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The Grand Theory of Romance
Am I the last person you'd expect to write about "love" on Valentine's Day? If the answer is not "Hell yeah"... you need to introduce me to someone. However, I've got something to say, and I'm damn well going to say it. Also note that ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
kuroichi, DodgyAussie from IRC, my mom, and sgibbons are particularly responsible for crystallizing my thinking. Thank them even if you disagree. They performed hours of community service protecting the rest of you from my "MKoatic" thinking.
1. Modern depictions of Romance SUCK. I know this is no brilliant insight, but it needs to be said up front. A brilliant depiction of romance should make the "loveless" types feel an empty place. The sad truth is that modern depictions of romance are less interesting to the average male than the biathlon. (I like the biathlon, actually). The average romantic movie... leaves me wondering if Hollywood could get more formula.
2. Romance is not Passion. This is the first common mistake leading to point 1, and the first premise on actually constructing an alternative. Passion often exists independent of romance. A romance can be done adequately without passion. The former shouldn't even be debatable because there are two relevant definitions, and neither alone is sufficient to negate my contention. First, " a feeling of strong sexual desire"... we also call that "lust", and that requires no romance to achieve. Second is essentially "intense affection", which is also inadequate because the primary examples used tend towards "he has a passion for baseball". Obviously, we should hope that does not mean he has a passion for baseballs in the other sense.
Therefore, passion might be a super-set of romance, or it might be an overlapping set. We need to examine my second contention. There is a subjective component to this, namely the word "Adequate". As a matter of removing subjective criteria, to the maximum extent possible, allow me to suggest that the standard for "adequate" be that the story generally has a love-oriented theme, and that there are substantial numbers of people who would say the story is self-consistent. That standard is fairly low, I realize, but it's designed to create a wider field for other people to try to bolster my main personal choices: Omoide Poro Poro (Only Yesterday/Tearful, Tearful Memories) and Mimi wo Sumaseba (If You Listen Closely/Whisper of the Heart). Since the latter is slated for a Disney DVD release in March, and was on Turner Classic Movies last month, there's no reason I should be accused of choosing anything especially obscure to make my point. Foreign? Sure, but that's part of my point. Animated? Damn Straight. If it was easy to find "normal movies" that did this, I wouldn't have made my first point, would I?
3. Romance is for men, too. It's true. I can jump on IRC and ask for romances and a bunch of guys have different suggestions. I've done it. I got answers on narrow parameters. I could do the same with my aunts. I'd get more suggestions, but there is a slight difference. My aunts would say "this is really good, so is that and this one's good, oh, and you should see this sometime". The guys on IRC are like "THIS IS THE ONE TRUE ROMANCE". What does that experience tell me? Guys actually love romances deeply. However, they are very discriminating in what romances they award that love to. In short, when guys rant about "chick flicks", they mean "film about love that is not good enough to be mentioned in the same breath as THE ONE TRUE ROMANCE". I believe the "guys don't like romances" meme is a direct result of Premise #1. No one will accuse me of having discriminating taste in action movies. Frankly, as long as "lots of shit gets blown up", the movie has served my needs in that area. For a romance, the movie needs to be emotionally stirring, which the whole damn point of one no matter who you are. However, emotionally stirring for me is quite obviously very different from most of the women I know.
4. The Art of the Meaningful Look. We're not so uptight as to require it actually be a look these days, but damn it, this is a pet peeve and a half. It ties to #1 and #3. I almost titled this section "Romance for men: older is better?". Why? because I like the romance scenes in OLD movies better than the ones in new movies. Then I rethought it because I remembered an interview with someone who deals with movies was saying that directors now have to SHOW the story, whereas old directors had to tell the story by device because they had restrictive social pressures and no special effects. Most notably, he brought up communicating lust with a single "meaningful look", instead of make-out sessions or sex scenes. I'm not against make-out sessions (they do, however, leave me cold), but there's something to be said for the meaningful look. What really needs to be said is that it can be an embrace, a look, a kiss, or a single spoken word. The only real requirements are that the meaning be clear (that is, if your audience needs to be familiar with a directing style that was popular in an indie film festival in Amsterdam last year, you're destined for failure), and the element itself needs to be special. Directors have a fairly open selection of ways to make an action special. Probably the easiest is simply "if you want a kiss to be special, don't have a lot of kissing". It's by no means the only way, but it requires next to nothing to budget or pull off. You can get more complex and stuff. We really don't mind. But see, it's exactly why KareKano works so well that it's still my #1 romance. There aren't many kissing scenes, and the important ones are presented as very delicate, loving moments, rather than passionate tongue-sparring matches. Why does the former click for me when the latter doesn't? Since it holds up across my male sample, I think that's the next point. This point is, much like #1, a statement that I find true, and one that leads me to other points.
5. The Miracle on Ice is the same as a great romance for a man. It's almost true, without much interpretation. I believe guys love both for more or less the same reasons. The Miracle on Ice, for American men, at least, is a moment of national pride, a story of hard work and guys pulling together to do the impossible. If you want to look at it another way, it's a vicarious tribal moment for the "American tribe". I think that's what sports are really about for spectators. Vicarious thrills. Similarly, I think a great romance in the male context, is one that plays on our imaginations. Not plays to, but plays on. In other words, rather than fulfilling what goes on in our heads, we need something that drives us to imagine living it. Do I have a damn bit of evidence for this? Hell no. My gut instinct is that this is correct, though. Deal with it.
6. Less is More. This constitutes many of the felonies in #4 and reasons so many romances fail to get #5. hop back to the kissing in KareKano, and how the meaningful ones were all extremely soft and delicate. Now think about point #5. What does a soft and delicate kiss in a film do to the male viewer? Hell if I know. My focus group is all asleep, the bastards. However, it works something like this: guys are visual. Academic studies always come up with that result. That translates to: See make-out session, get stiffy. See delicate kiss, think about how you'd feel giving such a kiss, feel heart beating funny, think of courtship, marriage, consummation, then get stiffy. OK, that's an exaggeration, because you don't think that far down the line. However, it's no mistake that the second path leaves a lot more to imagination. That's kind of how you emotionally invest people in something. It's also probably the second most common feature of romances the guys suggest to me. Since the first is something I mandated, I think the correlation is just as strong as if it were the single most common feature.
7. The Patterns of Love. I'm sure you can come up with infinite variations, and in an ever-growing audience, you'll find takers for almost any pattern you can create. Which ones are truly compelling, though? My mother seems to limit "romance" to stories specifically about falling in love. I disagree, and so does the dictionary. Quite literally, it's "love story" in the dictionary. However, I'd specify that a "romance" is emotional rather than being about "physical love" (though this is not specifically precluded, we call stories predominantly about "physical love" "porn" where I come from). So... a romance is a story aout the emotional side of love, possibly expressed at times through physical means. That's about what I claim. I can't imagine that being a controversial claim.
The most common romance novel formulas (according to my mom and her wall of these damn things) are basically the love-hate one (where you fight and fight and fight until you suddenly wind up married), the inconvenient-love-at-first-sight idea (like you're both engaged or something), and a number of variants in similar veins. I really don't remember them all after several days, but my memory of the conversation was basically that is was "these are romances, everything else is a love story", and deciding most of the "romance" "plots" are generally not sufficiently compelling. They can occasionally be done well enough, but every one I've found good does something unconventional to make it happen.
By now, you're probably sick of me bitching about this and want me to either shut up or offer a counter example. Fine. KareKano goes through the entire fighting to dating stage in a few eps. Most of the rest of the series is the trial phase of relationships, where "bad shit happens" and the relationship either breaks or grows stronger. Tsubasa Chronicle might be the best story about love in a while, and in 26 episodes, I don't recall anyone going as far as saying "I really like you" or anything of the sort. Yet it's far more emotional than a "romantic comedy" (Ichigo 100%) that Animania ran at the same screenings. The irony is that it's probably more emotional because the emotions of the characters are typically bottled up and deflected into more mundane actions, like kicking people in the face or making lunch.
See, Romeo and Juliet is one of the all-time great stories. Guess what! They freaking DIE. The whole damn story has about jack shit to do with them falling in love. It's about them having to deal with the major problems of a family feud disrupting their romance. Oh, and did I mention they don't overcome it? They DIE! That's right! The greatest English love story by common opinion, and they don't get married and have a long life together. THEY DIE! You could never sell that kind of story today. It would never get off the ground. See point #1.
For the record, this all began because I bitched about anime romances tending to have like 13 girls trying to seduce some loser. I thought it'd be nice if, you know, they had a romance where there isn't a freaking harem on the rampage.
8. Love is supposed to be forever. Just a thought, but it's a little hard to swallow love stories from a social circle where marriages often last in the months, rather than the decades. Particularly, the scripts these days are often so immature about love. Seriously, who really expects a relationship to work out when you're thinking about "your needs"? That's ass backwards. True love is supposed to, you know, put the other person first. If they're really in love with you, you're not going to be neglected. Is this what we get for movie scripts? Nope. Kids having sex with a pie is OK, but apparently the world will explode if love suddenly becomes about the person you love or something. Yeah, I don't understand either.
9. You don't need a number 9. You already know love as we know it is totally fucked up. The question is whether you can admit it to yourself.
I don't really apologize for excessive profanity above. Nor do I apologize for being an unromantic bastard. Deal with it ^_^
