ABSTRACT
Looking back at some of the most successful North American romantic films of the twenty-first century, it is hard not to notice several trends going on. As some authors have pointed out, two of these major trends have been a renewed interest in gender roles (masculinities in particular) and the idea of friendship as a new affective structure. This chapter brings forth another trend: that of the questioning of the teleology of a romantic relationship understanding its ultimate hegemonic goal as the hetero-marital coupling. As more and more people experience more romantic disappointment and find it increasingly hard in economic, social and emotional terms to build the will to find another person to start a relationship with (with the vulnerability it involves), more and more it becomes a common theme to understand why this is so. Singlehood has clearly become less stigmatised than in previous decades, particularly for women. Yet, a more burning concern, this chapter suggests, both for cinema and audiences is how to build a relationship with the new emotional demands that they bring to men. Because men’s roles in a relationship are being redefined, this entails both an exploration of how to do this while also a reactionary rebuke of these attempts. A corollary of this is how to deal with the anxiety-producing thought that relationships will probably fail. Using data from Blue Valentine and (500) Days of Summer and their audiences’, this chapter engages with ideas of male anxiety, of the emotional education of the male characters, of audiences’ fears, thoughts and anxieties over relationships and the lack of ‘happy endings’. The chapter concludes that while the role of men has certainly become a staple theme of contemporary romantic comedies, it points towards a question, both on-screen and off it, that has yet to be satisfactorily answered: how do you do intimacy?
