About Those RomCom Endings

So I was thinking this weekend, as I traveled six hundred miles back to southern Ohio, about romcom endings. Actually I was thinking about "She," the Elvis Costello song, and I looked it up on You Tube (I was in a hotel for the night), and you know how it is on You Tube, it's like eating potato chips, you just keep going, and I ended up on the press conference scene from Notting Hill, which led me to the declaration-in-the-office-in-front-of-everybody scene in The Proposal which led to me asking, "Why do all these movies have this stupid I-have-to-tell-you-I-love-you-in-front-of-everybody end scenes?" I can kind of see the press conference scene since there's no way a bookstore owner could have gotten to a mega-star at that point, and Thacker did kind of keep it in code with his "daft prick" line, but there's no way Andrew wouldn't have dragged Margaret into an office for his proposal. So why all the public love?

Which made me think about comedy in general, comedy as in comedy/tragedy/farce, not romantic comedy. Shakespeare's comedies always ended in marriages because that was a signal that society had been reaffirmed: the lovers were legitimizing their passion and joining the community, which made it stronger. And I wondered if maybe that's what the public declaration does now, stands in for the wedding ceremony which doesn't work so well in 2011, reinforces the idea that these people are announcing their bond before their communities which makes their relationships more serious, raises the stakes, makes it official in some way.

I still thought it was stupid.

So I went back to "She" for whatever reason I was looking for it to begin with and remembered that I used "She" in Bet Me, and that I had a crowd scene at the end of that novel. Min and Cal had already established their relationship, he'd proposed, they'd made love, their story was done, and then here came every other character in the book, trooping into Min's living room to comment. And there was that big scene in Clea's bedroom at the end of Faking It where everybody piled in and yelled. And there was the courtroom scene at the end of Welcome to Temptation. In my defense, none of these scenes are used as public declarations of love, but I think they act the same way because the lovers are publically working together, united against the world or at least the Big Bad.

I still haven't thought this through completely, but I'm thinking that the Community Scene may be important in RomCom because it demonstrates both that the lovers are officially together and that they're part of the community. That is, Min doesn't say to everybody in her living room, "Get out of here, I'm never seeing any of you again," Cal says something like, "You realize we're going to see all of these people at every holiday for the rest of our lives." Or something like that; I'm too lazy to go look it up. The climax in Maybe This Time is the moment when Andie, North, Carter, and Alice become a family, a unit, the kids choose Andie and North and together the four of them vanquish the Big Bad. I didn't do any of that on purpose, but I think that makes the observation stronger: something there is that doesn't love solitary lovers, that wants them community/family bound. "Mending Relationships" or maybe "Mending Worlds" that have been broken or weakened by conflict and loss. The return of the heroes to their community, healing the Fisher King?

Why yes, I am babbling. This is what you get when I invite you into my cognitive process before I've come to a conclusion. But I really think this lovers-before-the-community thing may be necessary.

Feel free to pile on here. I'm just sitting here cogitating.