Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2013

Vol. 27, No. 5, 603–616, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2013.824858

Sea of love: place, desire and the beaches of romantic comedy

Deborah Jermyna* and Janet McCabeb1
a
Department of Media, Culture and Language, University of Roehampton, London, UK;
b
Department of Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

This article argues that within romantic comedy, the setting of the beach has come
to function as a highly potent and privileged setting, evolving into a generic ‘magic
space’ (Deleyto 2009) that sanctions and protects those desiring love, while allowing
for certain forms of speech involving intimacy and the (sexual) self that cannot be
uttered elsewhere. Our analysis finds that, time and again, the sea functions as an
alternative, liberating space away from the intellectualism and emotional cynicism of
the modern city, constituting an arena where characters can find intimacy and give
themselves over to love in ways impossible elsewhere. But importantly, at the same
time, we argue, it is also a setting that may function in a compelling manner to suggest,
finally, the elusiveness of everlasting love. The meaning of the sea in romantic comedy
in this respect is not entirely stable, and is not used only to endorse romantic notions
about ‘authentic’ love and natural ‘soulmates’. Rather, a certain paradox is at play in
the genre’s use of the shoreline, since the liminal space of the sea/beach stands
simultaneously both for enduring natural wonder that will outlast each of us, and the
very essence of evanescence. Always changing, never fixed, inescapably different from
one day to the next, it is a reminder of the capriciousness of love and life, an expressive
signifier which by its very nature reminds us of the transience of all things.

I left my soul there,

Down by the sea
I lost control with you
(‘The Sea’, Morcheeba)
Given the importance that genre studies ascribes to ‘place’ in its detailing of how generic
traits function, remarkably little scholarship exists on the importance of place in one of
mainstream cinema’s most enduring staples: the romantic comedy. Jermyn, writing about
post-classical Hollywood rom-coms, has examined the recurrence of Manhattan as
constituting ‘a playground for (would-be) lovers’, a frenetic ‘urban tapestry’ which
facilitates the themes of serendipity and finding love against the odds (2009, 12 – 21).
Elsewhere, Deleyto (2010) has explored the representation of Chicago as a ‘magic space’
in the cycle of Chicago-set rom-coms. In defining the ‘comic space as a magic space of
transformation’, Deleyto makes the point that ‘this transformation does not necessarily
affect the characters in any permanent way but, rather, the fictional space in which they
exist, a fictional space which represents the social space of fictional discourses on love,
sexuality and intimacy’ (2009, 36). Genre, as we shall argue in this article, takes custody of
space and absorbs it into the serious function of telling particular stories in particular ways.
Only in discrete spaces, subject to strict generic rules and conventions of speech, can
certain discussions about love and romance, sexual relations and courtship, gender and

*Corresponding author. Email: d.jermyn@roehampton.ac.uk

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

604 D. Jermyn and J. McCabe

identities take place and (safely segregated) acquire particular forms of reality. Words and
gestures, signs and objects, become coded types of discourse, which in turn constitute a
social space where ‘affaires of the heart’ can be explored and spoken about without undue
reticence.
While the above-mentioned analyses privilege the importance of ‘the city’ to
romantic comedy, there has long existed a tradition within the genre of the nascent
couple only finding love once they have retreated or escaped to the rural. As such it has
constituted an alternative space which facilitates madcap escapades and liberates
protagonists from inhibitions and routines, but exists alongside other spaces (work,
family) which govern the protagonists and have the power to shape attitudes, behaviours
and expectations from which the individual seeks temporary release. Evident since
classical screwballs such as Bringing Up Baby (1938) and more recently in films such as
Runaway Bride (1999) or Sweet Home Alabama (2002), a pastoral landscape provides a
congenial setting for potential lovers to (temporarily) lose social reserve and release
repressed energies. It is a backdrop that allows for erotic liberation and a freer expression
of identities, in which characters feel more at ease to reveal their ‘true’ selves to another
person. Gehring (1983) has spoken about the comic anti-hero of screwball comedies who
no longer feels in step with an ever more industrialized environment, but Shumway
(1999) takes the argument further to suggest that couples cannot resolve difficulties or
problems until they move away from a sophisticated, fast-paced metropolitan existence.
It thus seems that the lovers will only reconcile and/or progress the relationship once
they have left the city and withdrawn into a pastoral idyll. From It Happened One Night
(1934) and The Awful Truth (1937) to My Favourite Wife (1940), the bucolic sojourn
provides a brief respite, before the lovers must return to the institutionalized spaces of
the dominant order; and where sexual relations and sexuality become carefully confined
and moved into the marital home with its alliances of monogamy, kinship and social
reproduction.
This article extends these lines of generic enquiry and thinks further about Deleyto’s
observation that the comic space allows ‘the spectator to glimpse a “better world”, a world
which is not governed by inhibitions and repressions but is instead characterized by a freer,
more optimistic expression of love and desire’ (2009, 36). It examines, in particular, films
in which the couple’s romance is (in part at least) played out by the sea – where it is at this
liminal border, between land and water, that the lovers are able to reach new levels of
intimacy and self-awareness. In more recent rom-coms, where once the couple took a trip
to the country, they now head for the ocean – not into the heartlands, as they did in films
such as It Happened One Night or Sullivan’s Travels (1941), but instead to Venice Beach
(L.A. Story 1991), a deserted South Seas island (Six Days and Seven Nights 1998) or
Hawaii (Forgetting Sarah Marshall 2008). This space between land and sea, of course,
forms an ideal context of romantic possibilities and alluring fantasy, with lovers walking
along the beach constituted as one of the most potent settings within our collective
mythology of love and romance. It is ‘down by the sea’, to quote Morcheeba’s wistful
lyrics, that lovers might ‘lose control’; or perhaps more accurately, that the conventions,
formalities and tensions that feature so heavily in our everyday lives might lose their
control of us. In what follows, we contend that the beach as a discrete space operates as a
highly potent and privileged setting within the romantic comedy genre. It has evolved into
a generic ‘magic space’ that sanctions and protects those desiring love, and allows for
certain forms of speech involving intimacy and the (sexual) self that cannot be uttered
elsewhere. What sustains the collective eagerness of lovers to return to the beach is
doubtless the opportunity to speak of love and sex, and share truths that are regulated as
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 605

coarse and obscene elsewhere. Pleasure comes from speaking differently about being in
love, happiness from the liberation to speak of love.
Recurrently throughout the romantic comedy genre, in (sometimes superficially
distinct) movies from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) to Failure to Launch
(2006), the sea functions as an expressive signifier of the inexorable forces of attraction
and unbridled passions, of utterly being dismantled by love, even while the films
sometimes self-consciously play with the hackneyed romantic connotations of the beach.
More than merely an aesthetically striking backdrop, being at the sea often identifies the
pair as desirous of love, since courtship in this setting evidences the exhilarating idea of a
natural fit. In this setting, the couple are figured as authentic or inescapably ‘right’. Yet the
meaning and use of the sea in rom-coms is not as entirely stable as all this may suggest.
There is a certain paradox at play, since the space of the sea/beach stands simultaneously
both for enduring natural wonder that will outlast each of us and also the very essence of
evanescence; always changing, never fixed, inescapably different from one day to the next,
it is a reminder of the capriciousness of love and life. Presumptions that romantic comedy
functions only as one of cinema’s most inherently conservative and conformist genres
have increasingly been challenged of late (for example, McWilliam 2010; Jermyn 2011).
Taking our cue from such recent interventions, this article asks how the genre’s beach
settings are used in sometimes reflective and destabilizing ways to dissect love stories and
scrutinize our continued investment in these fictions. Thus analysis of these settings can
enrich our understanding of the genre’s ‘transgressive potential’ (Abbott and Jermyn 2009,
6) for interrogating myths about love and romance, rather than merely popularizing them.
Our analysis finds that the sea, time and again, functions as an alternative, liberating space,
away from the intellectualism and emotional cynicism of the modern city. It is a space
where characters can indeed find intimacy and give themselves over to love in ways
impossible elsewhere. But importantly, at the same time, we argue, it is a setting that may
function in a potent manner to suggest, finally, the elusiveness of everlasting love.
In order to reduce the vast sample of film texts that might be called on here and focus
our enquiry further still, this essay specifically examines films in which the beach in
question lies somewhere on the eastern seaboard of the USA and the city/space from where
the couple are ‘escaping’ is Manhattan. The films Annie Hall (1977), As Good As it Gets
(1997) and Something’s Gotta Give (2003) offer, we suggest, a rich opportunity to analyse
how the space/setting/iconography of the sea constitutes a social and comic space which
facilitates a vibrant conversation about modern love and romance, sexuality, sex and
identities. Taken as a trio, these films provide a series of intersections that form striking
parallels and musings on the genre.
In Woody Allen’s celebrated ‘nervous romance’ Annie Hall, the director marshalled
the genre in innovative and unexpected directions, while also starring alongside Diane
Keaton. The film explored an idiosyncratic on-again/off-again romance between comedy
writer Alvy and chanteuse Annie that ends not in marriage, but contemplative separation.
Having here played one of the most memorable and quirky heroines the genre has ever
produced, Keaton subsequently starred in another landmark reimagining of the genre
almost three decades later, as Erica Barry, the accomplished playwright ‘older woman’
love interest to Jack Nicholson’s roguish entrepreneur, Harry Sanborn, in Something’s
Gotta Give. Nicholson’s ‘incorrigible bachelor’ character/star persona in its turn also
carried echoes of his role six years earlier as an unlikely suitor and an antisocial OCD
sufferer Melvin Udell in As Good As It Gets, who unexpectedly finds himself trying to
make sense of his uneasy attraction to struggling single mother and waitress Carol
Connelly (Helen Hunt). As this roll call of stars indicates, what defines each film,
606 D. Jermyn and J. McCabe

crucially, is a concern with the possibility of romance, of finding love in fact, among older
singles that have already ‘been around the block’ and are warier, more cynical, more
mistrustful, as a result. They are not the hopeful ingénues populating much of
Hollywood’s youth-driven rom-coms who collide with passion full of nothing but
promise; instead these are evidently ‘mature’ protagonists who find themselves, often
unexpectedly, invigorated by the life-enhancing potential of the beach.
Importantly too, the rather more circumspect outlook with which these films’
protagonists embark on finding love stems from not only maturity and life experience, but
also the milieu from which they are drawn; these are characters with East Coast ‘smarts’, the
cosmopolitan, often world-wary, perspective of New Yorkers. As long-standing traditions in
the representations of America’s opposing seaboards have it, the intellectualism and greater
sense of history associated with the East Coast stand in contrast to the youthful sensibilities
of the West Coast, known both for its ‘counterculture’ and seemingly more frivolous values.
Interestingly in this respect, each film features a protagonist earning a living writing
about love and loving in the contemporary world. Each is shown at some point as gifted,
but often ‘struggling’ with how best to communicate the vicissitudes of modern romance
(even if Alvy and Melvin write in the ‘low’ genres of comedy and romantic fiction). Erica,
‘the most successful woman playwright since Lillian Helman’ as her sister Zoe (Frances
McDormand) puts it, grapples with the angst of a broken heart to turn her failed romance
with Harry into a new hit Broadway play; Alvy writes the perfect happy-ever-after ending
into his first play to counter the romantic difficulties of real life; Melvin explodes with fury
when interrupted as he struggles to identify exactly the right romantic words for his latest
novel. With their smart wit, privileged connections, insight into human psychology and
superior grasp of language with which to communicate that knowledge, each character, in
some way, fits the mould of the cerebral, affluent East Coast intellectual. In their nascent
romances, the retreat to the sea thus offers a particularly heightened form of escape from
the erudite milieu of the city, where every twist and turn of love and sex has been talked
about, dissected and analysed. Most of the characters, for example, have sat on the
psychiatrist couch. With their words enclosed, gestures coded and meaning taken charge
of, in which every trace of sexuality has been discussed and difficult confessions disclosed,
protagonists from Alvy to Melvin and from Annie to Erica have already opened
themselves unreservedly to endless examination. Freed from this therapeutic space where
the ‘expert’ listens, it is at the shoreline that these characters find liberation in talking
differently in the less-hierarchal, more liminal space by the sea. Equally, however,
the romantic setting of the beach/sea works in tandem with their more knowing, often
more sceptical stance on love, since importantly at another level the coast stands, too, for
the ephemerality of romance and transience of life – a backdrop in constant motion,
changing moment by moment.

‘Love fades’: lobsters and laughter in Annie Hall

The year 1978 saw Henderson predict ‘the death of romantic comedy’ (1978, 19).
Wistfully nostalgic for romance, the genre had nonetheless run its course by the late 1970s.
But genre, like the heart, is resilient. For, at the very moment Henderson lamented the
demise of the rom-com, a new cycle of Independent films arrived, such as Annie Hall and
Manhattan (1979). Krutnik (1990) has described these ‘nervous romances’ as about
pushing towards a melodramatic resolution, mixing nostalgia for ‘simpler’ times with
scepticism about the utopian possibilities of the heterosexual couple. Tellingly they
appeared at the same time as dominant institutions of sexual privilege were being
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 607

penetrated and reconstructed by values, ideas and knowledges developing elsewhere.

The ‘nervous romance’ must be understood as emerging within a post-feminist, post-
sexual revolution, post-counterculture world that endorsed non-monogamous and non-
heterosexual choices and lifestyles, which, in turn, inexorably undermined ‘previously
forged bonds between love and marriage, eroticism and romance, pleasure and
procreation’ (Krutnik 1998, 16). Love and courtship in the modern world was no easy
matter; ‘the nervous romances [detailed] the difficulties men and women [faced] in
initiating, establishing and sustaining attachments in an age that [had] seen the splitting of
sex and self from previous guarantees of romantic and emotional fulfilment’ (1998, 18).
It is in this spirit that Alvy/Allen’s meandering opening piece to the camera
commences Annie Hall, and in which, in the first mention he makes of the eponymous
heroine, the cerebral, neurotic comic Alvy confides in the audience. ‘Annie and I broke up
and I still can’t get my mind around that . . . a year ago, we were in love’. From the very
beginning, then, the audience knows that this is a romance where eventual failure is neither
merely feared nor anticipated (most romances do, after all, ultimately fold); rather, its
inevitable demise is explicitly stated. This bleak acknowledgement in the opening monologue
that the affair we are about to follow will not last clearly makes for unconventional rom-com
territory in many ways: hence, Jeffers McDonald’s observation that of all the 1970s
rom-coms, this ‘radical romantic comedy’ is ‘both visually the most influential, and
narratively the most unrepeatable: a work of conscious iconoclasm’ (2007, 59). But this
apparent straying from a generic framework is not to say at all that Annie Hall does not indulge
in romantic fantasy in other ways – and, as we explore below, perhaps the most evident way in
which this is seen is in its use of a beach setting.
To place these scenes in context, and as Jeffers McDonald notes too, this is a film that
combines a fragmented plot, inventive temporality and tangled chronology with diverse
narrative strategies; not only do we know from the opening (present) monologue that the
romance just about to unfold in flashback is doomed, it meanders in non-linear fashion
through their relationship arguments, back to an early idealized ‘honeymoon’ period, back
further still to the couple’s ‘meet-cute’, forward to failed efforts at reconciliation and the
final break-up on a flight back from Los Angeles, all the while interspersed with
remembrances of previous (and evidently unsuccessful) relationships, in which they
themselves observe the disintegration of love and each other. It is also a film that
evidences a loving but conflicted relationship with Manhattan. Alvy is appalled by the
prospect of moving to the cultural wasteland of California, even while NYC is a city
peopled by pretentious academics, intimidating ‘Godfather’ types and ineffectual
analysts. Nevertheless, there is nowhere else Alvy would rather live. But it is in an early
sequence at the beach which we understand to have taken place relatively early on in their
relationship – and not in this thrilling, frantic city where ‘anything can happen . . . for
anyone’ (Jermyn 2009, 17) – that perhaps the film’s warmest, most romantic, most
madcap scene takes place.
Immediately after a sequence recalling the expiration of Alvy’s earlier relationship
with ex-wife Alison Portchnik (Carol Kane), in which he avoids sex on the pretext that he
is too preoccupied with the JFK murder conspiracy, the film cuts, without explanation, to
an exterior shot of a beach house, over which the evocative sound of gulls can be head.
On moving inside, a scene of chaos unravels; Annie and Alvy are fighting an army of
escaped crustaceans in the kitchen. As the shrieking couple try to capture the errant
lobsters, they dissolve into helpless laughter; and at one point, with Alvy/Allen pinned
next to the refrigerator, there seems to be a genuine moment of corpsing on the actors’ part.
The slapstick lobster routine is a moment of uninhibited, joyful, screwball surrealism and
608 D. Jermyn and J. McCabe

signals Alvy and Annie as the ‘right couple’, and it reveals further the continuing
importance of play within the genre as a means of establishing the companionship so
essential to modern love.
Though the audience does not know when or where exactly they are at this moment (a later
reference to visiting Southampton in the same setting will confirm the location as Long
Island), what is immediately apparent is that the switch to the beach signifies ‘good times’.
There are no city crowds or intellectual pretension to navigate here, unlike their earlier (which
is to say chronologically later) cinema date. Momentarily, in their proximity to the natural
world, Alvy and Annie are freed from the restraints of the everyday urban grind that normally
envelops them. Being by the sea temporarily liberates them from the narcissism of the New
York intelligentsia with its urban angst and stifled intimacy. While challenging the narrative
typography of the rom-com, then, the film also never abandons romantic convention, for there
is no more potent and time-honoured romantic getaway for a newly formed couple grappling
with getting to know one another than an escape to the beach.
As if to self-consciously recognize their ‘perfect moment’, Annie grabs her camera and
photographs the scene, thus capturing and commemorating the vitality and spontaneity of
their courtship. (The photographs’ special resonance is underlined later when they are seen
in Annie’s apartment, after Alvy comes to rescue her from the spiders lurking in the bath
and they subsequently rekindle their relationship.) Later, after the couple have split, Alvy
returns to the house with another, unnamed woman. The lobster scene begins to play out
again, but without the chemistry Alvy and Annie shared, this is no longer the ‘magic
space’ – that perfect moment cannot be recaptured and replayed. As if to echo one of the
film’s key musical accompaniments, Annie’s rendition of ‘Feels Like Old Times’, Alvy
finds that he cannot make it feel like old times again with this new partner. Significantly –
especially given this is a film widely cherished for its use of location shooting in
Manhattan – it is this first beach sequence shared by Alvy and Annie that features
prominently in the film’s DVD packaging,2 not the iconography of NYC as is so typically
prevalent in US rom-com (Jermyn 2009). Instead, a lobster dominates the foreground of a
sepia image of Keaton and Allen on the actual DVD itself, and the front cover of the case
carries a still of the two of them walking on the beach.
It is this sunset walk along the beach that follows on from the couple’s lobster scene –
and where Allen plays with the trappings of this setting to undo some of the romantic
expectations the film has to set up in order to dismantle and play against them. The sky is
salmon pink, with tints of peach and lilac, and the evening light is soft and subdued. As the
embracing couple walk by the ocean, among the grass of the sand dunes, Alvy asks Annie,
‘Am I your first big romance?’ Far from being met with a grand declaration of love, Annie
replies without hesitation: ‘No, no!’ and begins to recount tales of her previous love(r)s,
which the two then scrutinize in ‘flashback’. The couple walk out of shot and there is a cut
to Annie’s first love, waiting for her outside the movie house. This beach setting prompts a
shift in other intimate spaces associated with romance, places where couples speak of love –
at the movies, a party. This setting by the shore arouses memories of first love and sexual
awakenings. It becomes a place to explore those memories of what it felt like to be in love,
while taking us on a journey, from the innocence of a high-school romance in 1961 to a
counterculture party where sexuality and the self are explored in the raw. Any passing
earlier idealism about the love affair between Annie and Alvy is, therefore, all the more
vividly undercut, for the manner in which this frank exploration of Annie’s previous
relationships unfolds in a location meant to epitomize romance; an admission of sexual
and emotional experience on the part of the ‘modern woman’ that Henderson (1978)
argued undid the traditional premise of romantic comedy in this era.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 609

Disconcertingly also, as the film returns to the present of the beach scene after the
flashbacks to Annie and her ex-boyfriends, the setting becomes rather more unsettling and
gloomy. A hand-held long shot looks out on the sunset over the ocean, as the light quickly
fades, and the couple continue to discuss their earlier ill-judged relationships. With their
voices heard off-screen, the shaky camera movement suggests a point-of-view shot taken
from their ‘walk and talk’ along the beach. The staging is self-consciously both romantic and
anti-romantic; it is oddly perturbing to see the romantic iconography of the beach employed
without having the couple actually present in it. Instead, they are disembodied voices,
disconnected from the location and perhaps already from each other, their discussion of their
previous failed love affairs bringing with it the implicit recognition that this relationship is
also unlikely to last. Furthermore, audiences with extra-textual knowledge of the stars will
read these sequences (and indeed the whole film) with a certain curious contemplation of the
relationship, in that they will likely be aware of some of its ‘backstory’, namely that the pair
had once been a couple in real life and that Allen has admitted he wrote Annie Hall with their
personal history in mind and with Keaton envisaged in Annie’s role (Jermyn 2012, 39). This
merging of textual/extra-textual histories in the film both serves to embellish the audience’s
pleasure in the lobster scene (their laughter looks authentic and therefore offers the fantasy
of seeing into the ‘real’ affection the couple shared) and adds to the poignancy of the
doomed love affair prefigured by the dissonant beach sunset (the couple could not make it
work in ‘real life’ either)
In Alvy and Annie’s beach scene, this most romantic of settings, depicted through a
mournful and destabilized mise en scène, is thus used by Allen to belie the fact, as the
audience already know, that the relationship is doomed; Alvy and Annie are as transient as
the waves breaking next to them on the shore. The implication is that couples may connect
deeply and intensely, but there is not necessarily a long-term future for them.
Relationships are based on serendipity and chance, and the best we can hope for is to
encounter romance and experience it intensely before moving on with our lives. And yet
still, in this wistful moment down at the beach, for an ever-so brief moment as we
are returned to the origins of a romance (as well as other first dates), the film betrays a
plaintive nostalgia for the possibility of what the rom-com promises. As if to humorously
reinforce that rebellious freedom from social obligations and alliances, from the beach we
cut to Alvy and his second wife Robin (Janet Margolin) attending a fashionable but dreary
soiree with other New York intellectuals. The spatial relocation back to Manhattan thus
intensifies the stifled intimacies of that city space; a space where carnal lust has no place
among intellectual discussions about ‘modes of alienation’, and where Alvy’s ‘animal
urges’ are reduced to psychoanalytical categories.

‘I’m happy. And you’re my date’: (sexual) awakenings and (social) limits in As Good
As It Gets
As Good As It Gets may, on the surface at least, seems like an odd choice for inclusion
here. Misanthropic Melvin’s inadvertent acts of kindness, done for the most selfish of
reasons, find him making an uneasy connection with waitress, Carol Connelly, the only
server at the restaurant able to tolerate his rudeness and odd behaviour at the restaurant
where he eats daily able to tolerate his rudeness and odd behaviour. After becoming
involved in the life of his neighbour, a gay artist named Simon Bishop (Greg Kinnear),
Melvin agrees to drive him to Baltimore to ask Simon’s estranged parents for money
following medical bills that have left him approaching bankruptcy. In an attempt to lessen
the awkwardness (further exacerbated by his pathological mysophobia), Melvin asks
610 D. Jermyn and J. McCabe

Carol to join them on the road trip. The trio get as far as the harbour in Baltimore. Down by
the waterfront, love appears to blossom between the most unlikely of couples; but the fact
that Melvin and Carol never get any further than the Inner Habor gives the audience pause
for thought and encourages us instead to think differently about what we want out of a
romantic relationship – and the impossibility of happy ever after.
As in Annie Hall, time spent by the sea is only ever-so brief. Most of the action of
As Good As It Gets takes place in Manhattan. But the coastal sojourn provides the spatial
setting for three emotionally damaged and psychologically disoriented characters to make
intimate connections and become somehow reawakened, with the result that ambivalence
and confusion surrounds who exactly is the ‘right couple’. The trip to the waterside patrols
the boundaries of the generic rules on courtship and intimacy, with humour produced in
and through a reversal of, and playing with, the generic and narrative principles of rom­
com. The first time we see the harbour is when Carol opens the curtains in her hotel room.
She is on the phone talking to her son, Spence (Jesse James), who suffers from chronic
asthma; but thanks to Melvin paying the medical bills (in order to get Carol back to work),
her son is now in good health, so well in fact that Carol has been able to leave him for the
first time. Seeing the sea, as the drapes are thrown open, is thus linked to a sense of
liberation and (temporary) release from parental responsibilities. Carol is thrilled to learn
that her son is not only in rude health, but also out playing football with his friends.
So happy is Carol that she persuades Melvin to take her out dancing (after Simon has said
no, of course). Immediately, then, the sight of the sea has a restorative power, a space
where one can take a chance on something with someone not considered quite right.
Straightaway the film demonstrates how the romantic fiction works on us. The would-
be couple wander down to the waterfront on a warm summer’s evening (after Carol’s
exhaustingly long wait for Melvin to emerge from the shower, refreshed and scrubbed
clean). The scene begins with a diegetically motivated voice announcing, ‘Mr and Mrs’,
overlaid with the soothing tones of non-diegetic instrumental music. It is not, however,
Carol and Melvin referred to here, but a bridal couple, with guests in tow, walking along
the boardwalk. Spatially the happy couple, arm-in-arm, looking at each other and not the
camera, emerge from the direction of the sea. It is implied that their romantic coupling,
involving a promise of lifetime commitment, was sealed at sunset, on a boat on the ocean.
As the camera tracks their return to shore, another young couple (shot from behind) are
seen walking arm-in-arm into the scene and along the promenade. Continuing to track and
pan, the camera moves from the happy couple, separated by a glass fence, and finds Carol
and Melvin heading into the restaurant. All the while Melvin can be heard asking fixatedly
about hard shells above the ambient sounds of gentle laugher and lyrical musical refrains.
Fairy lights decorating the wood-clad buildings and soft lighting add to the romantic
charm of the scene, where love is quite literally everywhere. Spatially the scene rewinds
the amorous journey, from the bride and groom disembarking, to dating couples out
strolling or dining together, to Carol and Melvin. The scene is saturated with signifiers of
love and charged with romantic possibility, with Carol, in particular, entranced by what
she sees around her.
The romantically charged space of the waterfront creates a beguiling, almost charmed,
atmosphere; but it is not long before Melvin and Carol encounter an obstacle: he cannot
enter the restaurant without a jacket and tie, and his mysophobia prevents him from
wearing what the establishment has to offer. Following a mad dash to the shops, Melvin is
finally ready for his date. Now dressed appropriately he gains access to the restaurant,
where the mise en scène colludes with the language and practice of romance embedded so
deeply into our culture that it cannot be easily dislodged. The camera shares Melvin’s
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 611

point of view as he searches the room for Carol, a setting where romance is promised. Soft,
warm hues and subdued lighting add to this ‘magic space of transformation’ (Deleyto
2009, 31), as the camera finally finds Carol sitting alone at the bar. The image is overlaid
by the smooth vocals of a female chanteuse, Danielle Brisebois singing ‘My Only’ – my
only love, my only man, my only. Eyes meet across the packed seafood restaurant, and
Carol, escorted by a waiter carrying her pink drink on a tray, winds her way across the
crowded dance floor. Melvin watches with obvious delight (a positioned shared by the
spectator), as she leads the waiter a merry dance in time to the music containing lyrics
about finding the one: she is funny and feminine, playful and ever-so slightly irreverent.
Her dance ends with a close-up of her carefully lit, soft-focus face that validates
conventional wisdom of the power structure of the gendered look. It is, however, not
Melvin but Carol who looks with awakened desire. Enclosed within this magical space by
the sea, freed from responsibilities and seduced by the rhythms and mise en scène of
romance, Carol looks as if she is seeing Melvin for the first time. Her wide-eyed
expression scrutinizes his sartorial transformation and a sense of wonder suddenly ignites
in her. She is primed to be dismantled by the delicious promise of love. But immediately
she stops herself from being swept away: is this as good as it gets? Long, bitter experience
of bad dates and past knowledge of who she is looking at breaks the spell. With a half
smile, Carol does not name her desire but says only that Melvin ‘looks great’.
Even in this most romantic of setting, however, Melvin cannot help but be himself.
After refusing to dance, he makes the fatal mistake of insulting what she is wearing.
Her red dress with its accompanying soft diaphanous scarf in the same colour, signalling
an eagerness for sensuality and intimate connection, is not quite good enough (in Melvin’s
eyes, at least). Carol insists he pays her compliment – she demands it, she needs it.
The camera moves in on Melvin and his obvious discomfort. His palms sweat and, for a
man who makes his living crafting the language of love into best-selling romantic fiction,
he is, quite literally, at a loss for words. A shot/reverse shot articulation of looks builds the
tension as Melvin squirms and rambles about taking a pill for his ‘ailment’. Carol stares at
him mystified, until Melvin declares: ‘You make me want to be a better man’. The camera
moves in on her reaction, her face stirring with anticipation that Melvin (and beyond him
the sea) could (against the odds) be the one. His words, and uttered within this space
governed by the potent generic codes of romance, have the potential to hypnotize Carol
and release her from social and sexual inhibition. She moves over and shares the same
physical space with him, as the shot/reverse shots becomes one. Taking a chance she
initiates a kiss. This space, a seafood restaurant on the waterfront, affords Carol a much
more candid encounter with her desires and sexuality than the film has previously allowed
her. It is, however, a confusing moment for Melvin; the spell is broken when he confesses
that one of the reasons he brought her on the journey was to seduce Simon and ‘cure’ him
of his homosexuality. Of course the moment is ruined and Carol takes her leave in
irrepressible fury and complete disgust.
The evening culminates with Carol spending the night with Simon (rather than
Melvin), in which passions and the creative and sexual self are reawakened. Sitting on the
edge of bath with the taps running, wrapped only in a towel, Carol resembles the figure of
the Valpinc
on Bather. She is held in the (homosexual) gaze rather than an (heterosexual)
embrace, as Simon rediscovers his creative muse on seeing her sensual lines of beauty.
He spends the night frenziedly studying and sketching her nude form, and at one point he
symbolically rips off the rigid cast around his arm, giving his hand more flexibility and
enabling him to draw at an even more intense and feverish pace. The next morning the
hotel room, set back even further from the harbour (and closed to the outside world), is
612 D. Jermyn and J. McCabe

strewn with these spontaneous sketches depicting the curving rhythms and the deeply
sensuous nature of the feminine ideal. In Simon’s search for perfection, for a distilled and
ideal form of beauty, Carol finds what she needed and it was, as she declares, ‘better than
sex’. What she finds is never named; but what gets uncomfortably exposed in terms of the
fiction of heterosexual romance means that the trio must leave this space by the sea and
return to the city (with Carol insisting that Melvin stop playing his romantic songs on the
car stereo).
The fact that Melvin and Carol only make it to the harbour and not the beach is
significant. In the process of failing to reaching that liminal space which liberates
characters to freely speak of love and sex, the film complicates the very notion of the ideal
couple and what constitutes the perfect partnership. At the journey’s end it is Simon and
Carol who declare love for one another, and Simon who moves in with Melvin. Carol and
Melvin find some kind of uneasy resolution, sharing a kiss before buying hot rolls while
walking near her apartment at 4 am. It is difficult to imagine how this unconventional
relationship will last, and as the film ends here, the movie does not quite seem to know
either. But this struggle to articulate difference beyond matrimony and defining the ideal
(heterosexual) couple, and in deconstructing our investment in the mythology of romantic
love only to realize the imperfect couple as the ‘right’ one, is signalled by the film’s
inability to make it down to the beach.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Later-life love on the beaches of Something’s Gotta Give
Something’s Gotta Give also begins and ends in the city, opening with a montage of
Manhattan at night – a series of shots in which a procession of beautiful young women
are seen in what playboy Harry describes as that ‘magic time’ of their lives. These are
women in that flush of youth where they are at their most captivating and alluring
(hence endlessly desirable to Harry, he admits), and thus when the city is at its most
abundant with possibilities. Nevertheless, despite the urban location of this opening
sequence, of the three films examined here Something’s Gotta Give is the one most
explicitly played out ‘at the shoreline’, since, as Harry’s voice-over closes, we switch to
him driving along a country lane accompanied by a(nother) beautiful young woman,
Marin (Amanda Peet). It soon transpires that she is about to become his latest conquest,
at her mother’s beachside home in the Hamptons. As they turn into the drive, a visibly
impressed Harry remarks, ‘Wow, it’s the perfect beach house’, and indeed, as Jermyn
has observed, the luscious mise en scène and detail lavished into this set by director
Nancy Meyers has earned it the admiring attention of numerous architectural and
interior design articles (2012, 43). This light, flowing space appears to have been borne
of a fantasy beachside moodboard; tones of blue, cream and sand unfold across its
rooms, as all the while a subtle soundscape of waves on the shore can be discerned. In
Something’s Gotta Give we hear the sea far more, and much earlier, than we actually see
it, and this thread within the multi-layered soundtrack thus makes the ocean an affective
presence in the film’s ambience well before any of the action actually unfolds at the
beach.
As in Annie Hall, this is a film where the newly formed or still forming couple retreat to
the beach as a place where they might escape to in the early ‘honeymoon’ stages of their
romance. Just as Alvy and Annie find their ‘perfect moment’ in the Hamptons, Marin, in
particular, attempts to construct a romantic fantasy (of sorts) for herself and Harry; for it is
here that the two plan to have sex for the first time, an event they have deliberately postponed
in order for it to take place at this idyllic setting. Their plan goes desperately awry, however,
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 613

first when Erica and her sister unexpectedly turn up at the house and mistake Harry for a
burglar and later when Harry, at last alone with Marin in the bedroom, suffers a heart attack
moments into their foreplay. In the early stages of the film, therefore, the beach house
becomes not a romantic retreat for Harry, but a prison, when he is forced to stay there under
Erica’s care to convalesce, much to their mutual discontentment. Erica is less than
impressed by his lothario reputation, and as the two embark on a series of smart-mouthed
exchanges (which in the time-honoured tradition of screwball signal their inherent
compatibility rather than difference), Harry beseeches his doctor Julian (Keanu Reeves) to
‘Let me go back to the city!’ But it is only via enforced recuperation at the shoreline that
Harry is eventually able to find ‘rejuvenation’, to use Wearing’s (2007) term, of a sort that
the stream of young women in his life have failed to deliver.
We first see the sea, then, as Harry recovers from this brush with death. Julian advises
Harry that he will be ready for sex again once he can safely climb a flight of steps and we
soon cut to a shot of Harry at the bottom of a stairwell leading to the beach, looking
longingly up at its apex. Thus, the link between sexual (and later emotional) (re)
awakening and the recuperative powers of the ocean is made clear; the beach will
provide the backdrop not to yet another meaningless fling with an inappropriately young
woman for Harry, but to finding the woman who for the first time makes him
contemplate, he eventually admits to Erica in a moment of candour, the possibility of
‘soulmates’. Later, after Harry invites Erica for a walk we cut to them strolling on the
beach together, where their ‘sympatico’ fit is figured now not only by their verbal
sparring, but also by the shared colour palette of their beachwear. Mirroring each other in
neutral shades of white and sand, they are figured as at one, not just with each other, but
with the natural setting of the ocean that surrounds them. Immediately they seem freed to
become more candid with one another; Erica admits she has searched for Harry on the
Internet and is impressed by his many professional accomplishments. ‘It’s exhausting
just hearing about it’, he tells her. ‘I know’ she replies. ‘But the truth is it goes by fast,
doesn’t it’? she continues, suddenly serious. ‘In the blink of an eye’, he agrees. In this
small moment we sense a shift of pace, a recognition that they have more in common
than they might have cared to admit, but that here, on the beach, it seems right to
disclose. The two share a consciousness of time passing, and with it a certain
melancholy, that the beach both draws from them and allows them to acknowledge,
allowing their relationship to move into a newly honest territory – but with it bringing a
recognition of the essential impermanence of life.
Writer/director Nancy Meyers seems to deliberately signal her awareness of her use
of the beach setting in this way, when she has the two discuss what is happening to them
there. ‘I think our relationship is growing, have you noticed?’ observes Harry. ‘I’m
serious . . . now you may notice, interestingly, we’re walking back to toward the house
and it’s getting a little rocky again’. Later, the beach is used again to precipitate another
transition in their relationship, when it is after a storm breaks out over them picnicking
by the ocean that they run like giddy children back to the house and share their first kiss,
and first sexual encounter. Here, we would argue, Meyers deliberately releases an excess
of erotic and romantic signifiers in a reflexive play with the genre’s conventions: rain
pelts down, lightning crashes about them, a power cut necessitates that they surround
themselves with the flattering warmth of candlelight and, as the overtly sultry ‘I only
have eyes for you’ kicks in on the soundtrack, they share their first kiss before having
sex, ending a long period of celibacy for Erica we gather. Afterwards, Harry breaks what
has apparently been the habit of a lifetime to actually sleep with his new lover, and as we
cut the next day to the sight of new waves breaking on the shore, another revelation
614 D. Jermyn and J. McCabe

unfolds as the two insomniacs realize they have slept through a solid eight hours
together. Their idyll cannot last however; once Harry returns to Manhattan, in
compulsive fashion he foolishly goes on a dinner date with another woman only to be
spotted by Erica. The two separate, heartbroken – the city (for now at least), and with it
the return to old habits and engrained behavioural patterns, has broken the spell and
come between them.
Whether he realizes it or not, however, Harry has been changed irrevocably by his time
at the beach, and after more soul-searching, and making peace with his legions of
maltreated exes, he and Erica can finally reunite. The beach may long have been the
creative space Erica retreats to from the city to write, but she too has been altered by time
spent there with Harry. Now this space precipitates further candour with her daughter at
last also, when she tells Marin about her broken heart but says that nevertheless it was ‘the
time of her life’, beseeching her commitment-phobic daughter finally, ‘What are you
waiting for?’ Meyers can be understood as a director with both a deep affection and
nostalgia for classical genre film-making and a canny eye for utilizing these conventions in
ways which nevertheless speak to contemporary audiences (Wiggers 2010; Jermyn 2011).
The beach in Something’s Gotta Give exemplifies her ability to craft a knowing reworking
of romantic comedy, in ways which nevertheless feel reassuringly familiar. Here she takes
this enduring signifier in the landscape of romantic iconography, which is simultaneously
marked by our cultural preoccupation with the body beautiful and youthful exuberance,
and claims it as a melancholic yet inspiring space for her aged/ageing protagonists. Rather
than being rendered obsolete from the game of romance, here these older lovers find that
the beach prompts the kinds of revelation and honesty that has eluded them elsewhere, in
scenes in which mature couples (and mature women stars in particular) are rarely given
space to perform, proving once again the capacity for romantic comedy to offer
unexpected reflections on modern love.

Swept away: rom-com at the shoreline

Inherent within their playful yet still melancholic diversions to the shoreline, what these
films share is a sense of the genre’s (widely underestimated) capacity for a messy take on
love. In among the genre’s most cherished romantic exchanges and couples are countless
moments of awkwardness, shame and grief: Alvy’s realization that Annie will not return to
New York with him; Carol’s face when Melvin belittles her ‘housecoat’ on a date; Erica’s
bewilderment on finding Harry at dinner with another woman. For a genre so frequently
critically dismissed as simplifying, commercializing and propagating conservative
romantic ideology, the romantic comedy spends a remarkable amount of time
demonstrating how painful and damaging its processes are. The fact that all these films
centre on writer protagonists, who actively and artfully use their writing to recast or
enhance an idealized love story shown to be quite removed from their own actual
experience, demonstrates the genre’s reflexive capacity to both reproduce and question
romantic ideologies. Nowhere is this contradictory yet endlessly pleasurable cycle more
evident in contemporary rom-com than in its shoreline settings. The scenes explored here
are the ones which repeatedly speak to and satisfy our collective fantasy about
the restorative and romantic possibilities of the beach, yet all the while seem to
simultaneously underline the very insubstantiality of romantic myth. The beach offers an
alternate, redemptive space to the nascent lovers of rom-com, who can speak there with
honesty unfathomable elsewhere – but this is always, at the same time, a setting which by
its very nature reminds us of the transience of all things.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 615

Notes
1. Email: j.mccabe@bbk.ac.uk
2. MGM Home Entertainment DVD release, package design copyright 2006 Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer Studios Inc.

Notes on contributors
Deborah Jermyn is Reader in Film and Television at University of Roehampton. Among her books,
she is author of Sex and the City (2009) and co-editor of Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in
Contemporary Cinema (2009), and her work on rom-coms has appeared elsewhere in CineAction
and Celebrity Studies.
Janet McCabe is Lecturer in Film, Television and Creative Industries at Birkbeck, University of
London. She edits Critical Studies in Television and has written widely on feminism, film and
television. She has co-edited several collections, including Reading Sex and the City (2004), and her
latest works include The West Wing (2012) and TV’s Betty Goes Global: From Telenovela to
International Brand (2013, co-edited with Kim Akass).

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