The End of Romance: The Demystification of Love in The Postmodern Age

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The End of Romance: The Demystiﬁcation of Love in the Postmodern Age
Article in Sociological Perspectives · December 2000

DOI: 10.2307/1389548
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The End of Romance: The Demystification of Love in the Postmodern Age
Author(s): James J. Dowd and Nicole R. Pallotta
Source: Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 549-580
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
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THE END OF ROMANCE: THE DEMYSTIFICATION
OF LOVE IN THE POSTMODERN AGE
JAMES J. DOWD*
NICOLE R. PALLOTTA
ABSTRACT: We focus on the changing understanding of romance in

contemporary American society. Through an analysis of romantic comedies
and dramas produced in Hollywood between 1930 and the present, we
demonstrate how the decline of the romantic drama is due to significant
social and cultural change, the most important of which is the weakening of
norms governing the choice of romantic partners. The romantic comedy,
however, has more than compensated for the decline in dramas, with the
decade of the 1990s seeing more romanticfilms produced than in any previ-
ous time in the history offilmmaking. Although the contemporary roman-
tic comedy almost invariably reinforces the most conservative tendencies in
our culture, we argue that these films nonetheless work effectively to rein-
force a usable cultural script governing romantic behavior. By depicting
ideal culture as a real possibility, the romantic comedy nurtures the uto-
pian wish of "slipping one over on modernity."
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and
knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that
she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland.
Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly."
-Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose
It is a truism that we live in a time of global economic transformation, rapid social

change, and cultural disarray. The effects of such change on the lives and charac-
ter of human beings have been the object of study of sociologists from Fromm
(1941), Riesman (1950), and Marcuse (1964) to Lasch (1977), Bellah et al. (1985),
Hochschild (1997), and Sennett (1997), among others. There is general agreement
among these varied authors that the rationalization and demystification of the
world that has proceeded apace throughout the twentieth century has not been
* Direct all correspondence to: James J. Dowd, Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-
1611; e-mail: jjdowd@sherlock.dac.uga.edu.
Sociological Perspectives, Volume 43, Number 4, pages 549-580.

Copyright ? 2000 by Pacific Sociological Association. All rights reserved.
Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press,
Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.
ISSN: 0731-1214
550 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES Volume 43, Number 4,2000
contained within the public sphere of commerce and contracts but has moved
inexorably into the private realms of love and intimacy as well. Historical circum-
stances have reinforced in our culture an increasingly hedonistic, strategic, moni-
tored, self-reflexive, rational, and instrumental approach to the relationships of
everyday social life.
In this age of disbelief, we have become wary of most advertisers' claims, politi-
cians' promises, telemarketers' offers, and even our own memories and percep-
tions (Ewen 1996; Goldfarb 1991; Seligman 1997). Practiced in the art of decon-
structing public relations blather, infomercials, and the countless disclaimers,
excuses, and accounts that enter into so much of ordinary social discourse, it is no
little accomplishment that we continue to trust at all in the honesty and goodwill
of the many strangers and mere acquaintances that we encounter daily as we
work, shop, and otherwise engage ourselves in the world "out there." Although
we understand the necessity of caution, we continue to form new friendships and
to seek intimate ties with other human beings. We still hope, in other words, some
day to "fall in love," and possibly even to marry and raise a family. This we do
irrespective of our awareness of the failings and pathologies of family life that
have been exposed and analyzed by journalists, sociologists, and others. With the
divorce rates having reached 50 percent of all first marriages, spouse and child
abuse recognized as a relatively common occurrence, and new tensions in fami-
lies developing as a result of both economic necessity and the search for personal
fulfillment through paid employment (Cancian 1987; Miller 1995), family life is no
longer viewed as the idyll, or haven, that it was once presumed to be.
In the presence of these social and cultural developments, one may ask whether
it is still the case as it was in the time of Freud (1964) that work and love remain
the two most significant spheres of our lives. The attention paid by sociologists to
occupations and organizations suggests that work and the entire realm of eco-
nomic necessity continue as basic driving motivations in our lives. But what of
love? Sociologists study fertility rates, divorce rates, and the various pathologies
of primary groups, foremost among which is the family, but rarely do we attend
to the ways in which human beings come to love one another, or to engage in the
romantic pursuit of another human being.1
Given the changes mentioned briefly above, it is highly likely that this particu-
lar human practice, that is, the ways in which we become intimately attached to
one another, has also been transformed during the second half of this century. As
recognized decades ago by Parsons (1951), traditional rules governing human
intercourse have gradually been displaced by formal, rational-legal mechanisms
in cognizance of these changes. Legal statutes have been devised to govern
behaviors and relationships that, in previous eras, were nonexistent or not consid-
ered problematic. Furthermore, in the contemporary era, it is not only the state
that has exercised an interest in the behavior of citizens. The expanding concept of
legal liability has led employers and professional associations to attempt to con-
trol the behavior of employees or members through workplace rules and strin-
gent professional codes of ethics. At the subinstitutional level of everyday life,
however, the reaction to the postmodern shift could never be so decisively or
explicitly promulgated. It is, after all, cultural norms, folkways, and beliefs that
The End of Romance 551
govern behavior in the private realm of daily life among friends, neighbors, and
relations. The apparent lack of such cultural maps may help to explain the extraor-
dinary popularity of Fein and Schneider's (1995; Fein, Schneider, and Schneider
1997) instructional manuals on dating and romance. These manuals provide rules
designed to bring order to the current chaos of dating relationships. Among the
edicts offered by the authors are Rule No. 2 ("Don't talk to a man first") and the all-
important No. 5 ("Don't call him and rarely return his calls"). Guides for men are
similarly pervasive, including numerous articles in Esquire magazine that
acknowledge the need to "rewrite the obsolete, destructive parts of the old mas-
culine code" (Segell 1996:76).
In this context, questions emerge concerning cultural beliefs and practices
regarding love. What is our understanding of love? Do we still believe in love the
way we may once have done? Do we now expect more, less, or something differ-
ent from our romantic partners? These are the questions that have motivated our
interest in romance generally and romantic Hollywood movies in particular.
THE GENRE OF ROMANCE
The romantic genre has a long history, even predating the appearance of the first
literary novels. Originally, "romance" referred to the adventures of chivalrous
knights in medieval Europe. Later, with the appearance of the first novels, "romance"
became understood as a form of prose that featured remarkable and unusual
scenes and incidents and, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) explains, stories
"often overlaid with long disquisitions and digressions." Only recently has
"romance"/ come to be understood as a love affair. The OED cites G. B. Shaw as
one of the first to use the word in this way, as in his story Overrule (1919), in which
he writes, "I felt my youth slipping away without ever having had a romance in
my life; for marriage is all very well, but it isn't romance. There's nothing wrong
in it, you see" (p. 81).
Shaw's equation of romance with transgression is an early instance of the typi-
cal twentieth-century view of passionate love as a relationship that may just as
well lead out of a marriage as into one. This is a major break from the nineteenth-
century romance literature of Jane Austen, among others, whose stories of young
couples ended happily, or otherwise, in the couple's commitment in marriage.2
Austin's Pride and Prejudice (1813) is the prototype of the 19th-century romantic
comedy. The story begins with Elizabeth, the second eldest of the five Bennett
daughters, meeting Mr. Darcy at a party. The relationship gets off on the wrong foot
as Elizabeth overhears Darcy's comment that she is not quite attractive enough.
But, by story's end, Elizabeth overcomes her prejudice against Mr. Darcy, and he
surmounts his pride, and the two lovers finally marry and live happily together.
With the onset of the sociological realism of this century, the concept of
romance underwent a significant change as individuals were now considered to
quite possibly fall in and out of love, in a sequence of romances that extend across
the individual's biography. Although Shaw no doubt was correct in associating
romance with risk and social transgression, this notion of love with the "wrong"
partner has lost much of its narrative power as, with the equality movements
of the 1960s, the circle around those considered "improper" has grown increas-
ingly smaller.3
A second element of classic romance is the intervention of larger, structural or
otherwise powerful forces that impede the progress of the romance or may even
end it altogether. War is one such powerful force that is often used as a backdrop
to the story of two lovers. In another fictional reference to romance, T. Rattigan
(1953), in the play, Flare Path, (1.26), sets his lovers immediately within the tumul-
tuous events of World War II: "He was on a week's leave, and we were married
before he went back to his Squadron. What the papers would call a whirlwind
wartime romance."
In addition, then, to the risk of social ostracism (or, merely, social disapproval)
that might confront the two lovers, a second ingredient of the classic romance is
the presence of a serious obstacle, or impediment, that lies in the path of the
developing relationship. To be of interest to the reader or viewer (and, one might
speculate, to the lovers themselves), romance must constitute a struggle against
some outside force that, intentional or not, serves to separate the lovers and in
other ways make difficult the progress of their love. Such impediments, when
they are overcome, make the romance all the more meaningful; when the impedi-
ment is so momentous that it defeats the lovers despite their best efforts to
become a couple, the result is an emotion-laden experience for the reader and a
tragedy for the lovers.
In romantic fiction, then, love invariably thrives where it is forbidden. It is a
convention of the romantic genre that lovers risk crossing social boundaries of all
types to be with one another. However, as in the story of Romeo and Juliet, or in
the earlier tale of Oedipus and Jocasta, the socially ill-suited lovers must separate
in order for the social order to be reestablished. In actual social life, the tragedy
that usually befalls the lovers to effect this end is rarely encountered as the forces
of custom, socialization, and social segregation conjoin to minimize the chances of
love developing at the wrong time or with the wrong partner. But what today
would constitute a "wrong" partner? Indeed, it has been one of modern society's
greatest achievements to have deinstitutionalized the boundaries separating dis-
similar others and, through the compelling logic of democracy, to scrutinize any
and all ideologies of innate differences among social groups. Having thoroughly
deconstructed the ideologies of race, class, and gender, the cultural impediments
to social communion across group lines have weakened significantly.
It is not simply the disappearance of social impediments to romance, however,
that has changed cultural practices concerning love and intimacy. We also now
think differently of the actual emotional experience of "falling" in love or of "being"
in love. In the spirit of our times, we approach the matter of mate selection with an
eye toward compatibility of interests and beliefs, economic potential, health pros-
pects, and other similar concerns. We think of love, in other words, as a significant
undertaking, an investment in our future well-being, that must be approached care-
fully and rationally. Few adults today take seriously the notion that we each have
a perfect match, someone in the world who would complete us as a missing piece
does a puzzle. We might describe our lover as our soulmate yet also understand
that he or she is almost certainly not the only one who might be so described.
For these two reasons, although romantic relationships abound today as they
have in the past, the ideas of romance and love are no longer what they were in
the nineteenth century or even more recently. As with every other human practice
and belief, the beliefs and practices that are part of our culture's romantic script
have been subjected to a rationalizing scrutiny and, as a result, demystified.
We can no longer sustain, for example, the romantic notion that love is inexpli-
cable, the result of an urgently powerful and mysterious force; although such
rationality has a certain appeal, it also requires that we work all the harder to
effect through our own agency what once could be left to fate or chance. Even as
we succeed in attracting a romantic partner, the effort does not subside. Instead,
we now must continue to work "at it" in order to prevent the relationship from
becoming irredeemably cliched, which is the predictable outcome of most romances
given the widespread dissemination and routinization of the emotional scenarios
that guide romance in the present epoch (Gergen and Gergen 1995). With an under-
standing of the possibility of romantic ties with any number of possible partners,
the idea that one might be "completed" through finding one's ideal mate has
given way to more grounded hopes that the relationship may prove to be the
source of happiness and companionship, or the medium for sexual and emotional
expression. Love represents a good solution, although not necessarily a perma-
nent one, to the problem of need satisfaction.
The two romantic elements of risk and impediment are not unrelated. Indeed, a
problem facing lovers today is the almost complete absence of impediments, with
the ironic consequence that romance itself is socially inconsequential and dis-
tinctly unromantic. Gornick has commented on this change as she laments the
passing of love's transforming powers:
To know passion was to break the bonds of the frightened, ignorant self. There
might, of course, be a price to pay. One might be risking the shelter of respect-
ability if one fell in love with the wrong person, but in return for such loss one
would be gaining the only knowledge worth having. The very meaning of
human risk was embedded in the pursuit of love.... Today, there are no penal-
ties to pay, no world of respectability to be excommunicated from. Bourgeois
society as such is over. If the wife in The Age of Grief walks away from her mar-
riage, she'll set up housekeeping on the other side of town with a man named
Jerry instead of one named Dave, in ten minutes make a social life the equiva-
lent of the one her first marriage had provided her, and in two years she and
her new husband will find themselves at a dinner party that includes the ex-
husband and his new wife: everyone chatting amiably. (1997:B4)
In this article we examine a series of Hollywood films that extend from the
present back in time to the beginning of the era of sound in the cinema. Our pur-
pose is to analyze the developmental trajectory taken by the romance film in order
to understand better the actual cultural transformation in the ways in which we
"do" romance. We hope that through this analysis of Hollywood romantic movies
we will gain a better understanding of the prevailing cultural ethos governing the
realm of love and romance. Although there have been considerable changes in
the style of movies produced in the 1990s compared with the 1930s, there is a sim-
ilarity of purpose across the decades that is present in all of these movies. They all
manifest a common interest in the specification, valorization, and reinforcement

of certain romantic behaviors and the disapprobation of others. The movies, in
other words, serve as a cultural resource, a repository of both older and contem-
porary estimations of the rules of romance. It is through movies, and other cul-
tural products, that the ethical boundaries of everyday life are constructed,
revised, and maintained.4
METHOD AND DATA
For this analysis of cultural prescriptions for romance, we would (ideally) analyze
the cultural scripts themselves; these scripts, however, do not formally exist as
written documents. This problem is similar to that faced by Foucault as he under-
took the study of the history of sexuality and the repression hypothesis (Eribon
1991). Sexuality is enacted, not recorded. To study sexual practices across histori-
cal time is an archaeological project of considerable difficulty and one requiring
the most acute form of historical imagination. Thankfully, our problem is simpler
than Foucault's, since, although cultural scripts regarding romance are not stored
carefully and conveniently in archives, they are embedded in cultural products
that are widely distributed and available to almost all societal members. Such
products include novels, television programs, particularly soap operas and situa-
tion comedies, advice manuals, and newspaper columns, as well as Hollywood
films. Any of these products might be useful as data to investigate the problem
that confronts us here. We have chosen Hollywood film because, as with novels,
the romance is a clearly defined genre that has a sufficiently long history to cover
the period of interest.
Furthermore, popular film has a far wider audience today than does fiction
generally and romantic fiction in particular. Hollywood film occupies a position in
American culture not unlike "the place that ritual occupies in more primitive socie-
ties" (Wexman 1993). While both the publishing and movie industries have expe-
rienced considerable economic difficulties during the 1990s that affect the num-
bers and types of books and movies being produced, aspiring writers are more
likely today to attempt screenplays than novels.5
For this analysis, we have attempted to identify all romance films made in the
United States during the period 1930-99,6 or, approximately, since the end of the
silent film era in the late 1920s. There are an unknown number of movies, how-
ever, that have not survived or that have not made the transition to videotape,
particularly those of the pre-World War II era. Access to the movies of the 1930s is
especially difficult because of the relatively few films from that decade that have
been transferred to videotape. Although more than four hundred English-language
romances were produced in the United States during the 1930s, fewer than sixty
are available today in videocassette. Apart from those that are not available on
videocassette, we have considered every other romantic film of which we are
aware for inclusion here.7
Romance is a very broad and diffuse genre that may be subdivided, as Case
(1996) has done, into a large group of far more specific categories, including, for
example, Romance-Affairs, Romance-Infatuations, Romance-Unrequited,
and so on. The main categories, however, are two: Romantic Comedy and Roman-
tic Drama. It is occasionally difficult, as with films such as Annie Hall and Manhat-
tan, to categorize the movie unequivocally as either a comedy or a drama; when in
doubt, we have consulted a number of outside sources, including Case (1996),
Simon (1981), and Bourget (1977). There is also the problem, which we will dis-
cuss momentarily, of films that develop a romantic relationship between their
leading characters but not as the major focus of the story.
To define the universe of films we analyze here, we adopted a set of very spe-
cific selection criteria. These criteria, or filters, are necessary if only because of the
extraordinary number of romantic movies produced in the United States since the
appearance of talking movies. To reduce the total population to a manageable, yet
representative, group, we have restricted our focus to English-language movies
made by American film companies. We included neither silent films, such as Clar-
ence Brown's classic Flesh and the Devil (1926), which starred Greta Garbo, nor
films in which English is not the principal language. The number of notable
romances produced by German, Italian, Brazilian, British, Spanish, Japanese,
Russian, and, of course, French film companies is considerable, but because our
focus is on American culture, we believe the decision to restrict ourselves to
American films is not only practical but theoretically necessary as well. In addi-
tion to restricting our focus to American films, we have attempted to develop a
coherent and workable sample of films through the application of seven addi-
tional filtering rules.
The first of these rules concerns the occasionally ambiguous concept of genre.
Our principal genre-relevant rule is that romance must be central to the story
depicted in the film and not a secondary aspect. The precise definition of romance
is straightforward: the romance film genre has at its center the story of the devel-
opment of an intimate relationship between its two central characters. Whether
the two central characters will meet, fall in love, and begin what presumably will
be a successful, long-term relationship are questions that are at the very center of
the romantic movie. If the film is a mixed-genre effort-an adventure story, for
example, in which two of the characters become romantically attached, such as
was the case with Romancing the Stone or Speed-it was not included in our sam-
ple. Similarly, we excluded from our sample those films in which the lovers were
not clearly the central characters.
With this criterion, we eliminated all of the dark romances (the noir films)
including, for example, Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1946), since the romantic aspect of these films is secondary to other aspects of the
plot. For similar reasons, we excluded such adventure/ romances as Charade (1963),
sports / romances like Bull Durham (1988), spy / romances notable among which is
the Hitchcock film Notorious (1946), and coming-of-age/romances such as the much-
admired Mike Nichols film, The Graduate (1967).
Of all of the mixed-genre films, the single most difficult type to identify
unequivocally as a romance is the comedy. That is, the most difficult coding deci-
sions we faced in this research came when attempting to distinguish a genuine
romantic comedy from a comedy that contained romantic elements. We decided
against including such comedies as Tootsie (1982), Broadcast News (1987), Ground-
hog Day (1993), and Grumpier Old Men (1995), because in our judgment their
romantic themes were not the principal driving elements.
Second, we adopted the criterion that the characters engaged in the romance
should be adults. There is a sizable subgenre of romance, the high school
romance, that we wished to exclude from consideration because such films almost
invariably focus on generational conflict and coming-of-age traumas that would
complicate our analysis were they included. These younger romances are the
focus of an excellent analysis by Lewis (1992).
Third, we excluded those romantic subgenres whose style or story is obviously
not meant to be taken seriously, or is otherwise presented in a non-naturalistic
style. We have chosen not to consider, for example, those movies in which one of
the principal characters is not a living human being. Horror romances, such as
Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989), did not enter into our analysis. Also not
included are the "ghost" or "angel" movies such as A Guy Named Joe (1944), The
Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Always (1989), Meet Joe Black (1998), Ghost (1990),
Heaven Can Wait (1978), The Bishop's Wife (1947), and What Dreams May Come
(1997). These films have been extraordinarily successful as a group, and despite
the possibility that some viewers may well consider such apparitions realistic,
their supernatural tone and imaginative plot devices render them unsuitable for
the sociologically realistic issues we wish to investigate in this article.
We have also excluded, for related reasons, both musicals and the so-called
screwball comedies. These films, too, generally depart too obviously from the
generally naturalistic character of the typical romantic movie, and, just as prob-
lematic, if not more so, neither of these cinematic forms exists today as a viable
genre. Excluded, then, from our analysis are such well-known romantic musi-
cals as Easter Parade (1948); Carmen Jones (1954), the film in which Dorothy Dan-
dridge became the first African American nominated for a Best Actress Acad-
emy Award; West Side Story (1961); and Woody Allen's remarkable romantic
musical, Everyone Says I Love You (1996). Examples of the screwball comedies we
do not bring into this analysis are films like Come Live With Me (1941), Frank
Capra's much-praised It Happened One Night (1934), and the popular Billy Wilder
hit, Some Like It Hot (1959).
Fourth, for opposite but equal reasons that led us to exclude the fantastic or
nonrealistic films, we chose not to include the scattering of romantic films that are
based on biographical incidents or other historical episodes. Based as they are on
actual relationships, the utility of such biographies for analyses of sublimated cul-
tural themes is limited at best. The course of the relationships depicted in these
movies is a matter of fact, and thus the films themselves cannot be said to express
cultural values or wishes, except insofar as the film departs from what actually
happened. The film that was drawn from C. S. Lewis's life, Shadowlands (1993), for
example, or the story depicted in 84 Charing Cross Road (1986), which was based
on the semiautobiographical novel by Helene Hanff, are representative of this
type of excluded movie.
The fifth rule required that we remove from consideration any film based
directly on a play, story, or novel not written in the twentieth century. Although
the 1967 Franco Zeffirelli film, Romeo and Juliet, as well as any of the other film
adaptations of the Shakespeare play, is clearly a romance and one that continues
to affect the emotions of people today, the actual story is obviously anachronistic
and any relevance to contemporary culture is highly dubious. For this same rea-
son, we also chose not to include films like the 1939 William Wyler film, Wuthering
Heights, Clarence Brown's Anna Karenina (1935), and many other adaptations of
classic romantic literature from the nineteenth century.
Sixth, we chose to focus exclusively on those films in which the onset and
development of the romantic relationship between the main characters constitute
the central dynamic or story line. Those films in which the lovers begin the film as
an intact married couple inevitably must deal with a different set of concerns than
they would if the lovers were not; to include the married romance films in our
analysis would diffuse our focus and necessitate that we consider a set of issues
that are only peripheral to the central questions of this study.
Seventh, and finally, we have excluded from consideration those movies that,
although qualifying on other grounds, were never seen by more than a relative
handful of viewers. In addition to the older movies that have never been made
available on videocassettes, there are many other, more recent movies that are
included in the IMDb but may have been only in a few theaters for several weeks.
A movie that was eliminated as a result of this criterion is 20 Dates (1998), a low-
budget, poorly executed film that received overwhelmingly negative reviews and
barely generated $500,000 in gross receipts. Others, however, are an unknown
number of interesting "indies" that never succeeded in attracting a major distrib-
utor. In either case, independent or mainstream, those films that were released
within the past twenty years were considered for inclusion in our sample only if
they generated at least $1 million in gross revenues.
ANALYSIS
This analysis proceeds in two phases. First, we examine the distribution of

films over time, that is, from the 1930s to the 1990s. Second, we focus in greater
depth on a smaller group selected from among the 182 romance films that com-
posed our final sample. This latter part of the analysis looks particularly at the
more recent films and those films that have been the most popular or have been
acclaimed over the years as one of the "greatest" romances on film.8 The distribu-
tion of romance movies by decade and their availability on videocassette is pre-
sented in Table 1. The complete list of the 182 movies that we included in our
analysis is appended at the end of this article. No doubt, given the impressive
number of movies made in Hollywood over the years, we may have overlooked a
few of the lesser-known productions. Regardless of such possible omissions, how-
ever, we are confident that whatever conclusions we draw from our analysis cap-
ture the central tendencies of the romantic film genre and are generalizable to
whatever films may have escaped our scrutiny.
Several important facts emerge in Table 1 pertaining to the history of the Holly-
wood film industry. The first is that the production of movies in Hollywood
reached a peak in the industry's "golden years" of the 1930s and declined precipi-
tously during the war years and, most especially, during the post-World War II
TABLE 1
Hollywood Production: Total Films and Romance Movies, by Decade,
VHS Availability, and Inclusion in Sample
Decade Total Films Total Romance VHS Romance Total in Sample
1930s 8,377 402 (4.80) 54 19

(21.96)* (28.80)
1940s 6,776 159 (2.35) 85 28
(17.76) (11.39)
1950s 4,639 120 (2.59) 78 27
(12.16) (08.60)
1960s 3,103 43 (1.39) 38 12
(08.13) (03.08)
1970s 3,015 48 (1.59) 35 14
(07.90) (03.44)
1980s 4,769 146 (3.06) 117 18
(12.50) (10.46)
1990s 7,476 479 (6.41) 317 65
(19.59) (34.31)
38,155 1,397 723 182
* The numbers in parentheses are per
era that saw the advent of television. The amount of product coming out of Holly-
wood continued to decline through the 1970s, whereupon the trend reversed. The
1990s saw an outpouring of movies unlike at any other time since the 1930s.
The second fact that is evident from these data concerns a similar trend over time
in the production of romance movies. More than four hundred romances were
produced in Hollywood during the 1930s, but this number was reduced by more
than half in the following decade. The nadir of the romance's popularity was
reached in the 1960s, when less than 2 percent of the films produced in the United
States could be considered romantic, even loosely defined. The appeal of the
romance rose significantly in the 1980s and reached an unprecedented level of
popularity in the 1990s.
As noted above, romances may be categorized as comedies or dramas. For most
of this century, dramas have appeared more frequently than have comedies,
although this was not always the case in the more distant past. During the Eliza-
bethan era, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet-although justifiably remembered as
his greatest romance-was less typical of his romantic oeuvre than comedies like
A Midsummer's Night Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado about Nothing,
Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and All's Well That End's Well. Dramas must also con-
tend with the reality that the love affair must almost certainly never succeed. In a
tragic play such as Romeo and Juliet, the lovers' relationship poses a challenge to
the existing social order that cannot be allowed to stand. To reconcile events with
the natural order of things, it is conventional that one or both of the lovers must
die. This is not a surefire formula to win the affection of the audience, and such
plotting must be sufficiently artful as not to be predictable. Even more than this,
however, the difficulty of producing a compelling romantic drama may be traced
to the difficulty of setting up a convincingly substantial barrier that keeps the lov-
ers apart but does not alienate the audience. Shakespeare, writing at the very
beginning of the modern era, confronted a society still very much organized
according to beliefs in the natural superiority of princes over serfs and one in
which social mobility of all kinds was severely constrained. Against the backdrop
of warring clans, Shakespeare crafted the romance of Romeo and Juliet. But what
possible scenarios other than one involving contentious families might he have
chosen? The idea of social class as we know it was not yet conceivable; neither
was the notion of a multiethnic society. In romantic comedies, however, the cir-
cumstances that provide the basis for the romantic struggle could be reduced to
personality clashes, misunderstandings, or almost any circumstance that might be
contrived to fit the lives of the two principals.
With the coming of the industrial age, the potential for the romantic drama
increased. Social horizons expanded as transportation facilities reached into the
sectors where ordinary workers and their families lived. The middle class emerged
as a dominant social category; its structural position between the wealthy and the
workers enables its members to interact on a regular basis with diverse others.
The opportunities for romance involving those whom Wartenberg (1998) has
described as "unlikely couples" increased as a result. The stage was set for the
popularization of the tragic romantic story. From Anna Karenina to West Side Story,
or from the latter half of the nineteenth century through the aftermath of World
War II, the tragic romance became a staple of the romantic genre.
The proportion of romantic dramas to comedies seems to be shifting once again
in recent years. Today, it is the romantic comedy-not the drama-that is the
dominant form of the Hollywood love story. The reasons for this shift are not diffi-
cult to imagine. Romantic comedies have evolved a formula that allows an almost
infinite number of variations. The formula mandates that the lovers achieve an ini-
tial rapprochement only to separate but, by story's end, to reunite as a romantic
couple. With an abundance of plot devices to employ, and the advantage of a
happy ending to lure an audience, it is little wonder why romantic comedies
appear far more frequently than do their tragic counterpart, the romantic drama.
Since the end of World War II, the ratio of romantic comedies to romantic dra-
mas has increased steadily as the number of plausible barriers that might keep the
star-crossed lovers apart and that doom both their relationship and their health
and happiness has dwindled considerably. We examine these trends in Table 2.
The top three rows in the table show the film categories that entered into our anal-
ysis. A dotted line separates these categories from eight other types of romantic
film that we specifically excluded from our central analysis. The distribution of
these films over time yields some interesting and important findings. We see, for
example, that genres such as the musical and the screwball comedy have essen-
tially disappeared; since the 1960s, very few of these once-popular movies have
been produced. Instead, there has been a significant increase in the number of
romances between teenaged lovers, attesting to the popularity of movies among
teens, and also a revival of the older, supernatural romance involving ghosts, spir-
able,invdocstfrm.
TABLE2
Decad
GenrPoducti:FmsfRa
gorythaisledfnb.Smx"vwupc
isntedorawhgfclvbum.
Total402159376, VHStoal54879312
pledutohsrngikfbcvam.I190,4w
TypeofRmanc1930s45678*tl
sent10.4%ofh37rmacpdui9vlbVHSTwg *ThenumbrsipatdcgoflVHS.3190,x- *"Mixedgnrfstohlmapycbu.AwvAdaptions0(.)241359 Historcal1(0.9)2634 Screwbal7(13.0)2546 Supernatl4(07.)1358269 Mariedlov2(03.7)591684 Tenlov1(0.9)265437
*Inthe190s,givboxplumrfdcHywa Comedy/ra2(03.7)541869 Drams12(.)68053794 Comedis5(09.3)167248
Mixedgnr*10(8.5)243976 Musical10(8.5)243697
amongthexcludbri,sfpw";y- romanticsubpl.Ahgwef,ydFx porlyathebxficvnmsdwuk.I- Note:AparfmhnubsiTlw,qcdgyv-

its, and the like. Ghost stories were a successful genre of Hollywood film in the
1930s and 1940s, as indicated by the popularity of such films as Angel on My
Shoulder, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and A Guy Named Joe. One might have predicted
a decline in the ghost romance in the second half of the twentieth century in corre-
spondence with the increasing rationalization of our world, yet the opposite has
proven to be true. Ghost stories dropped out of sight in the 1960s, along with most
other types of romantic films, but have rebounded sharply ever since. In the 1990s
alone there have been more than thirty Hollywood romances involving some
form of supernatural theme or device as a central element in the story. Just a few
of the many instances of this trend would include City of Angels (1998), Ghost, Meet
Joe Black, and What Dreams May Come. The increasing use of sophisticated techno-
logical devices of all kinds among almost all segments of the population does not
suggest, it would seem, that modern behaviors are necessarily incompatible with
a popular culture that continues to exploit premodern themes and images. This
juxtaposition of disparate elements is, of course, a signature characteristic of post-
modern culture. Indeed, the last row of percentages in Table 2 accompanies the
distribution of "mixed-genre" films over the last seven decades. Mixed-genre
films, while not exactly constituting a pastiche of cinematic elements, do indicate
to an extent the blurring of genre boundaries, which is of course another key indi-
cator of postmodem style. It is noteworthy that the mixed-genre film has become an
ever-larger presence among Hollywood movies over time. Since the 1970s mixed-
genre films constitute approximately two-fifths of all romance films produced
in Hollywood.
More directly related to the focus of this article are the entries in Table 2 show-
ing the frequency of romantic comedies and dramas. These numbers appear in the
three rows above the dotted line in the table. Of particular interest are the top two
rows, displaying the frequency of comedies and dramas. The mixed case of the
comedy/drama is invariably less than the other two, pure, forms, The 1970s saw a
relatively large number of such films being made, several of which, including
Annie Hall and Manhattan, were the product of the particular genius of Woody
Allen. But for the two larger categories of drama and comedy, the trends bear
directly on our purpose here. In every decade but the 1990s the number and per-
centage of romantic dramas exceeded the comedies. Even if mixed comedy/dra-
mas were counted as comedies, the trend would be relatively unchanged. But by
the 1990s the trend reversed.9
Not only has the relative number of comedies reached its peak while the per-
centage of dramas reached its low point (7.6%) in the century's last decade, but
the absolute number of comedies actually exceeded the number of dramas for the
only time since the advent of the talking movie. It may be that the cost of produc-
ing such dramas as The English Patient (1996) or Titanic (1997) argues on behalf of
the less expensive studio comedy. The much-discussed expense involved in the
production of Titanic may indeed dissuade a number of filmmakers less driven
than James Cameron from undertaking such enormous projects. Yet, in truth, the
typical drama is not on this scale. In the 1990s, for example, among the twenty-
four films we included as dramas are Dying Young (1991), High Art (1998), and
Mississippi Masala, none of which are notable for their cost. Even those dramas
shot on location, such as The Horse Whisperer (199) and Message in a Bottle (1998),
while clearly more costly than the average studio film, were not so disproportion-
ately expensive as to make their production-and that of films like them-less
probable than a comedy.
To explore in greater depth the decline of the romantic drama and the rise of the
romantic comedy, we turn now to a more detailed analysis of specific romantic
movies, particularly those from the 1990s.
DISCUSSION
Romantic comedies have their own rules, or conventions, just as romantic dramas
do. But unlike romantic dramas, romantic comedies do not place significant obsta-
cles but only easily circumvented road bumps in the way of the romantic couple.
The significant obstacles that appear in romantic dramas are in one of two
forms: (1) one or both of the lovers is married; or (2) the lovers differ in race, eth-
nicity, clan, social class, or age. Of the two, it is the former that is the device most
often used. Most of us would have little difficulty in naming such examples as
Casablanca (1942), Doctor Zhivago (1965), or The English Patient (1996). Even lesser
films like Falling in Love (1984) or The Bridges of Madison County (1995) repeat the
same basic story of a passionate affair in which at least one of the lovers is mar-
ried. Only a few films take the more adventuresome approach of using race or
social class as the fact that distinguishes the lovers. The 1958 drama, Love Is a
Many Splendored Thing, told the story of two lovers-one an American journalist
and the other a Eurasian doctor-in Hong Kong during the early 1950s. Love Story
(1970) brings together a rich Harvard prelaw student and a working-class Rad-
cliffe music major. And, most recently, Titanic (1997) told the story of the doomed
ship through the developing romance between two of its passengers, one of
whom was a wellborn young woman and the other a working-class roustabout.
In all of these films but one,'0 the romance is fated to end unhappily.
The second of the two impediments, however, has become less convincing as a
dramatic device, since the egalitarian movements of the last forty years have con-
tributed to a greater tolerance of mixed-race couples as well as to the almost com-
plete elimination of older norms against what once was called a "mixed" mar-
riage (i.e., the marriage of a man and woman of differing faiths). Current efforts to
define the legal right of lesbians and homosexuals to marry provide perhaps the
strongest evidence to date of the erosion of status impediments to love and mar-
riage. These developments may explain why the few romantic dramas that do use
marriage or class as the romantic barrier are set in the past. Titanic is an ideal
instance of such a romantic drama, as are The English Patient, The End of the Affair
(1999), and The Bridges of Madison County. Today, only age and, to a lesser extent,
race retain any potential as a device to keep the lovers apart.
It was the hugely successful Love Story that marked the end of this particular
type of romantic narrative, that is, the narrative in which lovers defy social con-
vention and, in so doing, reinforce the ideal of love and marriage as natural, ideal-
ized, and eternal forms of human expression. As the 1970s unfolded and the sec-
ond wave of the feminist movement swept aside many of the older cultural
understandings of the essential nature of men and women, the "romance" of

Jenny and Oliver could no longer still be depicted as it was in the Erich Segal
screenplay. Rather than move the audience to tears, Jenny's deathbed speech, in
which she insisted to Oliver that she never regretted marrying him, despite its
foreclosing the possibility that she would continue her own music studies in
Paris, might easily become the object of scorn. To marry so young and not to fulfill
the opportunity of developing one's skills and talents-which in Love Story meant
a period of study in Paris under the reknowned Nadia Boulanger no less-would
later be understood not as romantic but as an unfortunate instance of hegemonic
control and the continuing power of patriarchal ideology.
This leaves marriage, then, as the principal thematic impediment in the roman-
tic drama. But marriage itself has been under duress in contemporary society,
with the increase in divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births having become
defined as a social problem (not merely as an individual sin or failing). Audiences
understand the difficulty of keeping marriages together; they also have come to
believe that couples should not remain in unhappy marriages and that men and
women, particularly women, need not marry at all if they choose instead to pur-
sue a career. Yet, because of the changing beliefs regarding marriage, it too has
become less credible as a significant circumstance that would keep lovers apart.
Romantic comedies fill the gap produced by the disappearance of the signifi-
cant romantic impediment. The comedies continue to invent ingenious and funny
circumstances that keep the lovers apart without violating social taboos. In Annie
Hall, for example, it is less their differing religions that separate Annie and Alvie
as it is their differing orientations: Alvie is a New Yorker, while Annie enjoys the
life on the West Coast. Even several of the more recent romantic dramas have
attempted to introduce circumstances rather than taboos into the formula. In both
The Horse Whisperer and Message in a Bottle, for example, the characters are white,
middle class, and, in the latter film, unmarried. The possibility of love between
the two leads is diminished neither by status differences nor by marriage but by a
simple, yet weighty, matter of identity and character. The men in these two films
belong in nature and not in the more constrained, feminized environment of the
city. They might try to share the urban lifestyle of their beloved, but it would avail
the couple little. Both Tom Booker, the horse trainer in The Horse Whisperer, and
Garret Blake, the shipwright in Message in a Bottle, are depicted as being too prin-
cipled, too genuine, ever to live happily in cities like New York or Chicago. While
most men and women today certainly do live in cities, the idea that men's
nature-but not women's-makes them unsuited to the controlled, genteel envi-
ronment of the city is a persistent myth of our culture that these two dramas effec-
tively exploit.
Whereas romance was once pitted against the forces of tradition, it now faces
the challenge of the new forces of postmodern irony and disbelief (Purdy 1999).
Older romantic dramas like Casablanca could only remain popular today as relics
of an earlier era that has long since passed into history. The few romantic dramas th
are made today that rely on older romantic conventions (such as The English Patient or
The End of the Affair) are almost always set in the past. Today, the only viable form
that the conventional, contemporary romantic film can take is the comedy.
The contemporary comedy, however, is a lightweight affair. It is a confection, a

fillip that might arouse but is also easily dismissed. The contemporary romantic
comedy is far different from the comedies of Shakespeare's time or even those of
Jane Austen's. They are also different from the romantic comedies of the 1940s
such as Pat and Mike or Adam's Rib, or the many films in the screwball genre. Such
movies were invariably satirical, using the manners and foibles of men, the rich,
and other privileged groups as their comical target. The romantic comedy of today
is even different from the inventive comedies that, beginning with Annie Hall,
became the signature of Woody Allen, indisputably America's most creative and
prolific maker of romantic films of the past twenty-five years. Annie Hall almost sin-
glehandedly remade the romantic scenario by removing almost all status impedi-
ments from the relationship and by recapitulating the historic shift in women's
roles through the developmental progress of the eponymous heroine, Annie. The
fact that Annie was a midwestern Lutheran and Alvie a New York Jew affected
their relationship only at the margins, which is to say hardly at all. The problem
with their romance is that Annie had her own life to lead and this life was to be on
the West Coast and not in New York, where Alvie was ensconced, never to move.
The film ended sadly-since Alvie obviously wished to be with Annie-but also
appropriately and in the spirit of the cultural times.
Woody Allen's next romantic comedy, Manhattan, also ends without the lovers
becoming a couple although there remains at least a possibility that Tracy and
Isaac might eventually reunite. In this film the obvious impediment to their rela-
tionship is the age difference between the two lovers: Tracy is a high school student
when they begin their fling and Isaac is a forty-something writer. The film takes the
position that the age gap, while significant, is far less problematic than the times
themselves."I We live in an age of insincerity and duplicity, when the commitments
made at the altar mean nothing and when educated people are acutely aware of
their lack of real wisdom. In this age, Tracy's innocence is given to the audience as a
gift and a sign of hope for the future. She tells Isaac, before leaving to study in
Europe, that he must have faith in people and that she will come back some day.
Thus, with Manhattan, we see Tracy not repeating Jenny's choice in Love Story. Yet,
despite these defiant gestures against the traditional romantic conventions, Man-
hattan seems to insist that its romantic intentions are pure and honorable.
The standard romantic comedies of today, however, are less concerned than is
Woody Allen to attempt either satire or social commentary. Their goal is the mod-
est one of providing amusement or entertainment for their audiences and a profit-
able investment vehicle for its costly stars and financial backers. These films place
only the mildest hurdles in the path of true love. Often one of the potential lovers
is engaged. Engagements, unlike marriages, may be broken with impunity and,
indeed, typically with the audience's strong approval. Whether it be Meg Ryan
jilting Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle or Julia Roberts dumping any number of
her fiances in Runaway Bride, the break is necessary as those couples were simply
wrong for each other. The audience knows, long before the lovers themselves real-
ize it, that Meg Ryan belongs with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts with Richard
Gere. The conventions of the genre, and the expectations of the audience, require
that the lovers themselves will, at some point, come to know this as well.
Every summer sees the release of at least one romantic comedy such as One Fine
Day, Notting Hill, Runaway Bride, or Picture Perfect, and their popularity strongly
suggests the continuing pleasure that audiences take from them. The relative
absurdity of many comedies remind one of what the novelist Kundera (1984)
might describe as their unbearable lightness; if art bears any relevance for life,
such films would indicate an approach to romance among contemporary filmgo-
ers that is anything but mysterious or magical. Rather than a momentous under-
taking with potentially long-term significance, romance today seems to serve as
an occasion to meet someone to call when the need arises for a date for a cousin's
wedding, for example, or for a coworker's New Year's Eve party. Although love
and marriage may no longer be as conjoined as the rural image conveyed by the
song's simile of the horse and carriage, the romantic relationship today still is
widely recognized to have two parts: the courtship and the routinized life together,
even if this second phase is not exactly "forever after." Because the Hollywood
romance invariably focuses on the courtship, preferring to leave the routinized
"forever after" for sociologists and other realists to study, the films are often criti-
cized as being reactionary. For their neglect of the later moments in the relation-
ship when the couple has aged and the woman, in particular, has become accus-
tomed to the realities of the "second shift" of household work, the romantic film
perpetuates the myth of romance as an ideal form of intimacy and one that need
never be extinguished.
There is considerable truth to this argument. It is not unreasonable to ask, how-
ever, whether it would be demanding too much of a cultural product, particularly
one as expensive as the feature-length film, that it position itself far ahead of cul-
tural sentiment and, with the power of its images, attempt to lead the culture to a
more enlightened state. Hollywood is in the business of producing profitable
entertainment, not social commentary. Despite this fact, or, more accurately,
because of it, films remain sociologically interesting inasmuch as they are filled
with indicators of the culture's center of gravity. When a movie's story concerns
romance, the movie must be understood as both incorporating those norms and
understandings governing romance that exist in the actual world and, in recipro-
cal fashion, retransmitting them back into the culture reinforced or reenergized.
Film, like art, is inseparable from the wider social relations between filmmakers
and their audiences and inseparable as well "from the wider social purposes and
conditions in which they [are] embedded" (Eagleton 1996:206).
Among the cultural norms and rules governing romance that are reinforced in
the romantic film genre are (1) marital fidelity; (2) the importance of marriage for
the right reasons, that is, for love;'2 (3) the primacy of individual wishes over
family preferences in the matter of mate selection; (4) the importance for the
romance of sexual passion, on the one hand, and a sense of intimacy, mutual self-
disclosure, and friendship, on the other; and (5) the integration of the romantic
couple as workers and consumers in the existing structure of modern capitalism
(which is present in almost all of the films in our sample, with the exception of
Casablanca, in which Ilsa is a resistance fighter on the run and Rick is the operator
of a nightclub in Casablanca and a purveyor of whatever goods and services his
customers might request).
In the contemporary Hollywood romance movie, tradition persists as four of

the five traditional norms governing romance remain easily discernible: it is only
the norm valorizing marriage that seems to have weakened. The idea of marrying
for love, the second norm, is present in Moonstruck (1988), When Harry Met Sally
(1989), Pretty Woman (1990), and Sleepless in Seattle (1993). The third norm, con-
cerning the primacy of individual wishes over family preferences, which is a cor-
nerstone of the classic romance since at least Shakespeare's time, remains so
today-as indicated by the novelist Oates's (1999:102) statement that romance is
"forever in opposition to formal, cultural and tribal prescriptions of behavior." This
norm is present not only in the older romantic films but also in such contemporary
movies as Moonstruck, Sleepless in Seattle, and Runaway Bride. In the newer films,
however, this issue is treated very carefully, as if in recognition of the increasing
irrelevance of tribal or familial bonds and with a certain feeling of nostalgia for
the time when such social constraints could at least be felt, if not followed.
The fourth of the classic norms, the understanding of the importance of inti-
macy, mutual self-disclosure, and friendship in the romantic relationship, is prob-
ably even more emphasized today than earlier, as indicated by the presence of
this theme in movies like Moonstruck, When Harry Met Sally, Chasing Amy (1997),
and You've Got Mail (1998). Finally, the traditional romantic motif of the economic
integration of the main leads remains solidly in evidence in all of the recent films
in our sample, from Moonstruck through You've Got Mail.
But there are two additional norms that have become evident only in the later
films: gender equality and the absence of the socially inappropriate mate. The
motif of gender equality, for example, was clearly represented only as recently as
1976, in Annie Hall. Every one of the films in our sample released since the mid-
1980s, with the single exception of Moonstruck, which set out to invoke an older
ideal of a thriving ethnic family amid a modern, urban setting, wrote the two
romantic leads as coequals not merely during the romance phase of the relation-
ship but with indications that the equality would persist into the commitment
phase. Although the professional identities of Harry and Sally in When Harry Met
Sally are not developed, it is implied that both are successful members of the
professional-managerial class and will remain so regardless of what happens to
their relationship. In addition, they both have had relationships with other people
and, before becoming a couple themselves, first form a long and confluent rela-
tionship as friends. This theme of equality is also claimed in Pretty Woman, and
although one might well ridicule the premise of this film, it is about the reciprocal
nature of the growing bond between Vivian, the prostitute, and Edward, the busi-
ness tycoon. Edward's material and cultural assets are obviously superior to Viv-
ian's yet she has a certain purity, a sense of authenticity or "ethical" class that
Edward lacks and that his hope for any further development as a human being
requires that he remedy (Wartenburg 1998). This idea is also present in Sabrina
(1995), another comedy in which the woman, although lacking the economic and
cultural resources of the man, possesses in far greater abundance an understand-
ing of life and the centrality of love to human existence.
There is a surplus of instances of the equality theme in today's romantic come-
dies. In films such as Sleepless in Seattle, One Fine Day, Chasing Amy, and You've Got
Mail, the two lovers are presented to us as coequals in both the economic sense
and in the agentic sense of being an active shaper of the story's trajectory rather
than a passive receiver of what the world or other characters deliver. In many of
these films, the two characters are even given the same general occupation, as the
cartoonists Holden and Alyssa in Chasing Amy or the booksellers Joe and Kathleen
in You've Got Mail.
Usually, however, the two lovers are depicted as middle- or upper-middle-class
professionals whose romantic entanglement may be impeded only by the existing
engagement of one of them to someone else. The engagement snag is a long-
standing element of the romantic film, present as far back as the 1939 Love Affair.
But in the more recent films, not only has marriage-and therefore the possibility
of infidelity-disappeared from the romantic movie but so, too, has almost every
other status difference that might impede the two lovers from pressing their inter-
est in one another. This evolution is, in large part, the reason for the demise of the
romantic drama. That President Bill Clinton's affair with the young White House
intern Monica Lewinsky produced snickers and jokes but no noticeable deteriora-
tion of his remarkable popularity among the American public suggests that our
culture has become inured to the shock that presumably illicit liaisons once pro-
duced. Politicians and others may fear public exposure of their affairs, yet it is
only in the military institution that an affair will ruin an officer's or noncommis-
sioned officer's career. In the Hollywood film romance, such affairs would still be
punished inasmuch as the prohibition against infidelity continues to exist, how-
ever weakened, in American society as a whole. Indeed, an extramarital affair is
almost the only inappropriate pairing that the movies can still punish. There are
other types of taboo pairings that are considered dangerous or wrong, such as a sex-
ual relationship involving a priest or a nun (although the success of the 1983 televi-
sion miniseries, "The Thorn Birds," indicates that such a theme can indeed be dealt
with in a highly successful way), but almost none that are considered so unaccept-
able as to prevent Hollywood from incorporating the theme into a romantic film.
CONCLUSIONS
It is our fate in these opening years of the new century to know firsthand the
experience of disintegration, loss, and disbelief. With knowledge of the world
more accessible than ever before, we feel less certain than in times past of the
meaningfulness of the social worlds that we inhabit. Although technology grants
us a degree of mastery over the physical world unparalleled in human history,
this competence has not been matched with an equal sense of conviction and pur-
posefulness. The age, as we have come to know, is a postmodern one. Disconnec-
tions, reconstructions, disorientations and, most of all, a continual, wistful glance
over our shoulders to past eras have become increasingly familiar to us as charac-
teristics of much of everyday life.
The events of the last quarter of the twentieth century proved revolutionary not
only for their effect on the world economic and political system but also for cul-
tural beliefs and individual consciousnesses that are nurtured by these beliefs.
With the American defeat in Vietnam, deindustrialization, environmental and
health crises, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the chaos produced in the wake
of this dramatic systemic collapse, entire systems of cultural and political world-
views were uprooted and, with them, the cultural scripts that guide social life in
countless quotidian matters. It is important to realize, of course, that this recita-
tion of tumult and upheaval could also be read with a much more positive inflec-
tion. Rather than angst and anomie as the outcome, one could justifiably point to
the new opportunities for the mobilization of oppressed groups and increased
demands for democratic institutions throughout the world, including in this soci-
ety. The undeniable successes of the civil rights, old age, and feminist movements,
as well as, on a more limited scale, the movements of gays and the physically dis-
abled, have pushed American society toward increased tolerance of difference
and greater disapproval of discrimination and bigotry. It is precisely the nature of
our times, though, that these advances occur alongside very reactionary political
and social movements and, less dramatically but equally interesting as a sociolog-
ical phenomenon, a loss of faith in the meaningfulness and effectiveness of social
practices of all kinds. We vote less, to cite one well-known instance, and we no
longer have the same taken-for-granted faith in institutions and professions such
as the family, the church, the military, the press, advertisers, public relations spe-
cialists, health practitioners, schools, the legal system, and, most certainly, the
political system.
These structural and historical transformations have made the romantic drama
that was so popular in the 1940s an anachronism in the 1990s. The essence of high
romantic drama is the presence of a socially constructed obstacle, either in the
form of war, warring families, or antagonistic ethnic groups, that keeps the lovers
apart or makes their liaisons problematic, even dangerous. The high romance sto-
ries are often tragic, in that they end with the lovers' separation or death or resig-
nation to implacable circumstances. Because of war's demise (at least the waning
of total war involving North American and European nation-states), the fall of
the Soviet Union, and with it the end of the cold war, and the erosion of state-
sanctioned racial discrimination and prejudice, there exist fewer, if any, signifi-
cant obstacles that would keep potential lovers apart.'3
Our romantic ties lack the element of risk and danger with which the presence
of such obstacles would, in most cases, serve to endow them.'4 Without war, with-
out the more,vicious forms of racial intolerance, without the drama of feuding
families that continues across generations, without-in short-the type of conflict
that creates as a by-product a major impediment to young lovers from the wrong
families or nations intent on becoming a unified couple, we have witnessed the
end of the era of high romance.
All that is left with which to create even the minimum necessary tension for
romance is, on the one hand, the prohibition to love posed by the existing mar-
riage of one of the potential lovers and, on the other, the prohibition posed by sta-
tus conflicts. An existing marriage, while still useful in romantic dramas to create
at least a minimal sense of prohibition, fails to elicit in contemporary audiences
the same sense of moral violation when the eventual affair takes place. The same
certainly was not true of older films. In Brief Encounter (1945), for example, the
distress experienced by the wife, Mrs. Jesson, as she agonized over every step in
her affair with the good Dr. Harvey, was almost unbearable to watch. Fifty years
later, however, it was Mrs. Clifton's passion for Count Laszlo Almasy in The
English Patient that galvanized the interest of the audience. She indicated very lit-
tle regret for her adulterous passion and, indeed, it was this passion unimpeded
by regret, that the audience found romantic.
The second impediment, status conflicts, had in the past been a sturdy founda-
tion for the stories of many films, soap operas, television melodramas, and other
erotic dramas. Usually the status conflict would involve two lovers of different
races, ages, religious/ethnic groups, social classes, or nationalities (especially if
the respective nation-states were at war). Such conflicts still exist in the world,
although with far fewer negative repercussions for lovers in the postmodern
world than for those in earlier times or certainly for those today in the developing
world who dare to transgress against local customs concerning mate selection. So
you might, without difficulty, imagine a touching, heartbreaking film or novel
that tells the story of the star-crossed affair between, say, a Serb and a Kosovar of
Albanian descent. But, set in the United States, a comparable film on the affair
between, say, an Anglo and a Mexican American (as was at the center of the film
Lone Star) might prove interesting but almost certainly would not provoke any
sense of emotional outrage among the audience. Romance today lacks the frisson
of risk it once possessed when it was more carefully surveilled.
Under such circumstances, the ideal of romantic love has been subtly redefined,
overcome one might say, by a sense of rationality; we approach romance today in
the way we would any rational market transaction, that is, carefully and with a
concern for quality and value (Illouz 1991, 1997). In addition to this commodifica-
tion of human relationships, society has been transformed by the equality revolu-
tion that began in the late 1950s with the civil rights movement and continues
today. Due in part to the post-civil rights era surge of the feminist movement, for
example, gender roles have been transformed, with clear implications for the
older ideal of romantic love, which, as Giddens (1992) points out, had constituted
one of the many ideological supports of traditional male privilege.'5 The romantic
films of the mid-twentieth century typically culminated in the union of the lovers
and rarely followed the relationship into its postmarital stage. This, indeed, has
always been part of the appeal of the romantic film, namely, that the audience is
allowed to imagine their future life as a continuation of the romance of their
courtship. This imaginary future, which is implicit in the high romantic film, is
central to its utopian theme.
There are signs that young lovers view their future with a greater sense of real-
ism. The confluent relationships that are more typical of today's young lovers are
entered into "for the time being," for rational motivations, and with little or no
attribution of the love being located deeply in the soul, heart, or other physical or
spiritual place (Cancian 1987; Giddens 1992). Some may wish to believe that their
love is timeless, fated, soulful, or wonderfully inexplicable; far more of us, how-
ever, are reluctant "to commit" or, conversely, inclined toward marriage because
of a desire to have children or for other carefully considered reasons. And all of us
these days recognize the truth of the sociological interpretation of interaction as
governed by both behavioral and "feeling" rules, even if we are unaware of the
actual sociological texts themselves. As lovers exchange Valentine's Day cards

and whisper endearments to each other, they understand that many others at that
very moment on that very day are expressing their love in much the same manner
(Schmidt 1995). As Wetherell (1996:134) has argued, the words and expressions
are "already in circulation, already familiar, already there, waiting for the moment
of appropriation." Some may actually express their sentiments without a self-
conscious feeling of appropriating the cultural script governing romance. It is our
belief that most do and feel at least vaguely and continually inauthentic as a
result. For most, the words and gestures of romance seem ludicrous, even mildly
embarrassing; even the physical act of love is made more self-conscious as our
experience has become more densely saturated with images of the now-standard
open-mouthed kiss, frontal female nudity, dorsal male nudity, and even vigorous,
simulated, sexual intercourse.
Our analysis of romantic movies from the past sixty years suggests that the
essence of romance has changed and is in danger of losing its utopian and trans-
gressive properties. We shop for romance by packaging ourselves, as Fromm dis-
cussed more than forty years ago in his book The Art of Loving ([1956] 1989). Not
trusting in the economic value of character traits such as integrity or faithfulness,
we strive to enhance our physical capital and to steep ourselves in the cultural
capital of the consuming class (current music, movie star gossip, celebrity affairs
and foibles, etc.). This tendency is the death of romance. We create an image of an
interesting, attractive, socially desirable romantic partner, but such images lack
narrative power, which is the sine qua non of romance.
The possibility of an exciting romance in exotic surroundings, then, although
recognized for the fantasy it is, is nonetheless preferable to the reality of everyday
life characterized by the continual consumption of products and services that
promise happiness but result only in further acts of consumption. Although we
have come to understand that "falling in love with love is falling for make-
believe," we are "the species that demands to be lied to, in the nicest ways" (Oates
1999:103). Hollywood romances may be unrealistic and silly, yet these films none-
theless work effectively to reinforce a usable cultural script governing romantic
behavior. During our present time of considerable cultural upheaval, when the
older understandings of how, when, and with whom one could become romanti-
cally involved have dissolved, these movies fill a cultural niche of considerable
importance. That the contemporary romance also valorizes the type of confluent,
equal romance that is far more progressive than the male-centered scripts of years
ago is also-from our viewpoint-a rewriting of the cultural script in the right
spirit and deserving of a certain amount of credit.
To conclude, we must acknowledge that this effect of the movies on real life (or,
more generally, the link between cultural products and actual practices) is diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to establish empirically. There are too many practices and
too many products. At the level of practices in everyday life, we share and abide
by common understandings and beliefs. As part of this particular habitus, there
exists a common understanding that it is only rational to take differences like
race, class, money, looks, age, size, and -so on, into account when it comes time to
fall in love.
But the reality of every

what we would like to believe or believe we would like. This is the other culture
of myths, proper behavior, gentlemen and ladies, loving parents, good neighbors,
patriotic citizens, merciful judges, and other idealizations. Except for those living
on the racist fringe, we accept the ideal truth that race is not, should not, or need
not be a defining factor in affairs of the heart. Neither, ideally, is any other status
characteristic. Movies exist at both levels of culture, the real and the ideal. They
certainly reinforce dominant and traditional cultural understandings, although it
is a mistake, we would argue, to conclude-as Hess (1977) does-that genre films
are a product of formulaic repetition for a capitalist-financed studio system and
can therefore only produce meanings in support of the status quo. Film cannot be
reduced to unmediated meanings. Even the contemporary romantic comedy that
almost invariably reinforces the most conservative tendencies in our culture can-
not be dismissed as pure ideology. The romantic comedy is better understood as
"a multi-leveled and contradictory phenomenon capable of producing from
within its contradictions works of art that are worth our constructive as well as
deconstructive mediation" (Babington and Evans 1989:vi).
More than most movies, the romance genre presents to us a dream of our ideal
culture existing as a real possibility. On leaving the theater, we may resort to the
baser understandings that are rife in our cultural habitus, but the images of the
ideal culture presented on the screen are not therefore insignificant or without
effect. We may hope in the ideal culture but find ourselves too weak to live up to
it. Or, at other times, we find ourselves glimpsing behind the curtains of our
socially constructed worlds to find that hope itself is a construct, a bit of internal-
ized culture that-like a Potemkin village, the world of Oz, or the Matrix-serves
no purpose other than to keep us aligned with the general cultural program. Ide-
ology, however, is unable to contain art, and it is for this reason that, in general,
we live in the crease between the ideal and the actual. This is the position of the
film critic Stanley Kauffman, who, although fully cognizant that the story told in
the movie Roman Holiday is dreamily unrealistic, loves it nonetheless:
We don't have to be embarrassed about luxuriating in those dreams today

because they were fabricated then. To glow with this film, to chuckle with it, to
cry-as I certainly do every time I see the last scene-is to enjoy a special tri-
umph. We have slipped one over on modernity. (1980:356)
This is the way in which products affect practices, the way that myth affects
habitus. Romance itself is an antimodern impulse, a utopian yearning for com-
munion with and acceptance by another human being. Romantic sentiments resist
the economistic, rational calculus that has colonized other spheres of daily life,
and, although we understand that the tension between romance and rationality
may eventually be decided in favor of the latter, we cherish the time we spend in
this crease, or moment, of illogic and sentiment. Romantic movies valorize the
utopian ideals of love and happiness while at the same time incorporating them
in the existing system of social and economic relations. While we must conform to
the realities of the world as-it-is, the continued success of the Hollywood roman-
tic film suggests that the dream of slipping one over on modernity is a deeply
rooted, widely shared, and uncommonly resilient aspect of contemporary Ameri-

can culture.
APPENDIX: SAMPLE OF FILMS BY DECADE
1930s
1. Algiers (1938)
2. Bachelor Mother (1939)
3. Camille (1937)
4. A Farewell to Arms (1932/1957)
5. Gone with the Wind (1939)
6. History Is Made at Night (1937)
7. In Name Only (1939)
8. Intermezzo (1939)
9. Love Affair (1939)
10. Morocco (1930)
11. Ninotchka (1939)
12. One Way Passage (1932)
13. Queen Christina (1933)
14. The Rains Came (1939)
15. Red Dust (1932)
16. Red-Headed Woman (1932)
17. San Francisco (1936)
18. Seventh Heaven (1937)
19. Trouble in Paradise (1932)
1940s
1. Adventure (1945)
2. All This, and Heaven Too (1940)
3. Arch of Triumph (1948)
4. Arise, My Love (1940)
5. Casablanca (1942)
6. The Clock (1945)
7. Come Live with Me
8. Dear Ruth (1947)
9. Flamingo Road (1949)
10. Holiday Affair (1949)
11. Humoresque (1946)
12. The Lady Eve (1941)
13. A Lady Takes a Chance (1943)
14. Love Letters (1945)
15. Night Song (1947)
16. No Time for Love (1943)
17. Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942)
18. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
19. Random Harvest (1942)

20. Remember the Night (1940)
21. Somewhere I'll Find You (1942)
22. That Forsyte Woman (1949)
23. The Very Thought of You (1944)
24. Waterloo Bridge (1940)
25. The White Cliffs of Dover (1944)
26. Woman of the Year (1942)
27. You Came Along (1945)
28. You Gotta Stay Happy (1948)
1950s
1. An Affair to Remember (1957)

2. The African Queen (1951)
3. All That Heaven Allows (1955)
4. Bombers B-52 (1957)
5. The Burning Hills (1956)
6. Bus Stop (1956)
7. Carrie (1952)
8. Cash McCall (1959)
9. Diane (1956)
10. Force of Arms (1951)
11. Interlude (1957)
12. Love in the Afternoon (1957)
13. Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)
14. Marty (1955)
15. The Mating Game (1959)
16. Pat and Mike (1952)
17. Pillow Talk (1959)
18. A Place in the Sun (1951)
19. The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)
20. The Quiet Man (1952)
21. The Rose Tattoo (1955)
22. Sabrina (1954)
23. September Affair (1950)
24. Summertime (1955)
25. A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958)
26. Weekend with Father (1951)
27. Yankee Pasha (1954)
1960s
1. The Apartment (1960)

2. Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
3. Doctor Zhivago (1965)
4. Goodbye, Columbus (1969)

5. The World of Suzie Wong (1960)
6. Paris-When It Sizzles (1964)
7. The Rat Race (1960)
8. Rome Adventure (1962)
9. The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961)
10. This Property Is Condemned (1966)
11. Walk Don't Run (1966)
1970s
1. Aaron Loves Angela (1975)

2. An Almost Perfect Affair (1979)
3. Annie Hall (1977)
4. Breezy (1973)
5. Cinderella Liberty (1973)
6. A Different Story (1978)
7. The Goodbye Girl (1977)
8. Harold and Maude (1971)
9. House Calls (1978)
10. Love Story (1970)
11. Manhattan (1979)
12. Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
13. Oliver's Story (1978)
14. The Panic in Needle Park (1971)
1980s
1. About Last Night ... (1986)

2. The Accidental Tourist (1988)
3. Arthur (1981)
4. The Big Easy (1987)
5. China Girl (1987)
6. The Competition (1980)
7. Continental Divide (1981)
8. Crossing Delancey (1988)
9. Falling in Love (1984)
10. Love Letters (1983)
11. Mrs. Soffel (1984)
12. Murphy's Romance (1985)
13. An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)
14. The Pick-up Artist (1987)
15. Roxanne (1987)
16. Until September (1984)
17. When Harry Met Sally (1989)
18. Witness (1985)
1990s
1. 'Til There Was You (1997)

2. The American President (1995)
3. As Good As It Gets (1997)
4. Bed of Roses (1996)
5. Before Sunrise (1995)
6. The Bodyguard (1992)
7. Born Yesterday (1993)
8. The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
9. Chasing Amy (1997)
10. Claire of the Moon (1992)
11. Corrina, Corrina (1994)
12. Dave (1993)
13. Dying Young (1991)
14. The English Patient (1996)
15. Fools Rush In (1997)
16. Forces of Nature (1999)
17. French Kiss (1995)
18. GoFish(1994)
19. Green Card (1990)
20. Guinevere (1999)
21. High Art (1998)
22. Hope Floats (1998)
23. The Horse Whisperer (1998)
24. I Don't Buy Kisses Anymore (1992)
25. I.Q. (1994)
26. The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995)
27. Intersection (1994)
28. It Could Happen to You (1994)
29. Lolita (1997)
30. Love Affair (1994)
31. Love Jones (1997)
32. The Marrying Man (1991)
33. Message in a Bottle (1999)
34. The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996)
35. Mississippi Masala (1991)
36. Mr. Jones (1993)
37. Next Stop Wonderland (1998)
38. The Night We Never Met (1993)
39. One Fine Day (1996)
40. Only the Lonely (1991)
41. The Other Sister (1999)
42. Picture Perfect (1997)
43. Poetic Justice (1993)
44. Pretty Woman (1990)
45. Random Hearts (1999)
46. Runaway Bride (1999)

47. Sabrina (1995)
48. Shakespeare in Love (1998)
49. She's So Lovely (1997)
50. She's the One (1996)
51. Six Days Seven Nights (1998)
52. Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
53. Speechless (1994)
54. Stanley and Iris (1990)
55. Strictly Business (1991)
56. Three of Hearts (1993)
57. Three to Tango (1999)
58. Titanic (1997)
59. Trick (1999)
60. Untamed Heart (1993)
61. Up Close and Personal (1996)
62. A Walk in the Clouds (1995)
63. A Walk on the Moon (1999)
64. While You Were Sleeping (1995)
65. You've Got Mail (1998)
Acknowledgments: An earlier draft of this article was presented at the annual

meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 1998.
The authors would like to thank Aimee Dowd, for sharing with us her boundless
knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology; Laura Dowd, for her patience as yet one
more Friday night was preempted by another romance video; and, finally, the review-
ers and editor of this SP, for their courteous, helpful, and encouraging comments.
NOTES
1. Romantic love has been studied by anthropologists and psychologists for years, but the
subject has proven to be of far less interest to sociologists. Among the notable exceptions
are Beck and Beck-Gemsheim (1995), Cancian (1987), Giddens (1992), and Illouz (1997).
2. The transition from the classic to the modern romance, from the romance leading to
marriage to the romance that is destructive of marriage, begins with Tolstoy's 1877 lit-
erary masterpiece, Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's novel is a tragic tale of adultery among the
nineteenth-century Russian upper classes, a work that brilliantly juxtaposes the con-
structed propriety and calm that appears on the surface of social life to the dark,
tumultuous passions raging underneath. Anna is obsessed with Count Vronsky, the
military officer who seduced her, as modern lovers are with the object of their desire.
Her pitiable agony in the final scenes in the train station close the romantic interlude.
Anna Karenina, although focusing on an adulterous affair, clearly remains a classic
work of romance inasmuch as Anna is doomed to suffer and, finally, to take her own
life as a result of her transgression of social and moral laws.
3. As few prohibitions remain, foremost among which is the strong norm against the
seduction of children, or against most forms of erotica or pomography involving chil-
dren. The difficulty encountered by the producers of the 1997 film Lolita in finding an
American distributor underscores this point (Leonard 1997). The efforts of some
groups to delegitimate any romantic relationship between college teachers and their
students is another by-product of American culture's increasing concern over the sta-
tus of children, including those in the liminal status of college student.
4. It is important to emphasize that the cinema should not be approached as an unmedi-
ated reflection of social life; what occurs in film is not "real life." Warshow's (1970)
emphasis on genre conventions provides a necessary supplement to the view that films
merely reflect social reality. For Warshow (1970:129-30), once historical reality is taken
up in an aesthetic process, aesthetic determinations take over. Genre films such as the
western refer not to historical reality but to other genre films, and they evolve accord-
ing to the rules of generic production. Films do not appeal to the "audience's experi-
ence of reality; much more immediately, it appeals to previous experience of the type
itself: it creates its own field of reference" (Warshow 1970:130). Recognizing the restric-
tions imposed by genre requirements should not lead one to err in the opposite direc-
tion of a belief in genre as impervious to trends in society or to the artistic vision of the
filmmaker. Genre is not a straitjacket and filmmakers will, as creative artists, continu-
ally redefine and reshape the genre. So, too, the public-through its choice of movies-
will indirectly shape the type of films that will be made in the future.
5. This is the opinion, at least, of many older novelists, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Bruce
Jay Friedman, who discussed the changes in their profession with the interviewer
Charlie Rose (September 8, 1997). Hollywood agrees, as indicated by the marked ten-
dency of writers to structure their books like movies (Weinraub 1997). Although more
than $20 billion in book sales in 1996 made it the most productive year ever (Miller
1997), most of these books were sold to an audience that spends, on average, only eight
hours a year reading novels (New York Times, August 24, 1997, p. 1). Movies, however,
have "become something of a national pastime," according to those familiar with
recent polls on movie-watching habits (Nichols 1997:H1): "Asked how many films they
had watched during the preceding month, respondents frequently said they had
watched several in theaters and several more on video and cable."
6. We have been greatly aided in this search by several Internet search engines, including the
Internet Movie Database (IMDb), as well as by a number of film reference books, espe-
cially Case 1996. IMDb identified 4,698 romances in its database. Given this huge number
of films, it was obviously necessary to focus on specific categories of romance movies.
7. Even those older films that are not available on videotape but that at least one of
the authors has seen within the past two years have been considered for inclusion
in our study.
8. We have been guided in our selections by sources such as the IMDb's "Top 50 Romance
Movies," Facet Media's "100 Best Love Stories," and Mr. Showbiz's "Greatest Movie
Romances" (http: / / www.mrshowbiZ.com). We consulted the judgments of numerous
film reviewers as well, including John Simon, Stanley Kauffman, and the estimable
Pauline Kael. With more recent films, that is, those produced since 1980, we have also
taken into account box office receipts as the second of two criteria by which we
selected our smaller group of movies.
9. The emergence of the modern romantic comedy actually began in the late 1980s with
films like Roxanne (1987) and When Harry Met Sally (1989). Following the huge suc-
cesses of Pretty Woman and Sleepless in Seattle, however, the appeal of such films to con-
temporary audiences was established beyond question.
10. The one film to violate this most important of all of the conventions of the romantic
drama, Ulu Grosbard's Falling in Love (1983), paid for its disregard in disappointing
box office receipts.
11. Given Hollywood's practice of matching aging leading men with much younger lead-
ing ladies, it is more difficult to use age as a convincing impediment to the romances
on the silver screen than it should be considering the persistence of a relatively strong
norm against such May-December romances in actual social life. The recent film Up
Close and Personal (1996) tried to incorporate the age issue into the film yet finessed the
problem by focusing on the difference in professional status between the lovers rather
than on the difference in their ages.
12. This idea is considered by Brehm (1985) to be one of the two essential features of
romanticism, the other being the belief that love will conquer all.
13. Neither of the two films that have used the Gulf War of 1990-91 as the backdrop to
their stories, Courage Under Fire (1994) and Three Kings (1999), was a romance.
14. Even in the great love stories of ancient myth, obstacles were an indispensable dimen-
sion of the romance. The impediments of Greek and Roman mythology were especially
problematic in that they often involved the troublesome intervention of a jealous or
angry god. The tragic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is a good instance. In this story,
Orpheus, a musician, loves Eurydice, who dies. Orpheus wants her back and so travels
to the Underworld to fetch her. He plays a song for Hades and Persephone, who rule
the Underworld, and the song so affects Persephone that the gods allow Orpheus to
take Eurydice back-but on the condition that he not look at her until they are out of
the Underworld. As soon as Orpheus is free of the Underworld, he immediately turns
around to look at Eurydice but, as she is a few steps behind and not yet safely removed
from this place of shadows and death, the condition set forth by the gods is negated.
The lovers share one brief glimpse, but Orpheus, depressed over his final separation
from Eurydice, dies.
15. Although older analyses, such as Beigel (1951), claim otherwise, it is generally con-
ceded today that romance favors men over women. Indicative of this view is Giddens's
(1992:62) argument that romantic love is thoroughly skewed in terms of power and
typically leads to the "grim domestic subjection" of women.
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The End of Romance: The Demystiﬁcation of Love in the Postmodern Age

Article in Sociological Perspectives · December 2000

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ABSTRACT: We focus on the changing understanding of romance in

It is a truism that we live in a time of global economic transformation, rapid social

Sociological Perspectives, Volume 43, Number 4, pages 549-580.

THE GENRE OF ROMANCE

manifest a common interest in the specification, valorization, and reinforcement

METHOD AND DATA

This analysis proceeds in two phases. First, we examine the distribution of

Decade Total Films Total Romance VHS Romance Total in Sample

1930s 8,377 402 (4.80) 54 19

38,155 1,397 723 182

* The numbers in parentheses are per

All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

understandings of the essential nature of men and women, the "romance" of

The contemporary comedy, however, is a lightweight affair. It is a confection, a

In the contemporary Hollywood romance movie, tradition persists as four of

actual sociological texts themselves. As lovers exchange Valentine's Day cards

But the reality of every

We don't have to be embarrassed about luxuriating in those dreams today

rooted, widely shared, and uncommonly resilient aspect of contemporary Ameri-

APPENDIX: SAMPLE OF FILMS BY DECADE

19. Random Harvest (1942)

1. An Affair to Remember (1957)

1. The Apartment (1960)

4. Goodbye, Columbus (1969)

1. Aaron Loves Angela (1975)

1. About Last Night ... (1986)

1. 'Til There Was You (1997)

46. Runaway Bride (1999)

Acknowledgments: An earlier draft of this article was presented at the annual

Austen, Jane. [1813] 1972. Pride and Prejudice. London: Penguin.

Eribon, Didier. 1991. Mic

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