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Of course romantic comedies harm your love life. They create unrealizable expectations for connection and intimacy. They feature the world's most beautiful people speaking dialogue written by the country's most talented screenwriters. But we didn't need a methodologically shoddy study for this finding. We just needed to read more Emile Durkheim.
Durkheim called anomie “the malady of infinite aspiration”. His central idea was that human beings need regulation – a framework of informal and formal rules that set limits to what they are entitled to expect, for instance, in the form of economic rewards. It is an idea that contrasts sharply with the culture of capitalism, not least its US version.The trick of romantic comedies is realism. The characters have to seem like real people. The situations have to be believable. The dialogue has to be ordinary. You need to be able to relate. But you end up relating to something utterly unachievable: Movie stars and prewritten quips and cute meets and plastic surgery and happily ever after. Then you step back into your ordinary life. And why should you settle for your life? What does Doug Heffernan have that we don't? Why doesn't our apartment look like that one?Durkheim's insight was that there's a flip side to the idea that we can achieve anything we want. It also suggests that we can want everything. And it's in that space between what we desire, and what most of us can achieve, that the peculiar unhappiness of affluence manifests. With unrealistic expectations comes unavoidable discontentment. Durkheim isn't as well known as he should be, but his theory has been expertly monetized by advertisers and movie producers, who aim their products right at that sore sport between expectation and outcome. They fill that gap, if only for an hour or two. So of course romantic comedies hurt. They appeal to what we want, and thus emphasize what we can't have. Which doesn't stop me from liking them. Go see Role Models!
