What's Up, Doc?: Why Everyone Needs the Rom-Com

            Though the library of master songwriter, Stephen Sondheim, reaches a pedigree of acclaim that is perhaps unrivaled, his most profound work is arguably his Tony award winning show, Company. 

Yeah, I know Bobby is sometimes played as a woman,
but this particular metaphor is more clear with a male protagonist

    Premiering in 1969, Company follows Bobby, the only bachelor among his loving network of married friends. The story is presented through a series of snapshots showing Bobby’s interactions with his coupled friends intercut with scenes from Bobby’s own romantic pursuits, and it’s through these little vignettes that we understand what it is that keeps Bobby tethered to single life: Bobby fears the chaos of being married to another person. Seeing up front all the turmoil that his married cohorts are subjected to, and faced with his own relationship woes, Bobby contemplates his own bachelorhood.

The show is mostly lighthearted, but it makes some hard pivots to philosophical, especially in its climactic number, “Being Alive.” Here Bobby muses on what this thing called marriage could possibly offer the rational person. “Someone to hold you too close? Someone to hurt you too deep? Someone to sit in your chair? To ruin your sleep?” Bobby begins the number dreading the prospect of ever inviting someone else’s mess into his own life, or of opening up the most tender parts of his psyche to another person to be judged, or maybe to be embraced. But the possibility of “being alive,” offers its own kind of seduction, the promise of facing life’s challenges with someone always by his side. By the end of the song, Bobby can’t help but crave it.

There is a construct of manhood that exists in the imagination of popular culture which represents independence uncompromised—power that leans not on the support of anything or anyone. Pop culture has long made a joke out of the men and their fear of commitment, but Company touches on something much deeper concerning the male fear of romance. There’s a fear of vulnerability, and of compromising one’s sense of control. This counters a prevailing image of how men have been trained to socialize themselves for generation. 

There’s a case to be made for contemporary gender roles softening, allowing men to grow out of their historical aversion to all things mushy. I think these kinds of conversations were harder to have ten or fifteen years ago. But these trends have inevitably shaped where we are now, which leaves some residue in how these conversations play out today. There's still insight to be had in reflecting on how we got here, just like watching a truly moving rendition of "Being Alive" can still feel revelatory fifty years later. To get to the question at hand ... 

What is it about onscreen romance that makes men so … squirmy?

      I want to talk a lot about the romantic comedy film genre, and I want to really focus on one particular film, What’s Up, Doc? This film is not only a rom-com itself, but it also plays like a throwback to the earliest films of the genre. (Food for thought: What’s Up, Doc? reached its 50th anniversary this year, placing it in closer proximity to the classical films it is referencing than the modern day …) The movie makes a strong case study because What’s Up, Doc? actively explores the fear of romance taking away a man’s sense of control and security. This it does not with heavy drama or heart-racing explosions (though at least one hotel room is burned to a crisp before the credits roll), but with something even more straining: slapstick.

            Even if we narrow our focus to just the overlap between gender and genre, there’s still much to unpack with a film like What’s Up, Doc? In this essay, we’re going to first look at how the rom-com has historically given power to the female viewer. After, we’re going to examine how this film explores the fear of romance through taking advantage of the format of the screwball rom-com, bending the rules of the male gaze, and showing what a person has to gain from the chaos of a partnered life. 

 

Rom-Coms + Gender: 101

            More than any other genre, the rom-com is entrenched in conversations about gender and about men and women. These films literally depend on a couple, generally heterosexual, entering into a union before the final reel. You’d think, given that these films place so much dependance on this coupling, that rom-coms were singlehandedly responsible for holding up the patriarchy. But the values they uphold don’t exactly extol manly dominance.

For one thing, the rom-com is the one area of film where women have had more pull and power than men. It’s not just that they are the one genre that gives priority to the female viewer. You also have women behind the camera as well. Filmmakers like Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers have found great success as directors in this field. This isn’t to say that the rom-com is totally beyond reproach in its female representation. Even as recently as the 2000s, you find a lot of rom-coms that can’t help but indulge in some skewed messages about courtship and female agency. But this is still a field where female representation has stronger footing.

    It’s maybe for this reason that the Hollywood patriarchy has undervalued the contribution of romantic comedies, spouting narratives that female stories “don’t sell as well.” Of course, even the most casual glance into film history will quickly debunk this narrative. When you look at the most successful films across history, and I mean films that have ultimately changed the way films were made (Titanic, The Sound of Music, Gone with the Wind, etc.), you’ll find stories that not only feature a complex female lead as their figureheads, but also explore their heroine’s complex inner life with a rich palette of high-budget filmmaking.

What’s interesting is that this dismissal is somewhat unique to modern filmmaking. You look back in the 1930s and 40s, and even the 70s, and some of the highest grossing and most awarded films were themselves rom-coms. Today there's a greater incentive for increasing the female presence in traditionally male spaces like action films than there is for championing historically female spaces like rom-coms. All the modern progress made on the gender front obscures how the most feminine of films are today relegated to little more than guilty pleasures, not worthy of real discussion. Regardless, real discussion is just what we’re here to have with this essay.

            Let’s start by reviewing the default formula for rom-coms: There are variations and divergences from the model, but one of the most common templates, especially those centered on a male character, has a young bachelor who just doesn’t have time for romance. If he is in a relationship, it’s a sterile one. But a chance encounter with a spritely young woman presents an alternate future for him, one with plenty of room for this frightening thing called romance. Naturally, the path she paves is a rocky road, one that catapults him out of his comfort zone, but it sure is entertaining for those of us watching. Yet something happens as he walks the winding road with her. The madness reveals a truer, happier version of himself, and that is worth any sum of chaos.  

            As Geoff King noted in his book, Film Comedy, “The institution of marriage is questioned where it is seen as leading to formal and lifeless relationship but not when it has the potential to be enlivened by spontaneity, play, and foolery. The specific role of the comic dimension is to offer liberation from, and within, social institutions or structure shown to have grown rigid and unyielding to the point at which their continued viability might otherwise be under threat.”

The difference between the two could not be clearer in the love triangle at the center of this film: At the center is Howard, a mild-mannered professor, torn between his stale but demanding fiance, Eunice, and the mistress of pandemonium, Judy. Eunice doesn’t overtly disrespect or belittle Howard, but she also doesn’t seem terribly invested in his happiness. There’s not a lot of love in their interactions—we mostly just see Eunice chiding Howard over nothing. Howard has been trained to expect nothing more, and so he’s averse when Judy comes along and exposes him to the idea of something more fulfilling, exciting even. The film lays out very clearly, a marriage to Eunice is a death sentence where life with Judy is a roller coaster.

 

“Don’t you know the meaning of propriety?”

            What’s Up, Doc? follows the casual mix-up of four identical plaid suitcases that land at the same San Francisco hotel one weekend. One has incriminating government files, one has a rich heiress’s collection of diamonds, one has an assortment of rocks that Howard needs for his academic presentation, one has Judy’s underwear. Through the course of the film, various interested parties converge on their targeted suitcases. If only they could tell which suitcase was which … 

            But chaos comes to call long before the mix-ups are even discovered. The forcefully free-spirited Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand) sets her eye on the intellectual but awkward Howard Bannister (Ryan O’Neal), who is visiting presenting at a conference in hopes of securing a professional grant with his stuffy fiancé, Eunice (Madeline Khan in her delightful debut). When Judy presents herself as a romantic alternative, Howard shirks from the chaos she sows. But maybe there’s something to be gained by keeping her around. The academic board in charge of the grant sure seems to like her. And Howard sure seems to like who he is when he’s around her. But there’s no room in Howard’s sterile existence for all the fireworks Judy leaves in her wake. And as their own current of chaos intersects with all the parties pursuing the various plaid bags, Judy and Howard’s blooming relationship might just tear the city apart.

            The movie is, in a word, chaos. Beautiful chaos. What’s Up, Doc? belongs to a special class of comedy known as screwball comedy, a kind of comedy that is defined by exaggerated situations and slapstick gags rather than purely by wit and snappy dialogue. These two classes obviously exist on a continuum, but screwball comedy displays its humor and absurdity through highly comical situations where everyone seems to be made of rubber.

            There’s always a lot going on in these films. A single scene can pack a million moving parts, both in terms of the visual gags and the development of the story at large. A lot of the success also comes down to the comedic instinct of the actors. Ryan O’Neal delivers lines like “Well, I don’t think of you as a woman, Eunice,” entirely without irony. I highlight the slapstick elements of the comedy because it’s in the louder aspects of the film’s comedy that the thing that Howard fears—what the movie’s really about—comes into focus.

            In one particular scene, Howard goes to his hotel room to repair the damage left by Judy, only to find Judy in his bathtub. By this point, Judy has already won over Mr. Larrabee, head of the institution in charge of the grant, and wrecked his relationship with Eunice. With Eunice already on her way to Howard’s room to attempt to make amends, the last thing Howard wants is for his fiancé to discover Judy in his bedroom with nothing but a towel, so he makes great efforts to hide her, which only makes things worse. 

            This scene exemplifies the kind of chaos that Howard fears, which he attributes all to Judy. But the ironic thing is …. it isn’t actually Judy that causes things to fall apart. The chaos builds as Howard tries to conceal Judy from Eunice. He maxes out the tv volume to try covering Judy knocking on the window, and this causes the neighbors to complain. And when he breaks the dial trying to turn it down, this causes the tv to blow a fuse, leading to mass destruction. 

            Very early on, Howard is faced with the question of whether Judy dropping into his life is a blessing or a thorn. At first, he defines this along the line of whether she can help him get the Larrabee Grant. After all, her natural magnetism helps him earn favor with Mr. Larrabee. And isn’t she a lot more fun, anyway?

But Judy also actively wrecks his relationship with his fiancé. And this exuberance that causes complete strangers to fall for her also creates the kind of chaos that sets hotel rooms on fire and gets Howard kicked out. In that way, Judy becomes a stand-in for the spontaneity and unpredictability of romance.

            When the guns start going off and fists start flying, the two of them make a quick getaway with all the suitcases, forcing their pursuers to chase them all across the city, setting the stage for a five-act symphony of madness featuring the majority of the film’s most impressive set pieces. Judy and Howard are pursued all across the city before they all ultimately crash into the San Francisco bay, finding themselves stuffed in a courtroom in the very next scene. 

   The chase sequence takes up roughly ten minutes of a 90-minute movie (it took an even larger percent of the film’s budget, 1 out of 4 M), and it is worth every cent and every second. The film even quantifies the outcome of the chaos. After the mayhem, the heiress offers Judy and Howard their $20,000 reward for recovering her jewels, but she deducts from their sum all the expenses left wake of the chaos they sowed in the city-wide chase, which she tallies one by one. There’s a twisted sense of humor as we watch in real time as Howard’s reward is gradually eaten away by all the cars they crashed, all the Chinese dragons they stole, all the glass panes they shattered. The final count comes down to a measly twenty-five dollars. 

And yet, it’s still twenty five dollars more than they had at the start of the film. A net gain. But more than any specific sum of money, the madness reveals how effectively Judy and Howard work as a team.  Chaos becomes the battlefield by which Howard and Judy prove both their compatibility and vitality as a couple.

 

            Some Thoughts on Male Objectification

Rear Window (1954)

        Way, way back (literally my first essay on this blog) when we talked about Passengers, we looked at the way objectification and “the male gaze” functions in film. I want to talk about it a little here because in a genre that is so obsessed with gender and the heterosexual union, there’s a lot of opportunity to discuss how maleness and femaleness is presented not just in the plot but in the viewer experience. 

    What’s Up, Doc? came out in 1972, three years before Laura Mulvey’s essay on the subject, so it’s not quite honest to say that the movie deliberately subverts the phenomena it describes. And given that the film is still helmed from the perspective of a man, director Peter Bogdanovich, even this bending of the male gaze is still an extension of how a male filmmaker is choosing to present manhood. Just so, the movie does make some fascinating comments on how the male need for control responds to the threat of The Female.

Some things to remember upfront: The cornerstone of the male gaze is the assumption that the heterosexual male is the default viewer, that everything seen on screen is designed for his viewing pleasure. You can see this most clearly in the way that female bodies are displayed like objects for men to ogle over. But remember also that objectification exists on multiple levels—there’s the visual level, the way the character is being presented onscreen to the audience—and there’s the narrative level, the way the character is used within the plot itself. The plot can suggest that a character, almost always a female character, has no function in a film beyond providing visual pleasure for the heterosexual male viewer, but because film communicates visually, the audience almost learns more about the character by how they are photographed than by the actions they take in the plot. 

            Compare, for example, the difference between how men and women are often objectified onscreen. Female objectification is often accompanied by an overtone of dominance or voyeurism—the male viewer is sneaking a peek of the leading lady in her underwear. In-universe, she may not be aware that she is being observed or even have control over whether or body is being displayed to begin with. Male objectification, by contrast, almost always frames the handsome hunk under the most desirable light. He has no problem displaying his virility and strength. The male gaze wants to view beautiful women, yes, but it also wants women to view the man as something desirable.

            The male gaze is also reflected in how men making films for men has shaped the cultural weight offered to certain kinds of stories. This is part of the reason why the women-centered rom-coms are looked down on. Male stories are seen as “universal” territory that everyone is expected to relate to while female stories are some sort of specialized taste. Lili Loofbourow wrote about a subset of “the male gaze” for The Guardian in 2018 when she talked about “the male glance,”

“The male glance is how comedies about women become ‘chick flicks.’ It’s how discussions of serious movies with female protagonists consign them to the unappealing stable of ‘strong female characters.’ It’s how soap operas and reality television become synonymous with trash. It tricks us into pronouncing mothers intrinsically boring, and it quietly convinces us that female friendships come in two strains: conventional jealousy, or the even less appealing non-plot of saccharine love. The third narrative possibility, frenemy-cum-friend, is only slightly less shallow. Who consumes these stories? Who could want to?”

In addition to simply creating displays of female bodies to ogle, the male gaze affirms to the heterosexual male viewer that they are the default audience, the one behind the camera of life, always calling the shots.

   I bring this up here because What’s Up, Doc? is one of those films that plays with “the male gaze,” and it does so on a number of levels. The film’s comment on gender is matched not only by the plot actions, but how the film situates the audience’s “gaze,” which in turn comments on why men may act dismissively toward rom-coms and all the vulnerability that it unleashes. 

We see this subversion very early on. Judy sees Howard for the first time as she’s ordering room service on the phone, suggesting that Howard is simply another item on the menu. In this way, Judy is presented as a disruption from Howard’s sense of control. This puts Judy in the traditionally male role of the acting agent and Howard in the traditionally female role of actant. Again, this subversion is actually somewhat common within the romantic genre where the female lead is occasionally allowed to be the driving force in her own story. 

           There is one scene in What's Up, Doc? where the question of objectification comes up visually. Returning to that scene in the hotel room, the whole mess starts when Howard undresses to take a bath only to find that Judy has already laid a trap for him. He spends the majority of the scene with his chiseled body on display for the viewer, but there's nothing flattering about the way that Howard's body is being displayed here. He's not "showing off," he's exposed.

            Note: Judy is wearing a towel for most of this scene, yet she’s not only still more covered than Howard, she’s also the one pulling the strings in this scene. But the actual displaying of Ryan O’Neal’s hot nerd bod is less interesting than what it stands for: the loss of control, being at the mercy of someone else, the thing that men fear when they open themselves up to the chaos of romance.

          I’m reminded of a similar scene in this year’s The Lost City. The film manages to sneak in a brief glimpse of Channing Tatum’s bare behind in a scene where Sandra Bullock has to extract leeches from his buttocks. The text of the scene itself is not sexually charged, but that itself is irrelevant. In a way, the fact that Channing Tatum is so unguarded is part of the appeal of the scene, and part of what makes Channing Tatum so attractive. How refreshing to see a Hollywood hunk who’s actually vulnerable.  (This admittedly opens up a lot of questions about objectification and autonomy, like whether objectifying men is somehow any less reductive than objectifying women, but one rabbit hole at a time.)

            This is underscored by the way Howard and Judy’s relationship is characterized. Even if Howard is himself positioned as the main character, in a lot of ways he is still an object to be acted upon, the damsel. So I guess the question is whether a romance with Judy helps Howard to become an active player in his own life. 

 

Judy and Howard Forever

The question at the heart of this film is whether Howard and Judy are good for one another, and because Howard is presented as our lead character, the thrust of this question is whether Judy is good for Howard. Is it worth all the pandemonium and bedlam for Howard to leap onto the bike and ride through life with Judy? 

Very early, the film signals that Judy is not only a lot of fun, she’s also Howard’s intellectual equal. During their first encounter in the drug store, Howard describes his research on igneous rocks to Judy, and he’s not too far into his description when he catches himself, “but you’re probably not interested in igneous rocks.” It seems like the movie is setting up the joke to come at Howard’s expense—obviously, who in their right mind would be interested in something as dull as igneous rocks—but our expectations are subverted when she lists in great specificity the kinds of rocks she is interested in. Judy and Howard have a certain repartee that Howard could never have with Eunice.

            There’s a scene where Judy, impersonating Eunice, is charming Mr. Larrabee and the board of trustees. They’re not only taken by her natural charisma but also by the stories she tells of Howard Bannister, the self-confident go-getter—stories that are patently untrue. She paints a picture of the stuffy Howard as a fearless, sky-diving daredevil. What’s worse, everyone seems to love Howard for it.

            Because it’s not just that she’s lying about the kind of person Howard is, she’s describing the kind of person Howard could be if he wasn’t so paralyzed by social convention. If he weren’t, in other words, chained to a partner so uninterested in his self-actualization, and if he himself weren’t afraid to live a little. 

            Again, let’s refer to how Howard fares with Eunice versus Judy. Under the handle of the tightly wound Eunice, Howard is little more than a finger puppet, reciting the words that Eunice trains into him to impress his superiors. With Judy, Howard not only has an intellectual equal, he not only has a lot more fun, he’s also more alive. Where Eunice trains Howard on the art of conformity, Judy is drawing Howard into circumstances where he must take charge, even if she is kind of forcing him into it. In this way, Howard almost derives his masculinity from Judy. And that's the central irony of this film, and romance as a whole. Howard can only "man up" by wholly embracing what a fulfilling romance has to offer.

          Where does this leave the film’s gender dynamics? Full of contradictions. Even as the story flexes Judy’s excellence and autonomy, the story remains firmly Howard’s. Howard is the one with the internal journey, and the actions of the story all revolve around what will happen to him. Yet Howard is also posited as a non-agent in his own life until his living anima plucks him from stale existence and forces him to live his best life. 

            Maybe the whole experience was a bit of an embarrassing situation for Howard, but how else would he have gotten to race across San Francisco wearing a Chinese dragon? As Michelle Williams’ character sings in The Greatest Showman, “But it’s all an adventure, it comes with a breathtaking view/Walking a tightrope with you.” Or as Judy herself says at the end of the film, “wasn’t it kinda fun, though?”

 

            "That's All, Folks!"

            Depending on who you ask, rom-coms have kind of struggled to find an audience over the last few decades. Julia Roberts has recently revealed that part of the reason she went 20 years without doing a rom-com is that she hadn’t been given any interesting scripts for the genre during that time. Christopher Orr wrote for The Atlantic in 2013, 

            “Among the most fundamental obligations of romantic comedy is that there must be an obstacle to nuptial bliss for the budding couple to overcome. And, put simply, such obstacles are getting harder and harder to come by. They used to lie thick on the ground: parental disapproval, difference in social class, a promise made to another. But society has spent decades busily uprooting any impediment to the marriage of true minds. Love is increasingly presumed—perhaps in Hollywood most of all—to transcend class, profession, faith, age, race, gender, and (on occasion) marital status.”

    In the time since Orr's article, rom-coms have found something of a second life on streaming venues. Netflix's Top 10 is regularly dominated by films like Always Be My Maybe. But these films have a harder time finding a footing on the big screen.

Orr’s point, that social reform has made the path to love easier, rings true on some level. But I’m less interested in the reasons why the genre has produced so few iconic pieces in recent years than I am with asking why a movie like Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a harder sell than a movie like The Bridge on the River Kwai. And I think a part of that reason has a lot to do with the way men have trained themselves to look down on the genre, less because they’re annoyed by rom-coms and more because they’re scared of it.

            Howard, Bobby, and perhaps many men offscreen shirk from the madness of a partnered life, repulsed by the reminder that the self-made construct of manliness is insufficient, if it ever existed to begin with. There’s an underlying fear that lasting romance might sap the man of their manhood, but opening oneself up to lasting love demands the full presence of one’s emotional faculties, to live life without defenses or safeguards. What could be more manly than that?

                --The Professor