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Rom Com 101
Hi, Letha. I was going to title this “When Jade Daniels Met Romcoms” but it sounded stupid. I tried for some kind of pun on Bringing Up Baby. That didn’t work either. Maybe you have some ideas but for now, we’re sticking with the basics.
I wasn’t sure about whether I wanted to go when you first mentioned this trip. For one thing, there was so much to repair and build here, and I've already pissed off the authorities. That's without them having seen the video yet, which I'm sure will surface any day now and then they really won't be happy with me.
The other thing is that, and this is maybe the most important part, this trip would be way, way outside of my genre.
Since you want to leave soon and I guess everyone with questions for us can wait, there’s nothing to be done but to dive head-first into some research. I will need recommendations for your favourites so I don’t miss any obvious motifs or overtures.
Rom Com 101
It’s easy to believe that rom coms have nothing in common with horror, but you would be wrong. Don’t worry, this isn't me going on a rant about how the guys are all creepy and pushy in these films and that’s what makes them true horror. But as I watch through these it becomes very clear to me: slashers and rom coms follow similar formulas. Not the same, but similar.
Remember from Slasher 101: slashers are about revenge. Friday the 13th, the camp counsellors don’t notice Jason drowning. House on Sorority Row, their House Mistress dies (coincidentally also by drowning) after their prank goes wrong. I Know What You Did Last Summer, they run a guy down on a mountain road—it was the nineties, so we needed a PSA about drunk driving, natch.
That might not seem applicable to romantic comedies, but stick with me here.
Instead of the main character being involved (but always slightly removed) in a tragedy, the lead of a romantic comedy has something kind of tragedy done to her. And it’s always a her.* She gets broken up with, or loses her job, or her boss is a jerk to her, or she catches her boyfriend cheating and swears off men forever (until, of course, she doesn’t).
My point is that the romcom is not about REVENGE but like revenge, it is about righting a wrong. Do you see?
The wrong in our movie was everything that happened on the lake that night. It’s not that you did anything wrong; something shitty happened to you. It's on the upper end of the scale of Bad Shit happening to a heroine, but if P.S. I Love You can kill off Hilary Swank's husband with brain cancer, why can't this movie include a supernatural girl that murders half the town one night?
So instead of a Final Girl we have a Leading Lady. We are rooting for her. We believe in her. Even when she is obnoxious or rude or does something awful (like the slideshow at the engagement party in 27 Dresses), we can’t help but sympathise in the way that we forgive the Final Girl for whatever part she played in the initial act that sets off the slasher’s vengeance plot.
All this to say, I guess, that maybe this trip won’t be so bad. Maybe there’s something to this.
* It’s been a few days since I wrote this and I’ve now watched some dude-centric romcoms. The formula still holds up, but I amend my earlier statement because the person it happens to can be any gender. In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Peter is broken up with while naked. The same is true in (500) Days of Summer, except for the naked part.
However, the one place this formula does NOT hold up is in Adam Sandler movies. In his films it’s always the Love Interest who has something go wrong for her. It’s more like a creature feature than a slasher at that point—he’s the wolf in the woods, the beast in the bay, on the outskirts of her life and lulling her into a false sense of security as he waits for his moment to pounce. She thinks her life is perfect, but then BAM! An attack (but of romance). …I have a whole load more thoughts about this, but I need to stay on track if we’re ever going to leave for this trip on time and I know I’ve already put it off for too long.
Rom Com 101
Let’s talk about isolation, then.
Slashers often have a very small radius of killing: Jason has the camp, Billy in Black Christmas has the upper floors of the house. Even Michael only visits two houses once the present-day violence really begins in Halloween. Some slashers have the luxury of an entire town but they are still heavily localised. It’s one of those cool things because it’s caused by budget constraints but it makes slashers better. There’s the sense of things closing in on the protagonists and this foreboding claustrophobia.
Would Friday the 13th be anywhere near as scary if fifteen minutes of the runtime was us watching Pamela Vorhees decked out in full hockey mask regalia trying to check in at the airport so she can catch a flight to her next victim? No way!
Rom coms use isolation in a very different way. They aren’t meant to be claustrophobic. Instead it helps push the characters together who might not otherwise meet. Even huge cities like New York or Chicago become the size of only six people in a romantic comedy.
Road trip romcoms do the same thing. It Happened One Night takes place on a bus journey back to New York, but the characters—one a prissy idealist trying to get back to her fiancé, the other a scuzzy journalist who will do anything to save his career—meet and are forced into this small bus then into a small ditch and then a small cabin. I assume your family’s cabin is a little bigger then the one they end up staying in. And has a double bed rather than two singles we have to dangle a sheet between? But we can do that if you want. And hopefully neither of us has to pretend to scream at the other to convince the cops we’re different people! I think I should be the shouter, if it comes to that. You are much more believable as the innocent one.
But I’m also thinking along the lines of The Holiday. Specifically, Cameron Diaz’s scenes. I wonder if this is what you had in mind when suggesting this trip because I realise now it’s almost Christmas. The Lake keeps the snow from ever getting too heavy around here but who can say once we’re out in the country? Will we find ourselves trudging up some country lane armed in stilettos and suitcase? Probably not the stilettos.
Anyway, Amanda’s stuck in this little snowed-in cottage in the middle of somewhere in England. She hates it there—until the night the owner of the cottage’s brother turns up drunk. Now they’re in this cosy little spot where they can live in their love bubble despite all the reasons they shouldn’t be together, like the fact he has kids and her business is in LA.
What I’m asking is: are we in a love bubble? What happens if we leave town and find out we only like each other in the context of this place? To go back to slashers, what if this takes the mask off one of us and we find Angela’s screaming face from the end of Sleepaway Camp under it? Maybe this is a good test. We probably shouldn’t be together if we can only stand each other in the context of the area around Indian Lake.
But Amanda and Graham fall in love anyway, even with all the ways the reasons they shouldn't. We never actually find out if they do make it as a couple or not. We so rarely do in romcoms. It’s like we never see the fallout for the Final Girl, traumatised by seeing her friends and family killed…
…we can leave tomorrow, if you want.
Rom Com 101
I promise this is the last one. I can read it to you on the way tomorrow if I don’t finish this quick enough to get it into your mailbox tonight.
For this last instalment (until next time) I wanted to talk about one of the biggest similarities, and that is archetypes.
In slashers, the classics are: jock, nerd, the cheerleader, the token and, you know it, the Final Girl. Post-Scream, the nerd always knows the genre inside and out. In rom coms, we have: the Love Interest, his lousy-at-love best friend, the jerk boss or the even jerkier ex (rarely both), the quippy best friend (usually in the shape of Judy Greer) and the Leading Lady. She is the woman who succeeds at everything, except love!
I’m sure you can see the problem.
Randy is genre-savvy in Scream and he gets to survive. That was meant to be me. I might have miscalculated for our own slasher, but the very fact you survived still proves that you could be Final Girl material if things happen differently next time.
But there’s no chance I can fulfil any of the roles of the rom com. At best, I could be the lousy-at-love best friend, but he always gets with the quippy best friend and you are not best friend material. You are the woman who succeeds at everything, obviously. I don’t even have the genre knowledge to be a commentator, not yet.
What does that make me? Could I be the lesser used archetype of the rebound guy on your journey to find your true love? At least if we were in a love triangle, I could be the scrappy underdog. Though, look how that worked out in Casablanca. Or Reality Bites—I know Troy is meant to come across as the underdog, but I'm sorry. That's wrong. He's obviously the shoo-in, all good looks and stupid hair. Watch Lelaina and Michael awkwardly make out while holding Big Gulps and tell me high school dropout Michael isn't the underdog!
The point is, I think I need to watch a lot more of these films before I understand how I can fit into your story.
I’m just hoping that if this is While You Were Sleeping, I’m Bill Pullman, not Peter Gallagher, the gullible idiot who spends half the movie unconscious. Although, even if I am Peter’s character (who is confusingly also called Peter) at least it means I get to be in the Callaghan’s family. That seems like a good consolation prize.
Jade watched her breath fog up the passenger side window. She was holding the paper tightly, while Letha pulled up next to the cabin. It was definitely bigger than the one in It Happened One Night, no worries there.
“It doesn’t have to be a movie,” Letha said.
“But the point still stands,” Jade insisted, “I’m not leading man material. I’m not anyone in any of these things. Nobody wants a tragic backstory.”
Letha paused, staring into the middle distance. Then she nodded to herself, turning her eyes back to Jade’s.
“I know what we’re going to watch tonight,” she said firmly. She was already getting out of the car. Jade ducked out too, grabbing her shabby backpack. Letha had packed so much more than her, and now she was embarrassed. She didn’t know what people were meant to bring on vacation with them.
“Is it Pretty Woman? Because even though it has the appearance of tragic backstory, the movie really shies away from—”
“Not Pretty Woman.” Letha picked up her own bag and led the way to the cabin. “And anyway, in the original script, it was much darker.”
“Which proves my point! They knew what the audience wanted.”
Jade came up the steps behind Letha, onto the cabin’s porch.
It was bigger than Jade’s dad’s house. Which was actually now just Jade’s house, even if she had trouble thinking of it that way. She still skirted through the rooms, avoiding him as if he was still there.
The outside of the cabin was painted a colour that Jade was pretty sure would be called “a tasteful shade of blue”. It looked good, too. Even as she got closer, she couldn’t see any dust or cracks in the windows, no cobwebs in the awning. When Letha unlocked the door, it didn’t shriek on its hinges. It looked like the houses Theo Mondragon had been trying to build in Terra Nova.
There wasn’t even a chance of it creaking in the night so that someone could ask “Did you hear that?” and the other person could insist it was just the wind, not knowing there was a masked killer right outside their window, if they would just look.
It was easy to forget just how rich the Mondragon family were (or had been, at least, but Letha had funded a lot of the repairs since the fire). But the house was fully furnished with shiny, expensive furniture. It made Jade think that maybe Iris’s cottage in The Holiday did exist in real life, if a place like this was kicking around in the woods only a few hours out from Proofrock.
The main living space was open plan, and there was abstract art splattered across on the walls. The TV was huge, which at least made sense. But how no one had broken in to steal it when the place was unoccupied most of the year, Jade couldn’t figure.
“Bedroom is through here,” Letha said. “We’ll take the master.”
More than one bedroom, even.
The bed was covered in clean, white sheets. Jade wasn’t sure if she was meant to sleep in it or stare at it.
Jade set her bags down near Letha’s.
“So?” Jade asked. She strolled back to the living room and sat on the sofa. It was dark grey, at least, so she felt better about soiling it with her who-knows-when-she-last-washed-them jeans.
But Letha was heading for the kitchen. Jade got up and followed her. She had pent up energy from being stuck in a car, maybe.
“What are we going to watch?” Jade asked.
“I didn’t recommend you any films with lesbians,” Letha said.
“Oh. Are there many?” Slashers had lesbians, but usually just so they could kiss sexily before they died.
Letha smiled as she put an enamel kettle on the stove and lit it.
“A few,” she said. “Some of them are pretty good. I have a specific one in mind: But I’m a Cheerleader.”
“It’s called ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’?” Jade cocked her head, then straightened when she realised that was a killer’s tic. “Is it a bunch of cheerleaders sucking each other’s clits in the changing rooms?”
She still liked Letha’s face whenever she was vulgar.
“No,” Letha said. “It’s about a conversion camp.”
“Shit.”
“Yes. I think you’ll like it. Because the characters in that have been through things. They have families who might disown them. They have things they are grappling with inside themselves. The leading lady hasn’t even admitted to herself that she’s gay before she’s sent to camp.”
Jade didn’t respond. She knew how that characterisation echoed through her own life, even if she didn’t want to examine it just that moment.
But if what Letha was describing was true, well.
“So, you’re saying…”
“I’m saying that maybe it feels like there’s no room for you in these stories because I recommended the wrong ones.”
Hope flooded through Jade like ice water.
“So will you let me show you?” Letha asked.
“I’ll watch with an open mind,” Jade said.
“No, not that.”
She leaned forward and kissed Jade. It still sent a shameful flush through her, like she wasn’t meant to be allowed to kiss someone like Letha. Randy never got the girl, after all, no matter how much he tried with Sidney.
“Let me show you how you fit into a love story.”