I’m quite fond of Fran Kranz, who’s had extraordinarily bad luck in terms of being in projects that are critically acclaimed but canceled or vanish from the box office before anyone notices they’re there, so I was intrigued to hear that he’s part of a new movie project that’s seeking Kickstarter support. But the description of the movie itself, “Lust for Love is the story of an innocent guy (Fran Kranz) who wins the love of his childhood sweetheart (TBA), but since he’s been holding out for her his whole life, he’s so embarrassing that he’s quickly dumped. Convinced he needs more experience with women to win her back, he convinces the sweetheart’s girlfriend (Dichen Lachman) to teach him how to woo women,” has me feeling kind of exhausted. Maybe because Girls With Slingshots recently plumbed similar emotional territory, when Clarice found herself helping Tucker, a creepy guy she met in the library, learn how to talk to women.

What’s tiresome about these premises is that one of two assumptions is behind them. First, that men are too silly to know what to do with women, and need the instruction and hand-holding of a good woman so that another woman will benefit. Growing up isn’t easy, but there’s something odd about the boy-man trope that focuses on protagonists who need extensive instruction in social norms in order to interact properly. I understand that this is the source of drama for makeover comedies for both genders, but there’s a difference between narratives that convince women that they don’t actually need to reject stylish clothes and makeup to retain their inner selves and stories about men who haven’t rejected social conventions — they’re just totally unfamiliar with them.

And if it’s not that, then the assumption is that women, with their feminism and their romantic comedies and the contradictions between the two have made it too damn hard for reasonably intelligent men to figure out how they ought to go about courtship. There’s a resentful streak there, as if trading formal rituals for a bit more honesty and flexibility, and a bit more gender equality in relationships wasn’t actually a good trade. Having to do a bit more work to get to clarity and keep romance alive isn’t oppressive, nor is it a burden that’s unevenly divided. And sexual and romantic relationships aren’t that wildly different from other social interactions — we’re just a bit funny about the stakes.

I missed this piece by Carina Chocano from a couple months back about how much she hates the short-hand “strong female character,” but I wanted to come back to it because I think it dovetails with some conversations we’ve had about plausible female action heroines and how to make female characters seem “strong”:

It started, innocuously enough, with lunch in the kitsch-yet-sinister town of Celebration, where we hoped to be lucky enough to experience a postprandial, regularly scheduled fake snowfall. It took a darker turn after we piled back into the S.U.V., headed to their house to pick up the guns and drove to the indoor gun range. As Rush Limbaugh fulminated at top volume, I slumped in the back seat like a sullen 13-year-old, a gun case resting heavily on my lap, and wondered how I had arrived at this place. What did it mean that I was here? Could I be here and still be me? Who was I? Within about 15 seconds of stepping inside the shooting range, before the guy behind the counter could take my gun order, I burst into tears, ran outside and spent the next couple of hours alone in the car reading Jane Austen.

So here is the question I’m posing: If this story were a scene in a movie, and the movie were being told from the point of view of a young woman, would you describe that protagonist as a “strong female character”? Or would you consider her to be weak?

If weak, would you find it possible to relate to her on the basis of something other than her sex characteristics? Or would identifying with this “feminine” behavior threaten your sense of self, whether you were a man or a woman? Would you consider the scene funny, or not, and if not, why not? And what would a “strong female character” in a movie have done in this situation, anyway? Toss off an epigram and then shoot the radio? Reveal a latent talent for martial arts, jump the rifle-range counter and start pummeling the guy at the desk? Confidently march out the door to the strains of a Motown anthem and never look back? And what would she be wearing? Would boots or stilettos need to be involved? Or would flip-flops or ballet flats be O.K.?

I guess I agree that it might be more useful to have a broader definition of Well-Developed Female Characters, of which Plausible Female Action Heroines is a subset. A movie that’s stuck with me for years is In Her Shoes, the adaptation of Jennifer Weiner’s novel of the same name, in which Toni Collette plays a successful professional woman who’s had her self-confidence repeatedly sabotaged by her spoiled, manipulative, but also illiterate younger sister, played by Cameron Diaz in one of her best performances. Neither character is a particularly good person, but the movie holds them responsible for their actions and helps them both to grow. Collette’s character needlessly sabotages a relationship with a man who genuinely loves her, and works to find and address the reasons she’s pushing him away. Diaz’s character, after burning her bridges, goes to live with her grandmother in a retirement community, learns to read, figures out what she wants to do with her life, and makes genuine amends to her sister. Both could easily be stereotypes, but they’re shaded with a specificity that makes them pop off the page. That they don’t start out strong and confident doesn’t matter, because their arcs are interesting and realistic. Ditto for Bridesmaids, which is a story of someone who’s been dealt two knockout blows in short succession finding her way back to herself and to being a decent person again. Annie doesn’t need to be perfect to be compelling.

And it’s worth considering that Plausible Action Heroines don’t all have to present the same way. One of the things I liked a great deal about Avatar: The Last Airbender was the way Katara’s healing powers, a more traditionally feminine water tribe skill, were presented as equal and complementary to combat skills. Similarly, the Kyoshi Warriors have a fighting style that turns feminine accessories like fans into key weapons in their arsenal. When Sokka meets them, he has to be more feminine, rather than less, to become a more skilled fighter. If we had more portrayals of traditionally feminine skills and attributes as sources of strength and power, I think showing women as strong when they take on traditionally male attributes or roles wouldn’t feel like lazy shorthand and instead could be part of a Balanced Action Diet. We need Michelle Yeohs, Sigourney Weavers, and Hit-Girls along with our Angelinas.

When I walked out of a screening of A Good Old Fashioned Orgy a couple of weeks ago, I was convinced I didn’t like the movie. The story about a group of friends who decide to hold an orgy to celebrate the end of their run of summers at a house in the Hamptons that’s being sold out from under them initially struck me as overly crude, yet another entry in Jason Sudeikis’ torpedoing of his own likability. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since, and I think I’ve decided there’s something refreshing and vulnerable about this crude, funny little movie that’s continued my thinking about male fantasies.

There’s no question that A Good Old Fashioned Orgy is vulgar and sometimes bro-ish in a way that can be off-putting. It’s not really much fun to watch a grown man speculate about what it might be like to receive oral sex from a high school girl wearing what he assumes are snap game bracelets, musing that “I bet she unhinges her jaw like a python.” Similarly, treating a guy who worries about HPV as if he’s stupid to worry about cervical cancer because “you don’t have a cervix” or mocking a man who doesn’t mind a girlfriend with pubic hair as some kind of hippie seem like unfortunate instances of beating up on men for acting like decent human beings. And when one character tells the core cast at a “White Trash Party” they’re hosting “I don’t find the notion of mocking the American underclass as amusing as you and your friends do,” I was pretty much in agreement.

But there’s something intriguing about the central insecurity that drives the characters to the idea that an orgy is a good idea: a sense that folks in their late twenties and early thirties lost some of their sexual self-confidence to the AIDS crisis. “It scared the shit out of all of us,” Sudeikis’ character Eric explains, making the pitch for the orgy to his friends. “Kids these days are freaks. This is our chance to take back what’s been taken from us.” I don’t think that the advent of an age of safe sex and realistic concerns about sexually transmitted diseases is a tragedy—it’s precisely the opposite, of course. But an ideal world is one where people can balance responsibility with the ability to ask for what they want. I was talking to Jaime Weinman, the television critic at Maclean’s about this over the weekend, and he pointed out there’s a definitive decline in the number of lotharios on television in the late eighties and early nineties that’s been followed by a resurgence of the type in recent years. The characters in A Good Old Fashioned Orgy aren’t all men, and they’re not necessarily aspiring to be Sam Malone, but despite the crudeness of the movie’s first half, the second is actually reasonably sensitive and thoughtful about exploring the characters’ desires.
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The key question at the end of the last, excellent season of Parks and Recreation was how Leslie, who has just embarked on a relationship with Ben, who is nominally her boss, will balance that romance with the chance to run for Pawnee City Council. In a weird way, I’m more interested in the news that she’ll choose between them rather than try to balance both.

The trope of a career woman who figures out how to have it all is one of the most common sub-narratives in romantic comedies. I don’t actually think it’s impossible for women to simultaneously have upwardly mobile career trajectories, and that there is a lot to think about when those sort of stories are done in creative and thoughtful ways. I think Leslie and Ben represent a couple whose careers have the potential for real emotional implications for each other, especially if Leslie’s campaign makes Ben feel insecure about his past failure as mayor, or if his past struggles make her feel anxiety about her ability to perform the job she desperately wants. But I do think the idea that a female character might want something other than a man enough to pick that is an emotion that’s essentially verboten in popular culture. At the end of The Help, Skeeter’s happily single, but she’s dumped by her racist boyfriend rather than kicking him to the curb to head up to New York and set the publishing world on fire. So if Parks and Recreation has Leslie pick City Council over Ben, or has her choose Ben and then spend half the season regretting it, I think it’ll be doing something rare.

And more than that, I’d like to see more romances that don’t have purely happy endings, that have the characters choose not to be in relationships; that have characters compromise to stay in relationships and make the case for that; to have characters have relationships that are good for a time, but are not meant to be permanent. The Wall Street Journal points to a study that suggests mothers who expect that balancing their professional and personal lives will not be difficult are at a greater risk for depression. It would be nice to have more pop culture that reflects that those balances are difficult for everyone, and that affirms that while choosing between priorities may not be fantasy-land style optimal, it’s not a sign of failure and can in fact be a sign of growth.

Apparently, it’s romance day on the blog, because Adam Serwer has some interesting thoughts on Manic Pixie Dream Girls as ghostly projections of movie writers:

My theory is that the MPDG is a fantasy molded from the clay of an infinite number of adolescent rejections from the women of their youth. Precisely because the relationship never reaches the stage of genuine intimacy, the MPDG remains a two-dimensional projection of the desires of a guy who is progressive enough in gender matters to want a woman who is “interesting,” but not one that has an internal life of her own beyond the superficial qualities that made her “cool” and “not like other girls” to begin with.

Key to the MPDG is that the concept reflects the gender-based hostility of the nice guy. She frequently suffers from a form of (mental) illness, because this both proves that she needs the nice guy and shows why he has such a hard time acquiring her. Even if she’s not sick in some way, she is defined by some kind of glaring emotional vulnerability that makes her, in an abstract sense, a damsel in distress who needs rescue. Under the circumstances, the nice guy’s qualities become as heroic as he imagines them to be. She often suffers cinematically, because she refuses — like the unattainable women of the nice guy’s imagination — to recognize just how good for her he is.

He and I were talking about this a little bit a couple of days ago, and while I think it’s pretty clear why MPDGs are a fantasy for men, I also think the archetype has some utility for women. After decades of makeover scenes and unrealistic physical and behavioral expectations, there’s something kind of appealing about being told that the fantasy isn’t the Herve Leger bandage dress and the body that goes with it, it’s the quirky cardigan; that it’s not about having to fix yourself, it’s about someone else has to do the transformative work and all you have to do is help. I don’t necessarily think it’s a good trade, and I don’t actually think it makes for fully fleshed-out characters or exceptionally interesting movies, but I understand why it might feel worth it.

Reading Chloe Angyal’s lessons from a summer’s-worth of romantic comedies, I was particularly struck by this:

This is surely one of the most bizarre lessons Hollywood rom coms teaches us about sex: You can only be open about your sexual desires with someone if you’re not dating them. In Friends With Benefits, Jamie and Dylan are delighted by the fact that they can speak freely about their wants and needs—like where they do and don’t like to be touched—because, it’s implied, they could never be that open with a significant other. Jamie is relieved that she doesn’t have to limit sex to a location with good lighting, the way she would with someone she was dating. In other words, Hollywood still wants us to think that honesty about sex is impossible in romantic relationships. When you’re having sex with a friend, you don’t have to fake orgasms, withhold constructive criticism of sexual technique for fear of offending your lover, or camouflage your repulsive body with flattering lighting. When you’re having sex with a romantic partner, however, those things are par for the course.

However much we may say the evangelical myth that if you wait to have sex until you get married the sex’ll be better is precisely that, a myth, we really do buy into a modified version of it in our pop culture when we assume that sex will automatically be awesome if you have it with someone you’re in love with because of…spontaneous synchronicity, or something like that. In The 40 Year Old Virgin, Andy may be quick to the finish line when he finally consummates his marriage, but when they have sex a second time, it’s implied to be a tantric, transcendent experience. You don’t need practice to make perfect, just true love.

The movie’s sexual politics aren’t perfect, but the scene in Chasing Amy where Alyssa*, Banky, and Holden talk about what it’s like to sleep with someone who won’t give you feedback and directions may be the most honest romantic comedy scene ever filmed:

Maybe the idea of other movies is that the quest for love is so overwhelming and titanically difficult that it only seems fair that sex should come easy. But that’s not true, and even if characters sleep together before they’re married, the romantic comedy promise that falling into bed is as easy as falling out of it is just another myth, and one that’s rooted in some considerably conservative assumptions.

*Probably the first significant movie with a character with my name. Came out when I was 13. I had some cognitive dissonance.

It’s almost unfortunate that We Need to Talk About Kevin, both Lionel Shriver’s novel and the upcoming movie adaptation of it, are about a teenage spree killer, because even though it’s brilliantly written and originally structured, a serial killer origin story that names bad parenting as a root cause is ultimately a bit of a cliche:

But the idea that someone just wouldn’t like being a mother, or more specifically, would dislike one of her own children, is one of the more impermissible emotions out there. There’s less plot arc in simmering resentment, loathing, and mutual discomfort than there is in murder, but I’m glad that someone’s bringing prestige to bear in exploring the topic no matter how melodramatic the framing. We Need to Talk About Kevin is a drastic corrective to the saccharineness of our romantic comedies, but it’s a useful and forceful assertion that not everyone has the same happily ever after.