables I picked from the garden this morning,” Carrie Mathison says, with increasing desperation when the CIA comes for her, six months after they came for her job, six months after she burned out part of her brain to try to silence it. “I don’t want to see him. I’ve put all of this away.” Homeland, which won the Emmy award for best drama last weekend, much to my delight, is a plot-heavy thriller, but it’s also a deeply humane show about the pleasures and connections war denies us. And it makes sense to me that as it begins its second season, “The Smile,” from its titles to its details, constantly returns to questions of how its characters feel about their roles in the Great Game of story, and of the war on terror.

When we first met Carrie a year ago, she was living alone in a relatively anonymous town house, pursuing one-night stands, and flouting the rules of her agency to set up surveillance on Nicholas Brody, a recently-returned prisoner of war who triggered an old warning from one of her informants. The Carrie we meet outside of the agency is someone who has acknowledged her mental illness rather than managing it erratically in secret, who lives with her father and sister rather than by herself, who teaches rather than interacts, and who sees that Israel has struck Iran’s nuclear development sites, but observes rather than acting. When her mentor Saul recalls Carrie to active, if temporary, duty because one of her sources, a Lebanese woman who “had a weakness for American movies. She loved Julia Roberts,” there’s a deep cruelty and kindess in the call. Carrie has sacrificed the nimblest part of her mind (if not the best of her self) to the maintenance of her sanity, had it treated like trash by her mentors and enemies. Saul’s call offers a chance for Carrie to serve, and to reclaim some of her damaged reputation, but it’s freighted with two terrible possibilities: Carrie could fail and have her brokenness reaffirmed, or she could succeed but remain shut out of the place that to her was once a kind of tortured heaven.

In a sense, Carrie begins this second season in the same place Brody began the first: believing that she is the vessel for a mission she has neither the desire nor the political capital to shape. “Believe me, I wouldn’t be going if I had a choice,” she tells her sister, shoving choice away from her the way Brody initially did on his return to the United States. “You do have a choice. You always have a choice,” her sister begs her, but Carrie tells her “Not this time.” If last season was about Brody’s coming into a power he didn’t know he had, and in the process separating the CIA from its most valuable asset, this season of Homeland could follow Carrie on a similar journey, gaining the hard intelligence, the credibility, and the mental strength to prove Brody guilty and her detractors deadly wrong, restoring the proper balance to the situation. Her weapons are paltry: a fruit basket from Saul, a phone, a bad brown wig, a flimsily-constructed story about hockey fandom, a headscarf, the ability to throw a knee. And her only victory in this first episode is to throw a tail. Carrie catches no terrorists or torturers, but she does, crucially, catch herself when she falls, and watching her, I cheered, even though I know that for Carrie to return to the CIA would put her further from lasagna, from the garden, and the blue books, and her father’s gentle concern about her lithium.

At home, the plot lines, and the emotions, are more complicated. When I initially saw this episode, and I’ve watched it several time since, I didn’t like the decision to make Brody a potential vice presidential nominee because it struck me as a bit of implausibility that isn’t actually necessary to any of the points the plot seems to be trying to make. It’s one thing for John McCain, who was held as a prisoner in Vietnam, to be a viable presidential candidate years after his return home, and long after the conflict that resulted in his imprisonment and torture had ceased to carry the specific sting and suspicion for the American populace that the September 11 attacks still have for ordinary Americans. Brody is a fresher victim of a rawer conflict, six months into his service in an abruptly-vacated Congressional seat. His only political asset is also a potential liability, even for people who don’t suspect Brody as Carrie once did: his experiences in Abu Nazir’s custody.
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Someone knows how to get my attention with a meme:

That said, the entire Tumblr this poster is from, RomCom 2012, is brilliant both as a deconstruction of Romney’s troubles on the campaign trail and of romantic comedies. Romney’s essential unlikability is the core liability of his campaign in the same way that romantic comedies always start with a man and a woman who dislike each other for some reason. In screwball comedies, it’s often because the guy is a sap, like beer heir in The Lady Eve, or the naive movie producer in Sullivan’s Travels. In contemporary romantic comedies, it’s often because the guy is a man-child, as in Apatown movies like Knocked Up or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or hiding his essential decency behind a facade of distaste for women like the misogynistic radio hosts epitomized by Gerard Butler in The Ugly Truth. The movie turns when the woman involved discovers that the sap is sweet, the man-boy is capable of growing up, the woman-hater is wounded. In Definitely, Maybe, a man who switches identities along with girlfriends figures out what kind of man he wants to be, and which woman he wants to be with. That’s a dilemma that should land with analysts who have watched Romney run for president over the last two cycles.

And Mitt Romney’s problems reveal both the problem with his candidacy and the weakness of romantic comedies. Some guys are never going to shuck off the nerdy professor aura and be miraculously attractive to women. Some man-boys are not going to be suddenly inspired, and find it easy to assume a semblance of adulthood. Some guys genuinely hate women. And some candidates are genuinely stiff rich guys who, at 65, are not going to spontaneously develop a capacity for empathy or an understanding of what it is to struggle.