Rom-coms deny online love
FOR a comedy to be romantic, it needs a meet-cute. Part of what makes such a meeting so damn adorable is that it is unexpected or serendipitous. It might start with two people who can’t stand each other, carpooling together from Chicago to New York. Or with a businessman hiring a prostitute for the night. However opposite the characters’ goals or personalities are at the beginning of the film, by the end they’re on the same side, aligned and smitten.
Rarely do rom-com protagonists meet online. After all, it’s not surprising when two right swipes lead to a match. Yes, there’s You’ve Got Mail, but that was in the late 1990s when online-dating was in its infancy and seemed desperate and dangerous. When Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) and Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) went to the mattresses – spending their days professionally feuding and their nights inbox-flirting – two rivals meeting and bonding online was unexpected. It was the perfect meet-cute.
In the 20 years since, however, the stigma surrounding online-dating has faded. True, the majority of couples are still meeting in real life. But in a 2015 survey from the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of American adults said that online dating was a good way to meet people. Forty-one percent knew someone who has dated online; 29 percent knew someone who has entered a longterm relationship this way, and FirstDate MasterofNone. 15 percent of American adults have tried online dating sites or apps themselves.
Movies and television are reflecting online dating’s ubiquity, but rarely do they showcase its success. Breeze through romcoms released in the past few months, and the plot lines that feel the most formulaic aren’t the gee-we’re-falling-in-love montages. Those are still there. But a new formula stands out: Snippets of app dates, sometimes smashed together, that come across as dutiful, shallow and repetitive.
The app date isn’t the romcom meet-cute but its foil. A distraction from the protagonist’s heartbreak or from their real love interest – someone they met in real life. The on- screen app date conveys the drudgery of modern dating, a way of depicting what single, swiping viewers know all too well: Sure, there are plenty of fish in the sea. But look how many bottom-feeders you’ll have to sift through.
This is especially apparent in the second season of Master of None, for example, which has an entire episode devoted to the hamster wheel of swiping, messaging and then going on the first dates that might result from all of that text-work. The episode begins with women perusing a Tinder-esque dating app during life’s heaviest and most mundane moments – at a funeral, while groceryshopping, while on the toilet, while out with friends at a bar – and deciding whether or not to swipe right, or yes, on Dev (Aziz Ansari). At this point in the season, Dev has already had his meet-cute: with Francesca (Alessandra Mastronardi), while making pasta in Italy. Small problem, though: She has a fiance.
In 26 minutes, viewers peer into more than a dozen of Dev’s first dates, all of which take place at the same New York wine bar, with conversations on the same topics: work, hobbies, siblings, and the racism and sexism that pervades online dating. The women are different – from a funemployed trust funder to a doghotel staffer to an over-worked lawyer – but no one stands out. At the end of the episode, Dev collapses on his couch and sends his go-to first message to someone new, starting another spin on the hamster wheel all over again.
This summer’s biggest romcom, The Big Sick, does not dip into online dating at all. Rather, it’s the story of Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani), who meets Emily (Zoe Kazan) after she heckles during his stand-up routine. As their relationship develops, Kumail doesn’t tell his parents about her. He’s a Muslim from Pakistan, and his parents are intent on him marrying someone of the same background. Every time Kumail goes home to his parents’ place for dinner, a single Pakistani woman just happens to “drop by”.
In this way, Kumail’s mother, not an app, is doing the matching – and she’s quite the determined algorithm. A montage of each woman’s picture landing in a cigar box on Kumail’s nightstand resembles an analog version of swiping through profiles on Tinder. As actor and filmmaker Ravi Patel has pointed out in his documentary Meet the Patels, online dating can easily be viewed as a modern twist on arranged marriage, with a parents creating the profiles and making matches. True to the new romcom form, Kumail’s meet-cute comes from his real life. His mother’s attempts are tolerated, but not enduring.
Some day we’ll likely see a Tinder rom-com of You’ve Got Mail proportions. In the meantime, maybe it’s enough to see Hollywood capture app-fatigue in all its predictable glory.