Loading...
Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Alongside Netflix’s algorithm-driven revival of escapist neo-traditional romcoms, an edgier realm of “radical romantic comedy” (Jeffers McDonald 2007) re-emerging on this and other streaming platforms complicates both the genre’s boundaries and its imagining of couple formation. Sci-fi and paranoid thriller premises differentiate these recent radical romcoms from the neo-traditional versions of the genre typically labeled “chick flicks,” even as this genre hybridization foregrounds corporate-controlled technoculture’s increasing reach into and regulation of our romantic lives and libidos. Whether imagining escape from AI-enabled surveillance and profiling (Made for Love, 2021; Run, 2020); escape to personal and professional liberation (Love & Anarchy, 2020; I’m Your Man, 2021); or escape through alternative realities and selves (Palm Springs, 2020; The One I Love, 2014), radical romcom’s lovers on the lam attempt to slip the spatiotemporal and psychosocial shackles that confine and define neoliberal subjects. Skeptically appraising conventional romcom’s complicity in promoting neoliberal narratives of “the happiness duty” (Ahmed 2010) and “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), these radical romcoms refute the genre’s promise of social integration, and attendant emotional and material prosperity, through coupling. Scrutinizing romcom’s “happily ever after” through the sci-fi/paranoid thriller’s dystopian lens, these radical romcoms plus four Black Mirror episodes (“Striking Vipers,” 2019; “Hang the DJ,” 2017; “San Junipero,” 2016; “Be Right Back,” 2013) represent partners(ships) attempting to outrun and outmaneuver neoliberal subjectification, imagining escape routes towards alternative relationship models that become ever more urgent as our social contract crumbles.
Reinventing Romcom: Escaping Partners(hip) en Route to Emancipation from Neoliberal Subjectivity
Alongside Netflix’s algorithm-driven revival of escapist neo-traditional romcoms, an edgier realm of “radical romantic comedy” (Jeffers McDonald 2007) re-emerging on this and other streaming platforms complicates both the genre’s boundaries and its imagining of couple formation. Sci-fi and paranoid thriller premises differentiate these recent radical romcoms from the neo-traditional versions of the genre typically labeled “chick flicks,” even as this genre hybridization foregrounds corporate-controlled technoculture’s increasing reach into and regulation of our romantic lives and libidos. Whether imagining escape from AI-enabled surveillance and profiling (Made for Love, 2021; Run, 2020); escape to personal and professional liberation (Love & Anarchy, 2020; I’m Your Man, 2021); or escape through alternative realities and selves (Palm Springs, 2020; The One I Love, 2014), radical romcom’s lovers on the lam attempt to slip the spatiotemporal and psychosocial shackles that confine and define neoliberal subjects. Skeptically appraising conventional romcom’s complicity in promoting neoliberal narratives of “the happiness duty” (Ahmed 2010) and “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), these radical romcoms refute the genre’s promise of social integration, and attendant emotional and material prosperity, through coupling. Scrutinizing romcom’s “happily ever after” through the sci-fi/paranoid thriller’s dystopian lens, these radical romcoms plus four Black Mirror episodes (“Striking Vipers,” 2019; “Hang the DJ,” 2017; “San Junipero,” 2016; “Be Right Back,” 2013) represent partners(ships) attempting to outrun and outmaneuver neoliberal subjectification, imagining escape routes towards alternative relationship models that become ever more urgent as our social contract crumbles.
Bio
Maria San Filippo is an associate professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College, and is editor of New Review of Film and Television Studies. She authored the Lambda Literary Award-winning The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television (2013) and Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media (2021), both published by Indiana University Press, and edited the collection After ‘Happily Ever After’: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age (Wayne State University Press, 2021). She recently completed a Queer Film Classics volume on Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior (2014) to be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. She is a 2021-22 Fulbright U.S. Scholar in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.