Time to Love: Romantic comedies and narratives of LOVE – from a Swedish context

Abstract

This study explores the relation between love and romantic comedies, (aka romcoms), among people living in Sweden. Romcoms, being one of the most popular film genres ever, has often been subject to critique of not being serious enough and to derange people’s perceptions love. To investigate this, and to find out if there is any relation between romcoms and how its consumers think about love, I will focus on why we watch romcoms, how we embody the love displayed in the films, and what effects this might have on our perceptions of love. Four concepts will guide my analysis: Merleau-Ponty and Toren’s definition of embodiment, Bourdieu’s masculine domination and doxa, and Young’s restrained intentionality. These analytical tools are employed together with narrative interviews and digital participant observations. The ethnographic data was retrieved through 10 interviews (6 women and 4 men) with a total of 22 hours. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, all interviews were conducting via the digital tool ZOOM. The study points at three conclusions:

▪ Romcoms has a psychopharmacologic function in the sense of escapism. ▪ The participants embody romcoms in terms of EPIC love, disappointment, resignation, fear, non-realistic, demands, false happiness or joy. ▪ Romcoms has become a negatively loaded symbol for traditionalism, monogamy, conformity, stereotypes and ideals.

Placing these conclusions within a larger discourse, the study points at underlying social structures, indicating romcoms only to be part of larger societal dilemmas. This also indicates a need to move away from ‘easy’ solutions of Hollywood being the bad guy. The study emphasises a chronology in which love, and romance precedes the love presented by the film industry, implying our perceptions of love to be a combination of historical, social, and near-universal elements. Escapism indicates societal problems to which romcoms are portrayed as solution – not problem. Paradoxically, this solution is presented in a stigmatised, negative tone, causing feelings of shame, blameand belittleness, contextualising romcoms as a ‘guilty pleasure’ for the female consumer. A consequence of this paradox is a continuation of society re-writing culture, reproducing the outdated idea of the Other, as in dividing people into intellectual, serious, and pragmatic consumers and the rest: the naïve and stupid consumer of banal and superficial portrayals of love. This indicates a dislocation of discourse from near-universal love to pragmatic rationalism. However, despite findings of love being related to pragmatism, disappointment and love always being for someone else, the interviews also indicate near-universal takes on love represented by dreams, hopes and visions for a love reaching beyond social constructions. The fact that romcoms hold such complexity, opens new horizons for future studies, in which three aspects are of certain interest: 1) the capitalisation of culture consumption including film, literature, music as well as social media, 2) the continuation of re-writing culture and, 3) the anthropological lack of discussing love as possible near-universal phenomenon