Rom-Com Metamorphosis: On Lust, Laughs, and the Ben Affleck Canon
To reclaim that romcom feeling, we may first have to break out of the genre.
Rom-coms don’t hit like they used to. The cause may seem obvious: the golden age of the Meg Ryan cinematic meet-cute-iverse is long over, Nancy Myers is finally slowing down, and studios are increasingly dumping all their coins into reheated intellectual property soup, mostly of the action/adventure variety. Or at least that’s how it feels.
But I don’t think it’s that simple. I’d argue there’s a rom-com resurgence afoot. A new era built on the backs of Zoey Deutch, Christina Milian, and Bowen Yang (I’m manifesting that last one — Fire Island was such a delight). Yet something’s not right. Whether it’s attention atrophy, dystopia-induced numbness, or the jaded exhaustion that comes with aging, watching Netflix’s newest star-packed rom-com leaves me feeling emptier than before. It’s like I’m chasing an early aughts dragon, one that cannot be replicated with budget, cast, or whatever flavors of nostalgia juice are hoisted on the menu. So perhaps the answer I’m chasing isn’t “OG rom-com verisimilitude” but rather “a sum of parts that scratch a rom-com itch.” And this my friends, is where hope begins. To reclaim that romcom feeling, we may first have to break out of the genre.
The Qualms
Before we dive into some alternative paths to rom-com-brain, let’s take a quick peek at the genre. According to NPR, what makes a rom-com is “1. a plot centered around a love story, 2. more laughs than cries, and 3. a complete collapse if the love story were to be removed.” Sure, sounds great, no arguments here. But my issues with 97% of current rom-coms are much simpler: 1. there is no rom, and 2. there is no com.
On the first point, one would think including believable romance in a love story would be a given, but oooh baby, it is not. For example, this year, I watched 23 Hallmark and Hallmark-adjacent romcoms and exactly zero of the leads had anything except siblings-kissing energy, and that includes the two I choked down where the leads are married in real life. This problem is not exclusive to TV-G-rated films either. It’s a wide-reaching rom-com problem. Tension? Nonexistent. Relationships? Unearned. Horny-meter? Not even plugged in.
The comedy part of the rom-com fares similarly poorly. I can’t help but feel like even rom-coms with prestige comedy casts (e.g. Meet Cute or You People) were written by an algorithm consisting of nothing but Lyft product placement and whatever was sitting on the Buzzfeed servers in 2014. This is not me saying “nothing is funny anymore.” Abbott Elementary is beating rom-coms at their own game without even trying. Insecure had zero problems making jokes and being horny. It’s like the second we enter the framework of a 90-minute film, romance and comedy become mutually exclusive.
But what if we look outside the rom-com canon? In thinking about films that do “at least moderately spicy and at least one (1) laugh well, melodrama might be our answer. Deep Water, the seminal entry into the Ben Affleck oeuvre, is my platonic ideal here. It’s the type of film that has everything I actually want when I think I want a rom-com — spice! hilarity! a bonus element that for now, I’ll just call cultural lore! Using Deep Water as a blueprint, we can access an entire world of rom-drams on paper that become rom-coms on screen. There’s a lot going on here, so let’s unpack.
The Rom
My general opinion is that most movies made for adults could benefit from an extra dose of horniness. By this, I do not mean boobs-a-blazing, a parade of dick prints, or whatever else you might see on the average episode of Too Hot To Handle. I’m merely talking about even a little sexual chemistry. Deep Water pulls this off on several levels that we can learn from in seeking out other flavors of frisson.
On a baseline level, Ana de Armas does whatever actors do to make us believe she is actually interested in having sexual relations (albeit precarious ones) with Ben Affleck. And then she does it again with Brendan C. Miller, Jacob Elordi, and some other guy named Martin. Maybe Ana de Armas is just extremely believable as someone who fucks, but Deep Water also benefits from allowing these relationships/situationships the space to simmer. All those little glances and naughty bits of intrigue add up to an Esther Perel fever dream of enigmatic sexual tension.
If de Armas eye-boning all the young men in town in front of her husband doesn’t do it for you, Deep Water also offers a more twee bit of romance. Yes, I’m talking about Ben Affleck and the manic-pixie-dream girl relationship he shares with his snails. Ben is “not like other boys” and the only sentient beings who truly understand him are the snails he breeds in his garage. Much like Patricia Highsmith’s own fascination with the creatures (there are reports of her bringing her gastropod pals to parties as well as smuggling “six to ten of [them] under each breast” each time she went to France), Affleck’s snail-fancier mode of existing is steeped in passion. He’ll do anything for those snails, even federal crimes. Hot!
The Com
I am not going to attempt to convince you that Deep Water is a comedy. But rather, if we were to make a Venn diagram between melodrama and comedy, it would often just be a single circle. To put it differently, when I am in my darkest moments, I typically struggle to feel joy in the traditional sense. I have learned that often, the backdoor to that joy is gleeful disdain — whatever flavor of absurdism that gets me howling at the TV.
In some ways, the comedy in melodrama can be credited to the “making strange of the familiar.” Deep Water does exactly that. It’s not just the old-timey town and the fact that no one really has a job, aside from Affleck and his retirement from war-mongering. It’s the uncanny valley of it all. The lack of normal human motivation and behavior — but only by a hair. It's part fantastical derealization, part absurdist surrealism. It’s also just a whole lot of camp.
Looking at Deep Water through the lens of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” we can see how it works as a backdoor comedy. Without writing an entire essay just on this point, Deep Water shines as a camp artifact because of its: “seriousness that fails, emphasized glamour and theatricality, exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms that go against the grain of one’s sex, ability to see everything in quotation marks, and finally, its naivete — camp which knows itself to be camp is less satisfying.” After all, “the whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious.” Success!!
Also, I repeat: the snails.
The BenAna Bomb
There is a final element in Deep Water that amplifies its triumph in both the rom and the com categories: IRL drama. Specifically, the kind of IRL drama that begs the question, “when two stars move their onscreen smooching offscreen, could said smooching and subsequent relationship media frenzy be considered its own romcom?” Where does one performance end and another begin? Because in the case of Deep Water, there was indeed a rom-com within a “rom-com.”
In case Don’t Worry Darling’s seemingly endless cast feuds, divorce envelopes, and salad-dressing drama reclaimed the part of your brain that stores on-set celeb gossip, let’s rewind to early 2020. For ages before the release of Deep Water, Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas were photographed everywhere stirring up buzz. They laughed, they posed, they drank an amount of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee that should have been investigated by the spon-con squad at the FTC. Of course, BenAna eventually broke up and a life-sized cardboard cutout of de Armas was spotted in Affleck’s dumpster shortly thereafter. A flawless rom-com arc if I do say so myself. The snail on top of the shitshow. A+!
If you’re looking to explore this rom-com metamorphosis in your own time, I’ve prepared a study guide. Other films I’d argue fit into the RomDram-to-RomCom-with-bonus-IRL-cultural-lore micro-genre include: The Place Beyond The Pines, Don’t Worry Darling, any entry in the Fast & Furious franchise, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Mad Max: Fury Road, Magic Mike, Twilight, Jennifer’s Body, and basically any movie where Ben Affleck or Blake Lively receive top billing (Gigli, Daredevil, Age of Adeline, A Simple Favor, Green Lantern, etc.)
Olivia Crandall is a writer whose work can be found in places like Vulture, Gossamer, Bustle, InStyle, Dirt, and her silly little newsletter,
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I loved this and I think you are exactly right. Forget the genre. Look for the elements in any story, a good story about anything else. I used to love romcoms but I thought I'd, as you put it, "aged out" of them. (Now that's a sad statement, I guess). What I was really missing were the elements you laid out so crisply and intelligently. Example of a one that recently reminded me of why I like a good rom com: Four to Dinner, an Italian movie I found on Netflix.