Monday, October 28, 2013

First Comes Love



For my presentation to Pop Culture works I will be pitching a romantic comedy that takes elements of the classical romantic comedy and aspects of radical romantic comedies. First Come Love is a story that focuses on a somewhat nontraditional couple trying to make sense of themselves and their relationship in the 21st century.  The female, Maggie, is a 24 year old college student and the male, Daniel, is a 47 year old student of life and theatre technician. This couple is trying to make their way through life in the disorder of the new world and find comfort in themselves as people. The male will be played by George Clooney and the female by Jennifer Lawrence and it takes place in 2013 in Los Angeles over a year period. It goes through the trials and tribulations of the two main characters during this year.  By the end, the characters still do not fully understand everything about themselves, but through the examination of their relationship, they are on step further down their journey of life.

The movie is set up as a traditional romantic comedy in that the girl and the boy end up together at the end, but it also has aspects of the radical romantic comedy genre. Although there is the traditional ‘boy meets girl’ characteristic they are not the traditional boy and girl that one would expect to end up together and a couple that people may not want to end up together when they walk into the film. “As [a] romantic comed[y], [it] wants to bring about the happy union of a woman and man” but it is modern and radical in the sense that it is “beyond
 
the naivety” that their ending up together is the only outcome (McDonald 69). For the lead male character, this relationship takes a leap from his usual relationships with women and he finds himself feeling almost immature at the fact that he is in “an old fashioned love affair” full of traditional romance with such an unexpected woman (McDonald 68). He does not always know how to show his feelings because he is not used to the emotions he has with her. The lead female is also new to this type of relationship, never having fully committed to anyone due to insecurities and feelings of  self-consciousness, but finding herself in a situation that “seems too good to be true” (McDonald 68). They are both head over heels in love, but are still learning the ropes of how to express it.

This comedy will be more realistic than the traditional romantic comedy. It will use “more realistic language and discussion of sexual matters” focusing on both the male and female characters which is characteristic of the radical romantic comedy (McDonald 70). Along with the realistic language, the setting of the film will be used to create an “underlying sense of realism” by being set in a very recognizable Los Angeles (McDonald 71). Because Danny works in theatre and they are both lovers of art, many of their scenes will take place in identifiable places. The characters will be forced to go through much more serious situations like loss, death, issues of control, self-consciousness and more given their life in the chaotic new world disorder.

Both characters are influenced by the time in which they were born and grew up and are constantly struggling to understand each other from these varying points of view.  Danny was born in 1966. It was during this time that the Fordism of the old world order really began to experience problems that caused the shift to the new world disorder. He was born in a time of crumbling certainty where the life style and economic times of his parents were changing dramatically and he had to deal with this mixing of old and new worlds during his adolescence. Because of these “aims at multi skilling workers and eliminating rigid job demarcation lines” he grew up to be a jack of all trades (Barker 147). He does not rely on the idea of life time careers from the old world but its influence is still visible in his life. He has done many jobs throughout his life and relies on his ability to adapt to whatever a situation may need. For the past twenty years he has worked in theatre, which lends itself to this new sense of disorder. He started out building sets for shows, and worked his way up to scenic, light and sound design and has been the technical director for various theatres in Los Angeles. It is because of his adaptability that he has been so successful in his profession.

Maggie was born in 1989, well into the chaotic world of the 21st century. She has never known anything else than to be prepared in a world of certain uncertainty, increasing globalization, and service sectors. She is intuitively more tech savvy as she is a product of a world that has seen a “shift from industrial manufacturing to service industries centered in information technology” (Barker 150). She has often relied on technology for social interaction, but is trying to break free from that. Growing up in the ever changing world she has, our lead is often struck with cynicism and confusion about how to proceed with life and where her life will lead and can often be seen railing against this society she has been born into. She is completely aware of her generation and the generations before hers and often feels out of place in her world of disorder, which is one of the reasons why she finds herself in a relationship with someone closer to the world she thinks she wants.

Because of her inner conflict, Maggie is constantly struggling with her self-identity and social identity. One of the major character downfalls of the lead female is her self-deprecation and self-consciousness that stems from her lack of knowledge of self and her fractured identity. She often has differing views of herself, wanting to be and do conflicting things at the same time. She is a postmodern subject “assuming different identities at different times” and these identities “are not unified around a coherent self” (Barker 225). She can often be struck with the desire to run off and live a life of romantic partnership somewhere exotic and beachfront while simultaneously wanting to raise a family in a house with a white picket fence. Occasionally Danny gets frustrated with her constantly seeming to be driven by whims and consumerist ideals. This in turn makes her question her ‘self’ even more at times, not knowing if she has a core self or if she is simply a product of her disordered world.

Danny is far more concrete in his self-identity. He is more of an enlightenment subject. He is very rational and considers himself a “unique unified agent” “endowed with the capacities of reason, consciousness and action” (Barker 123). It is because of this strong sense of self-assuredness that Danny can often come off as arrogant. He is extremely confident in his abilities and who he is as a person, but he is also always changing and growing. The part of his life that is out of balance, in a similar way as Maggie’s self-identity, are his cultural practices. In the case of Maggie her self-identity is changing rapidly, but her cultural practices are relatively stable. Danny on the other hand has a fairly stable self-identity, but his “cultural and religious practices are changing” (Bader 261). Because of his relationship with Maggie, the way he relates cultural practices is different. For instance, Danny was never very big on holiday celebration or decoration but because it is something important to Maggie, he is changing the way he interacts with holidays by putting lights up during Christmas time and getting pumpkins for Halloween.

Danny deals with many things in his life in a modernist way, that is “with enlightenment rationality” and with a strong “belief in the objectivity of scientific investigation” (Flynn 141). He values rational thinking to work out problems as opposed to irrational whims or ideas that manifest without any practice and research. He can get very annoyed with people in his profession that have a lot of opinions about how things should be done, but with no knowledge or practice in the actual field they are speaking about. Despite these feelings of inadequacy towards certain people he has, he is a very patient person that strives to educate those around him. He usually internalize his stress and tries to make situations work without making a big scene, but this causes him to have a bunch of pent up stress that he must deal with at some point.

Despite this aspect of enlightenment that pervades Danny’s profession, there is also an element of romanticism in his personal life, especially in his relationship with Maggie. As much as he relies on science and rational thought, he is also an artist, musician and lover of truth and beauty who relies on “intuition, feeling, emotion and imagination” (Kendrick 133). Early on in their relationship both characters struggled over whether to follow their heads that said society might not approve and this might not be the easiest relationship, or their hearts that said they truly felt something for each other. One thing that they have both come to understand more fully is that “human behavior, creativity and even knowledge [is] found not in the head but in the heart” (Kendrick 133).

The characters also struggle with the societal consequences of language. Defining their relationship presents a problem. To define them in a structualist point of view depends entirely on the culture and the arbitrary relationship between the words themselves (signifier) and the ideas behind the words (signified). To the young Maggie, boyfriend/girlfriend sounds almost juvenile and she constantly has difficulty defining what they are in words. They way in which they live is like that of husband/wife, but that cannot be used either because it does not match the traditional signified meaning. She chooses to define them as ‘partners’ in an effort to articulately describe what they are and move away from the political connotations of the other terms. The traditional relationship of men and women is always political with one part of the binary inherently superior. In the case of these two the established, older, sure of himself male culturally and linguistically lords over the young, often floundering, still finding herself, young woman. She often tries to fight these ideas, but at the same time internalizes and finds comfort in them. Danny on the other hand has more of a post structuralist idea of how they relate to the language about their relationship. To him, the words are not as important because there is no sense of presence in the meaning of them; the meanings are unstable, as are the binaries involved. He sees words as able to “carry multiple meanings, including the echoes or traces of other meanings from other related words in other contexts” (Barker 86). There are often communication issues based on these different understandings of language that lead to humorous and heartfelt situations.

            Through this relationship the audience sees a denial of Foucault’s idea that disciplines regulate sexuality. By most academic discipline’s standards these characters go against the normalization that is created in an effort to keep society ordered. Based on society’s perceptions, of ‘normal’ this couple might be viewed as bad or immoral; the male being the creepy older man in a mid-life crisis lusting after a young woman, and the female would either be using her sexuality to find a sugar daddy or she has severe father issues. Many audience members may go into this film with these preconceived notions about right and wrong, moral and immoral, weird and normal, but when they finish the film they will be rooting for the couple and possibly questioning society’s standards.

            First Comes Love is an unconventional, radical romantic comedy about two people from different generations and with different world views. We see them struggling to make their unexpected love work in a chaotic and uncertain world and trying to understand themselves as independents and as a complete unit. Sometimes they are put down by society trying to normalize them, sometimes they are conflicted, and sometimes it would be easier to quit. Ultimately however, they know they are soul mates who will go through life in a constant battle trying to find peace. For them, love is worth it and will conquer all.
 
 
 
Works Cited
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 4th ed. London: SAGE, 2012. Print.
Bader, Viet. “Culture and Identity: Contesting Constructivism.” Ethnicities. 1, no. 2: 251-273.
Flynn, Elizabeth. "Rescuing Postmodernism." College Composition and Communication 48.4
            (1997): 540-55. JSTOR. Web. 25 Oct. 2013.
Foucault, Michel. "The History of Sexuality." N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. CSU Northridge. Web. 22
            Oct. 2013.
Kendrick, M. Gregory. The Heroic Ideal: Western Archetypes from the Greeks to the Present.
            Jefferson, NC: McFarland &, 2010. Print.
McDonald, Tamar Jeffers. "The Radical Romantic Comedy." Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets
            Girl Meets Genre. London: Wallflower, 2007. 59-84. Print.

 
 
 
 
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