James Wolcott has a nice riff off of David Denby’s essay in the recent New Yorker. Though I’m not a huge Denby fan, in general, I think everyone’s being a bit harsh on the essay, which was actually pretty good. Still, I always enjoy Wolcott taking the piss out of the various pillars of the media establishment, and Wolcott knows his shit, so …
Who knew that an essay by David Denby could induce more than groggy nods from readers fortunate enough to make it across the finish line? Yet his New Yorker "Critic at Large" cogitation-lamentation on romantic comedy in the gastrointestinal era of Judd Apatow has incited quite a salon exchange over at Emily Gordon’s Emdashes, with Katha Pollitt dropping into the comments section to reiterate her recoil at Seth Grogen and the stunted, grubby man-boyhood of Knocked Up.*
My problem with Denby’s essay, apart from the yawning obviousness of some of the complaints he lodges our cinematic fall from grace, is his definition of the essential message of the genre.
"Romantic comedy is entertainment in the service of the biological imperative. The world must be peopled. Even if the lovers are past child-rearing age or, as in recent years, don’t want children, the biological imperative survives, as any evolutionary psychologist will tell you, in the flourishes of courtship behavior."
I haven’t run into any evolutionary psychologists lately but the go-forth-and-multiply edict from The Taming of the Shrew that Denby puts in patriarchal italics doesn’t seem to me to explain in the tiniest bit the appeal or urgency of classic romantic comedies, where if anything the biological imperative seemed to have been suspended, put on hold, magically arrested. Does watching Astaire and Rogers swan together across the dance floor make anyone think of replenishing the species? Does anyone think of Hepburn’s tremulous antics with Cary Grant as a preliminary stage to motherhood? It ruined the fun–the floating illusion–of The Thin Man series once Nick and Nora produced offspring. The world has managed to repopulate for millennia without recourse to Hollywood-style romance or wisecracking comedy (though these obviously make life and civilization more bearable), so maybe the underlying DNA for the genre isn’t as universalist as Denby believes.
Also, as a nice bonus, here’s a scene that didn’t make it into the theater version of Knocked Up:
