Hopefully by now you’ve got a strong sense of who your characters are and some of the ways they see themselves and cope with life, as well as their deeper needs in terms of relationships. Perhaps you’ve even applied some psychoanalysis to their development, particularly in how their unconscious might work when it comes to relationships. Now your challenge is to shape and refine the story that this character or these characters have to lead because it’s true to who they are. Remember, in a romcom, character is love story in the broadest sense.
We want to share with you here an ideation-based approach to shaping character-driven story and structure in a romcom, classic or otherwise, that’ll hopefully inspire your visions and choices. At the heart of many romcom screenplays is a character arc – an emotional journey that the protagonist travels, very often from a need or a lack, to fulfilment. Although the most obvious first thing to consider when developing a film might be its plot, often the most important thing to work on first is its emotional journey. This is because it creates resonance in the audience and the characters, leaving them with a strong feeling about the themes and meaning of the story being told. So our approach essentially seeks to inspire your shaping of the emotional journey that your character will take.
STRUCTURE AND PLOT AS EMOTIONAL JOURNEY
As with any screenplay, one of the most important aspects of the romcom is structure. Structure refers to the architecture of a script – or, how story elements are put into place on the page. Structure doesn’t just mean plot – it also means structuring the emotional journey, or the character arc. It's also about structuring experience – making decisions about story design so that an audience will feel the story you want to tell. When you start to structure your romcom it can be very useful to think about the plot as a physical representation of the emotional journey. In short, orchestrate the emotion by plotting the action in relevant and meaningful ways. This will ensure that each time the action moves on, so does the character arc. The physical journey and emotional journey are intertwined, working with and for each other.
In Western culture, our films often have a clear ‘through-line’, firmly, though not always, establishing what the character wants and needs. Three-act structure has become a strong tradition within Western screenwriting for film, and there’s much to gain by learning about this. It should, however, be viewed as a creative, not a rigid, endeavour. Stories and their structures are getting more diffuse, experimental and exciting as advances are made in film, TV and online platforms. And so structure is about finding a form that works for your story, not a formula that has to be fulfilled no matter what. Like architecture, screenwriting can work best when a screenplay is developed from the inside out, starting first with the foundations (theme, character arc), then the skeleton (plot, supporting characters), and then adding the more colourful details later (voice, visual motifs).
In the traditional romantic comedy, the overall dramatic shape is about the chase. The two lovers work like protagonist and antagonist to one other, wanting yet rejecting each other. The dramatic goal of each is to be united with the other, and this often starts as a chase initiated by one side, eventually developing into mutual love. The inciting incident is relative to this goal – so, the two lovers meet and then ‘unmeet’ (reject one another, perhaps), and from this moment on the chase begins. The main drive of the story is related to the conflict between the two, where they and their worlds collide into, and react against, each other. The majority of the story is then characterised by conflict. Because of the comedic demands of the romcom, conflict provides humour and the audience laughs at the star-crossed lovers, cringing at the situations they see them in. The climax typically comes in the form of a reunion of the lovers, where, after a journey from bad to worse to unbelievable, a final event brings the two together. This can often be a mirroring of the inciting incident.
However, romcom now covers so many sub-genres and hybrids, and can be found on so many platforms other than film, that being governed by previous ‘rules of romcom’ can feel outmoded and there’s a good chance the old rules on structure won’t really help if your story isn’t the familiar boy/girl meets girl/boy.
The order in which information is given to an audience determines their emotional response to the story – tension, surprise, empathy, anger, hope, etc. At first your romcom might seem to have an obvious shape, but that’s only the start of things. The same idea can be told in many ways and for many effects – as with the list of sub-genres given above – so working with structure is a key part of discovering how to best express your story. Designing a finely tuned structure is like playing music, where you pluck at the heartstrings of the audience to create the right emotion.
As well as general plot and specific story beats, story design also includes considerations of visual storytelling (including recurring motifs and settings), world and theme. All of these are interwoven, of course, with theme sitting in the middle. Genre plays an important role in story design more broadly, and in story structure more specifically. This is because aspects such as dramatic shape, dramatic goal, inciting incident, conflict and climax all have their own audience expectations – and, as such, make demands on the screenwriter.
Deciding to use a recurring object as a motif (a love letter or a dating profile, for example) affects the plot, because you need to find meaningful points at which to use the object. Similarly, deciding on the plot your protagonist undertakes will dictate which settings would not only be credible for your scenes, but would also offer meaning, such as juxtaposition or tension. This is why structure is so important in screenwriting – and, to reiterate, understood in the sense of structuring experience.
QUICK INSIGHT
Gene Wayne Hart, a screenwriter and filmmaker who also runs a romantic comedy film club in Melbourne, Australia.
Attempted confessions
In 1954, Humphrey Bogart's Linus Larrabee gave a full confession to Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn) of the deception underpinning their courtship – a devious plan to protect the family business. Sabrina leaves him and returns to Paris.
But not all heroes have to show such honour and break off the relationship themselves. Probably your hero is a lying scumbag, pretending to be someone he's not, to win the girl. In the logic of a romantic comedy, this lie will have to be exposed somehow, and the hero will have to do penance for it. But how can your hero get out of this jam with honour?
When someone confesses to a crime after they've been caught, you can never be sure if they're sorry they committed the crime, or sorry they were caught. We want complications and obstacles in our romantic comedies. We want to punish our heroes. But we also want our heroes and heroines to be worthy of love. You can have it both ways with the attempted confession scene.
The mark of an honourable romantic hero is that, when everything's going well, he’s prepared to risk it all and come clean – the attempted confession. We know the hero’s a good guy, he tried to come clean, but the other characters don't know that and they punish him – the hero gets his just desserts, while showing that his heart was in the right place.
The best place for an attempted confession is about ten seconds before the hero is caught.
Let's take Wedding Crashers as an example. John is lying through his teeth to woo Claire. And he's succeeding. She's falling in love with him. Very dishonourable, wooing a girl under false pretences. But John knows it's gone too far, and he wants to come clean.
John and Claire are outside on the swing. While John is preparing to confess – the ‘there's something I need to tell you’ moment – Claire's fiancé is in the house receiving a phone call that exposes John for who he really is. Before John can get his words out, all hell breaks loose in the house, everyone rushes out, John is exposed and the fiancé punches him in the face. This creates something of an emotional paradox – we feel John should be punished for lying, and he is, but we know he was going to come clean, so we feel bad for him for being exposed in such a cruel way.
A variation on this is the misinterpreted confession, in which case the hero confesses but is misunderstood. There’s a particularly lovely version of this scene in The Hudsucker Proxy. Amy tries to explain to the dim-witted Norville that she's not a secretary, but an undercover reporter out to expose him. When she starts, Norville cuts Amy off to tell her that he knows she's not who she says she is – he's been aware for some time that she's not a very good secretary, but he won't tell anyone.
An important follow-up to the attempted confession is the acceptance of guilt. In Wedding Crashers, once exposed, John tries to explain himself, but seeing the hurt he has caused and knowing he's in the wrong, admits it without reservations when Rachel asks him if it’s true. He accepts that he was in the wrong and leaves.
Humphrey Bogarts are few and far between these days. More likely your hero is a lying scumbag and deserves what's coming. So give it to him. Just show us that his heart is in the right place first.
THE ASPIRATIONS, INTERVENTIONS AND OUTCOMES APPROACH
Thinking about the emotional journey that your protagonist will take can be seen in the form of a process where he/she/they have some kind of aspiration of the heart, and it’s the pursuit – active or passive, conscious or unconscious – of this that shapes and informs the journey. The aspiration encounters interventions – external and internal – that either help or hinder it, or something in-between. This process will have certain outcomes – some closed, some open, some good, some bad. You can see outcomes in terms of ‘resolution’ or ‘lessons’.
By thinking in terms of an aspiration, as opposed to a ‘goal’ or a ‘need’ – or even the well-known heroic quest metaphor of the Hero’s Journey – you’ll be engaging with the character’s conscious and unconscious world more actively in your writing from day one. It also means that you can introduce ambivalence, contradiction and other dynamics to your handling of the character’s aspiration. If you embrace this in thinking about your comedic love story, it’ll perhaps free up your ideation processes considerably as you’ll be rooting yourself in the messy matters of the heart from the outset. Also, aspirations in love come and go, are replaced by new ones, live alongside each other, and clash.
As you get to know your character better, you’ll undoubtedly be thinking – what does this person need to actually learn? The kinds of lessons you want them to take away by the end of the screenplay will start forming in your mind, so the next task is to work out – how are they going to learn them? Which situations, factors, people, places – i.e. interventions – are you going to give them?
The important thing is to see this as an emotional approach to story ideas – no rights, no wrongs, no rules and no preconceptions involved. Emotions defy logic, which is what makes them such fun to work with as screenwriters.
Let’s have a look at each of these aspects in more detail.
ASPIRATIONS
What you aspire to can be conscious, subconscious or unconscious. If the aspiration is conscious, the capability of the protagonist to actually achieve the romantic goal can go hand in hand with their blindspot! A clichéd example is the ugly or shallow chauvinist who thinks the size of his wallet means he can have the hottest girl. The tougher the blindspot, the harder they fall, like Hal in Shallow Hal. Or it can be very heartfelt and within reach. In romcoms, aspirations – depending on the sub-genre or hybrid – tend to boil down to three main categories, and many protagonists fit all three.
Yearning for togetherness
Yes, the most obvious! The character in the romcom wants, chases and/or represses the need for love. The conscious or unconscious aspiration, clear to the audience if not to the character, is that having intimacy or commitment with another will make them much happier, even if that seems totally unreachable for the character in terms of the emotional state they’re in now. Craving togetherness can also take the form of the loss of a loved one, such as in P.S. I Love You, where Holly is paralysed by grief when her Irish partner Gerry dies.
Fighting for autonomy
The character’s independence and achievement is their number one priority. This aspiration finds the character motivated to attach a lot of importance to their right to determine their own life, the right to live how they want, and to have everything on their terms. They’re ‘selfish’ to the extent that their selfhood is very motivating. Clearly, this can reflect good self-esteem, but extreme aspects can also reflect a compulsive desire to keep people at arm’s length because sharing and compromise feels threatening for some reason. It can also lead to loneliness.
Fighting for autonomy can take the form of a career, a very clear ambition, wanting to be alone, and commitment-phobia. Take Diane in chumcom Identity Thief – she’s a reckless, selfish criminal doing whatever she can to get money fast to support compulsive consuming. She’s out for herself, big time. Violet in The Five-Year Engagement loves fiancé Tom deeply, but she’s pretty career-orientated, pursuing an academic life in psychology that evolves as a clear aspiration over the five-year span. This is in stark contrast to Tom, who yearns for togetherness from the start, and this doesn’t really waver for him – the relationship comes first.
Craving healing
The protagonist has clear emotional wounds and some scar tissue that’s getting in the way of their emotional life moving forward smoothly. The aspiration is to feel better about themselves and life. Like all aspirations, it can be hopeless and remain conscious or unconscious. Take Annie in romantic sorocom/dramedy Bridesmaids – she’s craving for togetherness with a user-jerk and a best friend who’s about to disappear into marriage. But she’s also craving healing from a string of disappointments that probably started early in life with her parents’ divorce (only hinted at in the film), a failed cupcake business and poverty. However, romantic dramedies that take a character who’s suffering due to the loss of a loved one or a relationship, where the character ends up in a more resolved but still lonely state, are increasing, reflecting a truth that sometimes the happy ending comes from accepting and embracing a single life where emotional support comes from within and/or from a wider group of friends.
INTERVENTIONS
How is your character going to achieve their aspirations? You have to decide how conscious or unconscious they are of their aspiration, because it’ll substantially influence the interventions they encounter.
Internal conflicts
Your character’s primary problem in achieving their aspirations comes down to their personal set of neuroses or their internalised conflicts. The character who yearns for togetherness may feel deep down that they’re too fat, too ugly, too old or too dumb. It’s up to you to develop appropriate private fears and paranoias. This is the hardest work of character development (and backstory) because you have to a) decide what’s happened to the character to make them have these insecurities, and b) create the form these interior conflicts will take, so that they feel emotionally true to the character. Greed, arrogance, insensitivity, inappropriate loyalty, addiction… the list is endless. The point is, they’ll appear as interventions for your character’s journey during the course of your story.
The significant other/object of obsession
How you shape the ‘intervention’ of the significant other is up to you. Your romcom could be like Hope Springs, in which the meet cute has long been forgotten after years of increasingly unhappy marriage. Or Blue Jasmine, in which Jasmine turns up on her sister’s doorstep practically destitute and needing a home and retreat. The first meeting could be in a romantic flashback, as in The Five-Year Engagement. How the protagonist encounters the object of obsession serves as the kick-off to many romcoms, and poses the central question – how are these two going to find love with each other, or find happiness again, together or alone?
The significant other frequently embodies enough different qualities to generally explode, over the course of the journey together, the whole identity of the protagonist. You need to work out, from character development, the shape and form of these ‘significant other interventions’ in terms of personality, interaction, situations and experiences. What’s the central conflict created by the object of obsession, and what does this conflict reveal about the protagonist? Is it to do with emotional wounds – like a rejection the protagonist can’t deal with? Is it dependency on a teddy bear because they can’t move on, like in Ted? Or a lifelong bittersweet friendship arresting both parties’ development, like in Sideways?
Incompatible values
Love at first sight is more often a case of indifference or even repugnance at first sight in the romcom. Spending time together, appreciating each other, developing shared interests and having open communication are very often the results of a long battle campaign lasting the majority of the film between the two main characters. Fights, arguments and vendettas are meat and bones to the steamy broth of a romcom. Conflict isn’t only entertaining; it raises many active questions, such as, ‘How the hell are they going to end up together?’ The overall effect of the struggles between two people conveys to the audience a sense of the couple ‘earning’ compatibility through acceptance. No pain, no gain – or, more romantically speaking, the yin and yang of a union can be achieved. In marriage guidance counselling, it’s a common perception that the couple fighting have more of a chance than the couple that no longer gives a damn. A good example of this is Intolerable Cruelty.
Friends
Who are we without friends? What do our friends, or lack of them, say about us and our place in life? Who do we choose as friends, and why? What do they need? Ask your character these kinds of questions and work out how friendships feature in the story. The hooking-up-with-friends scenario in a romcom is very familiar. In dramedies, as we’ve seen, friendship is often the relationship that is under scrutiny, as in Frances Ha, who cannot get over the loss of her best friend. Rivalry, betrayal, bitterness, loyalty, fun and escapism – friends can serve the lot. Friends can also be outgrown, embarrassing reminders of our former selves.
In this age of Facebook, friends take on a rather wide and nebulous form as we and they – people we might not know well at all – share comments about what food we ate today, or how cute our child looks. The lonely guy, who aspires to fight for his autonomy due to commitment-phobia, inadequacy, crippling lack of confidence or any other ‘loser’ trait, but who craves healing deep down, might fall in love with a blow-up doll, an avatar, a fictional character or similar, as Lars and the Real Girl, Ruby Sparks and Her all depict. The ‘real buddies’ then take on a real intervention as they try to come to terms with what’s happening with their friend, accept the weirdness, and then help them get over it. In this sense, do friends serve as positive, negative or ambiguous interventions to the character’s aspirations?
Family
Family womb or family tomb? The family group, or just the odd relative, often features in romcoms, sometimes to indicate why the protagonist is the way they are, but equally often to act as an obstacle to be overcome. The family can have a symbolic energy in heterosexual classic romcoms, as if representing the purpose of love – to unite and create a new family, extending the tribe. Sometimes family is a retreat – somewhere the protagonist can return to, to lick their wounds, only to discover that it’s a false retreat. In Failure to Launch, Tripp doesn’t want independence – he needs an intervention to man up and deal with his permanently regressive state, which prevents him from getting a life and forming relationships.
Ultimately we all have to leave the nest and create our own lives. The nature of family connections and the expectations we have of family members are inevitably defined by the wider culture the characters belong to. Some romcoms are firmly rooted in the world of work, which completely dominates the action as intervention on the aspiration, particularly hybrids like Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (fisheries in the desert), This Means War (espionage) and Caramel (a Lebanese beauty salon).
Work and colleagues
Work – or lack of it – is central to your protagonist’s identity. Why have they chosen to do what they do? Is work satisfying to them? How does it support or conflict with the central relationship of the romcom? Does the object of their affection/obsession belong to the working world, or is it threatened by the protagonist’s job? Work can be a huge interventionist threat to obtaining love or a better sense of identity in the romcom.
In The Five-Year Engagement, the resolution of the couple’s problems is seemingly achieved at the end by Violet giving up her academic career to serve gourmet fast food created by her ex-chef husband, out of a truck, causing feminist critics’ hackles to rise. He’s previously given up his top job to back her career, so there’s also a message that a lifelong commitment requires an equal level of compromise in a relationship. In real life, of course, conflicting work demands are often a major cause of break-ups.
Rites of commitment
Dates, stag nights, hen parties, births, birthdays, weddings, funerals and even divorces provide frequent interventions in the romcom, reflecting back on the protagonist and how ‘ready’ they are to accept the responsibility of commitment to another person – or to themselves. The bad date symbolically reflects the work that has to be done by the protagonist in terms of open communication, being honest with themselves and others, trust, and – most fundamentally – the ability to accept being loved.
The guys in romantic bromedy Wedding Crashers trash the meaning of commitment by lying and screwing their way through the wedding season, reflecting their need to grow up. If your character’s aspiration is yearning for togetherness, but she finds herself always the bridesmaid, never the bride, then work’s going to have be done (27 Dresses and Baggage Claim) to break the pattern. Alternatively, if the character’s aspiration is career success, like Ryan in Up in the Air, he’s not going to make much time for special celebrations that bring people closer.
LESSONS
What does aspiration plus intervention equate to in the romcom? The answer is life and love lessons. Obviously, as your character has their own unique set of aspirations, the lessons they learn are also going to be unique and ‘right’ for them – and it’s your job to define the most essential lessons that this character must learn. Most often, this is to become a whole functioning person able to love another, or themselves, a whole lot better. He or she will develop increased emotional intelligence, some degree of personal growth, and hopefully an increased capacity to feel happiness, with the ability to give and take loving feelings right on top! If you remember the degree of misery your protagonist feels at the beginning of the romcom, it usually takes a steep learning curve to get them to this better place. Your job is to plan those lessons!
Below are some ‘lessons’ that you can explore in relation to your character. Remember, depending on your theme and tone the character might actually not be able to go the distance and learn the lesson – despite the numerous interventions you’ve given them. But for feel-good purposes, to which most romcoms aspire, the vast majority of protagonists bite the bullet and meet the challenges you’ve set for them. It’s sometimes far more effective to give a secondary character the role of being bad emotional student!
Sharing
The most popular lesson in the romcom is where the character learns the ability to share – their life, their heart, their bodies, their thoughts, their money and their time. Being in a relationship requires some degree of letting someone in to occupy central space. This is pretty hard to do in real life, let alone for the romantic comedy character. In famromcom 2 Days in New York, Mingus has to share his partner Marion with her maddening French relatives. In Notting Hill, Anna has to share her private life with William, after being accustomed to masking herself for the press. In Leap Year, Anna and Declan have to share their unhappiness with life in order to find their true selves, and then true love with each other.
Trust
Up there with sharing, trust is an important lesson in the romcom. Trusting another with your emotions, your vulnerabilities and your most private truth is a huge and often seemingly insurmountable lesson for many romcom characters. Learning to verbalise that trust, alongside showing it, takes courage. Again, in Leap Year Declan has to trust Anna in order to grieve for his late wife – and once he can do that, he’s symbolically reborn and then able to move on.
Fundamental to trust is being able to be genuinely truthful, with yourself and with others. Many romcoms show the ongoing suffering of protagonists who simply can’t face the truth – about their own problems, their responsibility for these, and their need to move on.
Self-esteem
Self-love and self-respect are life-changing lessons in the romcom – and the hardest. Protagonists who finally appreciate and value themselves, like Annie in Bridesmaids and Muriel in Muriel’s Wedding, have a far better chance of getting the guy or the girl, and being happy with them.
Being alone and letting go
Some characters learn that being alone isn’t a terrible thing, in fact, and that it’s a small price to pay. At the end of I Love You Phillip Morris, Steven faces the consequences of his unbelievable crime spree – being locked in solitary for multiple life sentences. He’ll die alone for wanting love, even if we know that he’s not going to give up trying. Brooke and Gary in The Break-Up gain real closure without continued rage and resentment for each other. By finally achieving closure in an adult fashion they’re finally able to move on with dignity.
Courage
Learning to put yourself out there and take risks is a big lesson in the romcom. Having the maturity and bravery to face rejection, to take on responsibility for others, to lose material possessions, to metaphorically walk over coals for the one you love, and to stand up for your rights – in love and in the world – are all great lessons in a protagonist’s life.
Life isn’t fair
The wise character in the romcom has learnt not to pursue empty goals that they’ll never win, or the ones that’ll ultimately make them unhappy. There might be some residual regret, but the protagonist will be able to walk away knowing that it just wasn’t meant to be. They basically don’t want what they can’t have. Muriel in Muriel’s Wedding does this, when she realises that she’s been leading such a fake life that she must accept who she is for now without the need for a man – and instead embrace her friendship with Rhonda.
Living in the moment
The resolved romcom protagonist generally exudes a kind of spiritual inner calm. A plateau of self-acceptance and spirituality has been reached in the character’s mind, as if they’ve gained a window onto the secret of genuine happiness. Tim in About Time manages to genuinely live in the moment, to appreciate each day and, most fundamentally, to give all of himself to each and every moment.
Feeling joy
Romcom protagonists can actually start out as a fairly miserable bunch of people! They chase empty dreams, sabotage relationships, hate themselves, hurt others, are envious, jealous, addicted and screwed up, and generally exude ‘loser’ in one or several areas of their life. An enormous number have so much emotional baggage that they’ve forgotten the ability to feel and to immerse themselves in pure unadulterated joy. Remember the Greek peasant in Mamma Mia!, dumping her sticks? That’s the feeling you want your overburdened protagonist to be able to feel – permission to be happy. Shedding the load, and feeling light in spirit and in heart, is a major achievement for these protagonists. It makes all the interventions a price worth paying!
EXERCISE – Creative interventions
Brainstorm all the issues your protagonist has in their life – with themselves, their work, their family and the object of their obsession.
Select the top three problems in order of importance to the character in the time frame of the story.
Try to work out a backstory that would logically and illogically (these are emotions, after all!) justify these difficulties. Ask yourself, ‘What’s the obvious way to heal these problems?’
Now work out a series of ‘interventions’ in the story that would test and challenge these problems, and ones that would make them more manageable.
Here’s an example:
Issue – Envy of best friend/female boss (Aspiration = Craving Healing)
Cause – Problems with mother/sister rivalry, displaced onto best friend/female boss
Intervention – Best friend gets a better job. Protagonist gets sacked/is ditched by boyfriend. Protagonist meets someone worse off than herself. Protagonist loses friend altogether. Protagonist discovers a talent.
QUICK INSIGHT
Honourable Intentions
Gene Wayne Hart
I remember a friend saying, after a romantic movie, ‘Oh that's never going to last, she'll see through him and go back to her husband.’ That's the last thing you want someone to say after you've spent two hours trying to convince them that your hero and heroine belong together!
Hopefully your entire narrative, all the conversations the hero and heroine have had, all the fighting and making up, will prove that they should be together. But one trick you can employ, to make us root for the hero, is the honourable intentions scene.
In There's Something About Mary, Ted chases his long-lost love Mary. Since he can't stop thinking about Mary, Ted hires private detective Pat Healy to track her down. Healy finds Mary and discovers why Ted is still in love with her – she's beautiful! And he's not the only one – the film is full of Mary's suitors. So how do we know Ted is the right one for Mary?
When Healy reports that Mary is no longer the dream girl Ted's been pining for all these years, Ted’s shattered. At this stage it seems that Ted was only interested in rekindling a flame with a beautiful girl who got away. Nothing heroic about that. But the next day, Ted comes back to Healy and says, ‘I've been thinking about what you said, and I still want to look her up.’ And there it is, the honourable intentions scene. That's the moment we know he's the one for Mary. It doesn't matter if Mary is overweight, in a wheelchair, poverty-stricken or has a bunch of kids to different fathers – he still wants to find her.
Now we know his feelings are real, we desperately want Ted to find out what we already know – that Healy was lying. And when, a couple of scenes later, Ted finds out the truth and decides to go to Miami to win Mary back, we know he's doing it because his heart is in the right place, and not just because Mary's ‘still a fox’.
As the film progresses, Ted emerges as a worthy hero full of honourable intentions. He confesses to his deceptions, exposes the other suitors, and even withdraws from the contest to nominate Mary's ex-boyfriend, Brett, as her true love. But it’s the much earlier honourable intentions scene that puts us on his side.
Compare this with the film The Heartbreak Kid. Eddie has just married the beautiful Lila, only to discover she's not the girl of his dreams. Over the first few days of the honeymoon, Lila proves herself to be a grab bag of annoying traits and disappointments – everything from a massive drug debt to singing along with the radio too loudly.
But Lila's not trying to annoy Eddie, she's just being herself. Her heart’s in the right place and we feel for her. She apologises over and over again, always trying to make the relationship work. Eddie, on the other hand, is never honest with Lila. He never reveals his true feelings. All attempts to start afresh come from Lila, while Eddie takes every available opportunity to remain distant and to avoid saying what's on his mind. Even when he's trying to break up with her, he's so equivocal that Lila misinterprets the break-up as an even bigger commitment to the marriage.
Though the film’s hilarious, we’re never on Eddie's side the way we are on Ted's, and when Eddie finally breaks up with Lila and has a chance with new love Miranda, we can leave the cinema wondering if it’ll work out, or if Eddie’s doomed to heartbreak.
CASE STUDY: Silver Linings Playbook
Silver Linings Playbook is an emotional rollercoaster of a romantic dramedy/famcom, which shows the upward struggle of bipolar sufferer Pat to gain control of his mental stability. Character-driven and unpredictable, with a charismatic cast of characters and set in a diverse Baltimore community, the film gives an intimate yet entertaining study of a man who’s painfully in denial about the loss of his wife. Pat’s lack of balance seriously jeopardises his future happiness, and he faces numerous ‘interventions’ on a long journey back to recovery.
Aspirations
Yearning for Togetherness – For the vast majority of his emotional journey, Pat’s controlled by a superego defence mechanism of a total inability to face the fact his wife Nicky has left him – and for good. Pat has been incarcerated in a psychiatric institution after losing all control when he found Nicky having sex with a ‘history teacher with tenure’ in his shower, as their wedding song Cherie Amour was playing. This was a catalyst for a complete breakdown, as Pat, we learn, has coped with undiagnosed bipolar and delusional symptoms for most of his life. Pat’s conscious aspiration isn’t either a helpful or a truthful one, holding him in a state of arrested emotional development.
Craving Healing – To his family, it’s obvious that Pat’s still borderline out of control, and that he still needs help. When Tiffany meets him, she mistakenly believes he’s better than he is, but is soon disappointed that he’s still totally stuck. To the audience, Pat’s vulnerability is heart-wrenching and we long to see what form the recovery will take. Pat himself wants to heal, but is going the wrong way about it.
Interventions
Interventions in Silver Linings Playbook are exactly that – everyone connected to Pat wants to help him get better and so take actions, and create situations that they think will help.
Inner conflict – Not being able to control his delusions or outbursts, particularly those triggered by stress, seriously upsets Pat to the extent that ‘the Nicky delusion’ can be seen as a coping mechanism that he needs to outgrow. If he can get himself well, he’ll prove to both himself and her that he’s a better man. The trouble is that this is completely inappropriate. He jogs relentlessly, wearing the ‘protection’ of a bin liner in order to make himself sweat, which also reflects his low opinion of himself – that which he can’t admit – as trash. He refuses medication. ‘Excelsior’ is an important intervention for Pat, a word he clings to that symbolises the supremacy of positivity that will lead to the silver lining moments he also believes in. The trouble is, his faith and conviction are all totally misplaced.
The restraining order preventing Pat from seeing Nicky is also an intervention imposed by the court, but one that he tries to evade. Pat has to attend therapy with caring Dr Patel, a ‘formal’ intervention that also challenges and tests Pat’s fragile world view and self-delusion.
Significant Other – Tiffany is a damaged woman herself whose husband died on the streets. She carries guilt for his death – he was off to buy her sexy underwear to revive their sex life when he was killed – and this resulted in a sex spree at work, followed by her getting the sack. She’s trying to forgive herself. She instantly sees the potential for an equal in Pat – someone who’s been to the dark side and acquired an honesty – and she aspires to get close to him.
She’s shocked to learn how damaged he still is, and how far he has to go to forget Nicky. Essentially, Tiffany represents a potential soulmate but only if Pat can do the right work on himself and heal. She’s brutally honest and confronting, something he hates initially but also needs. She offers to fulfil his obsessional need – to get a letter to Nicky – but only if he becomes her dance partner. It’s the dance lessons that bring them together, physically and mentally, and this nurturing and intense process begins to loosen the grip of Pat’s delusion.
Friends and Family – Pat’s father, Patrizio, a bookie and football fan, suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder, and also has a history of no self-control. His own mental health has influenced Pat’s functioning. Father and son both provoke and challenge each other, leading to a huge family fight which serves as a turning point for Pat as he now has no choice but to go back on his medication or return to hospital. Pat’s mother, Delores, the ‘oak’ holding the family together, is the one who actively saves her son from eight months of institutionalisation, only to live on tenterhooks in case a clearly unstable Pat makes her regret her decision.
It’s the parents who originally support Tiffany ‘ambushing’ Pat on his manic jogs to get and stay fit for Nicky. They intervene to help him move on. Danny, another patient and best friend to Pat, intervenes when Pat and Tiffany are rehearsing. By showing Pat how to dance with passion, Danny triggers jealousy and possessiveness towards Tiffany in Pat . Eventually, Patrizio’s reckless gambling produces a high-stakes intervention to win back money he’s lost. He creates a ‘parlay’ – a double gamble that the Phillies will win a football game, and that Tiffany and Pat will score five at the dance competition. Pat now has to prove his responsibility to himself and others.
Lessons
The tone of Silver Linings Playbook is predominantly compassionate and feel-good, and the lessons that Pat learns reinforce our faith that love, support, family and community can help an almost unreachable person to get better.
Genuine Emotion – Pat learns that he’s able to express genuine and truthful emotions. Without medication, he was too manic to actually learn anything. Back on medication, he’s calm enough to begin the journey of healing. He feels many things – his family’s love; remorse that he’s so difficult; empathy and sympathy for Tiffany; the need to protect her; the desire to be truthful; and, last but not least, love based on care and respect. He can actually see another human being, not his own projected idealised other.
Self-esteem – Pat’s self-esteem grows through his commitment to a responsibility to Tiffany, and by sticking to a rigorous dance rehearsal routine. His father also shows genuine love and remorse towards him, for spending more time with Pat’s older brother in their childhood. Pat is able to feel loved and accepted by his family. He’s also able to forgive himself, his father, and Nicky.
Letting Go – When Pat finally discovers the truth – that a letter he has received via Tiffany from Nicky was actually written by Tiffany, who’s been lying to him all along – he’s able to finally release himself from the power of his self-delusion. Not only does the letter show how much Tiffany cares for him – because she’s written caring and tender words about him – he’s also confronted with his own lies. We see him able to see Tiffany for the amazing woman she is – and whom he’s fallen in love with. At the dance competition Pat finally sees Nicky, who’s brought along by Tiffany’s destructive sister, Veronica. He’s able to see how far he’s come as he no longer desires the woman who obsessed him, but can hold on to and protect his real feelings for Tiffany. He has found the courage to let go and move on.
Feeling Joy – When Pat and Tiffany perform at the competition, they exude sexiness, desire, freedom and true jubilation. The dance celebrates Pat and Tiffany’s deep connection and journey to heal each other. After the dance, Tiffany mistakes Pat’s whispering to Nicky as a sign she’s lost him forever, when really he is telling her (we assume) that he’s finally moved on. Pat rushes out to find Tiffany, chasing after her, which is a symbolic reversal of all her jogging ambush ‘interventions’. Pat tells her he loves her, and they finally kiss. The final scene with the family shows Pat and Tiffany ensconced in each other’s arms as Delores, Patrizio and Danny hang out happily. These scenes of union celebrate the long road Pat has travelled to experience genuine happiness.
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