Sexual Revelations on the Silver Screen
“I wouldn’t say that I was raised on romance.
Let’s not get stuck in the past.
I love you more than everything in the world.
I don’t expect that will last.
They told me everything was guaranteed.
Somebody somewhere must’ve lied to me.”
A female friend told me that I’m the only straight male that she knows who really owns up to having enthusiasm for rom-coms. I might go so far to say that it’s my favorite film genre. Some people like documentaries that reveal awful truths about life, some like movies where magic is real and a world of endless possibilities is created, while others prefer movies where fire, guns and fisticuffs delight our primal urges. I mostly like movies where people talk, walk around, reach a conflict and eventually kiss.
There are many answers to why this might be. I was raised by a father who is a vigorous cinephile, who inundated me with Golden Age movies, starring duos like Tracy and Hepburn or Astaire and Rogers that told stories of loves lost, found and rekindled. When I was really young, my favorite movie was Singing In The Rain; Gene Kelly was something of an alpha male hero. The bottom line of all these movies was about getting the girl. These are the lessons that film taught me long before I knew anything about love or sex. Even the songs in these movies, the sublime jazz standards by George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Leonard Bernstein, used chord and melody structure to create a mammoth, unattainable version of love that has followed me in my work as a musician. As much as I want to rock, I am, at heart, a ballad man.
As I entered my pubescent years, it got even worse. This was the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and the teen rom-com genre was infected with the manic energy of the “alternative era.” Films like Can’t Hardly Wait, 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless and She’s All That became part of my consciousness. I had never felt particularly connected to my peer group, but I would really, truly try to see myself in these movies. There was always some kind of outsider character—that would be me— who made a connection to the love interest. By the end of the film, he becomes the hero, the one who deserves love and adoration, who, like Gene Kelly, gets the girl. I remember watching High Fidelity for the first time and seeing John Cusack with his record collection and his issues with women. I thought, “This is a cool guy, and I hope I’m like this.” As an adult, that movie has become terribly depressing, because I’ve become one of these assholes, and it isn’t a great look in real life. The attractive qualities of a man who is an expert on Hüsker Dü and a moron about love are severely limited.
By the time I was actually of the age where sexual experiences were on the table, I was already pretty damaged by all these unrealistic stories. My first real sexual experiences were with a friend, not a romantic interest per se — shyly testing the waters. I had confidently rounded third base a few times, but when it came to going all the way, I wimped out, secretly hoping that I would soon fall in love and have the classic experience that I had seen in the movies — the true birth of love. Little did I know, I would spend many years waiting for that experience, and I barely knew it was happening when it did. Fuck the movies.
When I was in school, all I wanted to do was fall in love. It was all I could think about as I listened to Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness and Pinkerton over and over again on my Walkman. This vulnerable state led me to a deep well of disappointment, insecurity and rejection. There was a band popular at the moment named Dashboard Confessional, led by a white singer so sensitive he makes Elliott Smith seem like Lemmy. I liked one of their songs, “Hands Down,” the chorus of which went: “My hopes are so high that this kiss might kill me.” I would fall in ‘love,’ get too worked up and then get destroyed when she told me she was going out with the drummer, or while she enjoyed my friendship, she was not attracted to me sexually, or she had too many personal problems and didn’t want to hurt me. I’d like to say that things have improved into adulthood, but that would only be a partial truth. I can’t deny the part of me that wants to be Ben Braddock and steal the girl away in a brave, life-changing move.
It’s possible I am the eternal Duckie from Pretty In Pink and it is not realistic to be gratified by lip locking Molly Ringwald once when an inferior Andrew McCarthy waits it in the wings. In fact, John Hughes originally had Duckie getting the girl, but test audiences disapproved, and the ending was reshot. Whether this change made the film better is irrelevant, but it does make the movie more realistic. Despite McCarthy’s character being a rich wiener with no charisma, we all know that his type of character gets the girl at the end, and not the Duckman.
I was watching a re-run of Friends when Phoebe Buffett marries Paul Rudd, and I started tearing up, even though this was way past peak Friends, I didn’t even like the show at all when this happened, and I didn’t even support the marriage as a plot point. This is because I am an absolute sucker, and I always have been. I have been in love and when the love was returned it was better than any bullshit Meg Ryan-ism, and it certainly didn’t happen in the same way. As a grown-ass man, I have a battle between cynicism and romanticism, optimism and pessimism, realism and idealism. When I look back, I wonder how many times in my life I wimped out, wasn’t brave enough to create that movie moment, that turn in the screenplay where the hero gets the girl. Maybe this is truly not how life works, and I have been poorly informed by the film industry.
In Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, Mia Farrow’s character is a struggling woman in Depression-era New Jersey, who goes to the movies to escape the realities of her shitty life and the abusive husband that she cannot find the confidence to leave. It is only when Jeff Daniels’s hero character literally walks off the screen in a moment of magical realism that she experiences real love. Of course, this premise doesn’t last forever and she ends up back at the movies. When I was in love all we did was eat great food, make love and watch movies, but now I mostly go to the movies alone. If I were a screenwriter, this would be a great way to introduce the new romantic lead, but this is real life and nobody meets a stranger while going to the movies by themselves.
I know that I want real love, but maybe I don’t know what it is. Maybe I am absolutely warped by all these influences, and like Mia Farrow, can only see love in the fantastical sense found in motion pictures. Like a pornography addict who cums harder with porn than in real life, maybe I need these rom-coms to fill a void for romance that is unrealistic for real life.
Jamie Frey is a writer and musician born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and plays in the band NO ICE.
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