This is a cute line, but is it true?
All the technologies of mass entertainment have, paradoxically, cut us off from the masses of other people. Television, iPods, DVDs, the Internet, e-mail--you can order a date, dinner, or a movie online, and if you happen to work at home, you never have to leave the convenience and security of your four walls. Romantic movies used to be about the difficulty of meeting the right person, or the calamity of meeting the wrong one. Now they're about the hardship and inconvenience of just being with another person, period.
Just scrolling through the current box office, The Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year Old Virgin were both about meeting the sort of stunning human that could snap the protagonists out of their lonely, shallow existences, Shopgirl is about meeting the wrong people, and you all know the plot of Pride and Prejudice, right?
So it's not that I'm against the woe-is-us, alienation meme, but I'm not seeing it in movies. Romantic comedies, by definition, are romantic, they've little to do with the decidedly unromantic work of long-term cohabitation. But if the first part of Siegel's column is wrong, this bit is just cartoonishly cantankerous:
As a result of our pleasurable, isolating technologies, people act in public as if they were all alone in private. Shouting into cell phones. Wearing baseball caps in fancy restaurants. Holding a symposium in a darkened movie theater. The other day I saw a guy at the gym wearing ... flip-flops. But I did not see flip-flops. I saw the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead.
It's not that these people are rude. It's that, in the evolutionary sense, their adaptability to a social setting has atrophied from disuse the way eons ago our flippers and fins dried up and disappeared when we started living on dry land.
He goes on to laud the brilliance of The Boondocks cartoon show, another obviously wrong move considering the colossal disappointment it's proved to be. But that I can forgive. It's tarring all my naive, simplistically idealistic romantic comedies with a cynical brush that's truly wrong.
