This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caitlinhart.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caitlinhart.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caitlinhart.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caitlinhart.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caitlinhart.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caitlinhart.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caitlinhart.substack.com

In her 1983 novel Heartburn, Nora Ephron wrote, “I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.” This is the tension at the heart of all romantic comedies: we acknowledge that it’s a fairy tale, a type of genre film as much as fantasy or sci-fi is, and yet we yearn for it. We briefly believe it’s real. 

But, we don’t really make rom coms anymore. The media has been heralding the end of the rom com since at least 2013. Action and adventure movies dominate screens and box office numbers. These CGI-heavy films rely on winking at the audience and hiding “easter eggs” for fans, so self-consciously aware of its audience that it’s hard to see a film through the layers of self-reference. Action, not romance, is the subject of our films, and the stories are told with a level of ironic detachment that reveals what is really at the heart of our culture: generating internet discourse, producing gifs, and prodding the audience to point at the screen and say, “oh look, it’s [IP I recognize].”

Our culture is so steeped in irony that we’ve become alienated from desire. As RS Benedict writes in their fantastic essay “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” about modern movies, in “[a] room full of beautiful, bare bodies … everyone is only horny for war.” No one is ever really horny in Nora Ephron movies either, but they ache for human connection, for an antidote to loneliness. There’s real attraction and chemistry between the characters. Human feeling, not spectacle, is central to the plots and characters. 

Woman characters, when we do see them in big Hollywood movies, are imbued with so much post-MeToo, post-Trump, 5th wave feminist weight that they come off as empty shells of AI-generated girlbosses. An occasional film like Eighth Grade breaks through, but mostly, we’re inundated with superhero fare like Wonder Woman and powerful women biopics like On The Basis of Sex, that foreground women’s strength and ignore their humanity. It’s hard to feel like roles for women have improved when every female character is basically Faye Dunaway in Network (and we’re meant to believe that’s a good thing!). In the era of Captain Marvel, the faux-empowerment of tough, mean women as the new standard of femininity feels alienating. Anyway, most women don’t occupy these roles in their real lives. No matter how many Supergirls and CEOs we see onscreen, most women aren’t bosses — literally or figuratively. We have only a little power, and seeing a non-stop parade of super women is exhausting. In the context of the last two years especially, when women are feeling the burdens of work and domestic labour more acutely than before, it just doesn’t feel authentic. 

The shift from the now archaic world of Sex and the City to the more modern womanhood of Girls, Broad City, and Insecure feels almost alienating, even if the narratives reflect how we have relationships now. Women who came of age on the latter are settling down later and in less conventional arrangements. More power to them! But we can’t deny there has been a shift in how women in real life and onscreen articulate desire, and what the objects of desire are. 

I experienced it first via Broad City, a show that I watched religiously in my early 20s, which defined my own relationship to dating and marriage. Ilana and Abbi are not relationship girls. This became the standard, too, for me and my friends, fighting through the world of Tinder and casual dating. We resisted labels and deep conversations, and we never asked for what we wanted. Unlike the heroines of Sex and the City, who ultimately settle into monogamous, heterosexual bliss, Ilana and Abbi are comfortable staying single. More than comfortable, it’s a natural state, one worth luxuriating in rather than despairing the way a character like Charlotte York does when she exclaims, “I’ve been dating since I was 15, I’m exhausted, where is he?” Accepting singleness as a justifiable way for women to be is positive, of course. But the more I am honest with myself and my desires, the more I identify with Charlotte, with Sally Albright crying, “I thought he didn't want to get married. But, the truth is, he didn't want to marry me!” It’s an emotionally honest moment at odds with the new type of woman we expect in the stories we consume. These expectations are borne from the eras in which When Harry Met Sally… and Sex and the City were rewriting the narratives for women, of women experiencing new freedom and new expectations, trying to figure out the new rules. But instead of writing our own rules, we just got a new unfair standard to live up to: the cool girl who doesn’t have relationships, never asks for commitment, and keeps her vulnerability hidden. There’s a faux empowerment about existing outside of standard relationships. 

The framework shift gives rise to media that promotes the idea that women should be single and untethered, and that to be in a monogamous relationship is old-fashioned. Even Sex and the City’s reboot series had to take an axe to one of the series most beloved, monogamous pairings to fit in the new, modern world of prestige TV. But modernity is kind of a drag right? Too irony-soaked about love, too earnest about politics, too disconnected from desire.

I say, it’s time for a Meg Ryan renaissance. Bring back women who believe in love. Bring back adorable, sweet, smart, strong women who don’t have super powers or positions of power. Bring back close female friendships, yearning for commitment, and having a career without making it your life. 

Meg’s characters have always resonated with women. It’s easy to see yourself in her everywoman nature. She feels like your friend, which is why I can’t bear to follow Canada Press guidelines and call her “Ryan”. She represents women as we are, struggling with our desires in the modern world, rather than the Katherine Heigl-type who has the world by the balls. I’m sure that’s how some women experience the world — but it’s not how I do. Meg represents a fantasy, but it's one I can imagine myself in, because she represents me, even if I’m not a blonde, upper class New Yorker. 

The classic Nora Ephron-penned heroine, as played by Meg is quirky, smart, and a bit emotional. She is witty and particular, but soft and sweet. Meg is a woman with a pink kitchen and a fluffy housecoat and a VCR stacked high with old movies. She is vulnerable and resilient at once, believing in love even when it leaves her empty and hurt. The women of modern rom coms are jaded and bruised, hiding behind high-powered careers so no one will ever get to know them. They’re women with penthouses and assistants and egos. Meg’s characters are more ordinary, special because of their quirks and passions, not their salaries. 

Connecting with Meg’s characters and Nora Ephron’s writing on romance, her films occupy the same space in my life that Casablanca and An Affair to Remember do in her character’s lives. They’re the cheesy, comfort food of cinema that reveals the romantic desires we don’t dare speak. Rita Wilson crying about the end of An Affair to Remember is literally me describing the plot of any Ephron movie. It’s a funny but truthful moment about the power of cinema to connect us to our most embarrassing, base feelings. Under all the cynicism, even the twice-divorced Ephron loved the sentimental trash of An Affair to Remember. The kind of romantic only a cynic can be!

Women in modern rom coms are cynical, and their true feelings of love must be drawn out of them by a man. It’s framed as a more modern, feminist approach to romance on screen — the career woman, the alpha female who puts work before love — when really these films act as an admonishment to women, a continuation of the same tired question that never interested Ephron: can women have it all? 

Love and career are almost never at odds in a Meg Ryan-Nora Ephron joint. A good career and a search for love are diametrically opposed in most romances post-2001. In the last ten years, the only romantic comedies being made come from Netflix or Hallmark and these films have leaned in hard on the divide. Our options are either the conservative parables of Hallmark, or the girlbosses of Netflix’s offerings (which are also inherently conservative!). Always Be My Maybe is one of the strongest recent rom coms, and even it falls into the girlboss trap. 

Sally, Annie, Kathleen — Meg’s characters are decidedly not girlbosses, although Kathleen is a business owner, and Annie and Sally both work in media. These women are decidedly uncool, connecting us to some imagined Hollywood past as they articulate desire, cry about movies, and vent to their girlfriends. These characters strike me closer to the heart than 27 Dresses or How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. The need to desire and be desired is one that women can’t articulate because culture has done a 180 — women don’t worry about “having it all” because career has become the only option. This is partly economic and partly cultural — many things are! 

I’m not advocating for a trad lifestyle. Returning to tradition isn’t a solution, partially because it’s unrealistic in the economy we live in. No matter how much my friends and I dream of not working, or having a high-earning partner, it’s important for women to earn an income of their own. For most households, two incomes are necessary to pay rent and keep the lights on. But work isn’t life. 

Like many women in the creative class (including most Nora Ephron characters), I enjoy a lot of the work I do. My career is important to my identity. I don’t want to give it up — but I define myself more by my relationships than my pay cheques. That’s why Meg’s rom coms still resonate with me most: careers are important, but they're merely a side character to the friendships and romantic relationships that give life meaning. A job you love is important, but it’s not everything, as these movies gently remind us, unlike the palm pilot-clutching women of 00s rom coms, who have to be bashed over the head to be reminded that love is a good thing. 

I find great comfort in the optimism of When Harry Met Sally… and Sleepless in Seattle, even if it doesn’t feel real to me. When it came out, When Harry Met Sally… was written off as a Woody Allen knock off. Allen is a more cynical and therefore more honest writer on relationships than Nora Ephron. I love Annie Hall but the romance of When Harry Met Sally… serves as an antidote to the assumption in Allen’s films that it never works out, that we’re doomed to repeat our mistakes, that we will watch Woody Allen and Diane Keaton fall in love and break up many more times. We leave Harry and Sally believing he has overcome his cynicism and narcissism and fear of commitment. We believe Sally is learning to loosen up and to trust again. We want to believe love makes us better people. Maybe that’s why I cling to this movie — life has taught me that relationships look a lot more like Annie Hall, like two people hurting each other, coming back together and trying to make it work, and still failing at being right for each other. We leave Annie and Alvy never knowing if they figure it out.

When my ex and I got back together, it seemed like love had made us better people. He was more open; I was more confident. We were both more honest. I want to believe I changed because he loved me, or because I loved him, but truthfully, I changed because he hurt me. I changed to protect myself, reflexively, against another earth shattering romance. Love is meant to make you better, but we’re never just reacting to love; we’re reacting to vulnerability and fear and trust and all the other things that come along with it. We don’t know whether to let it consume us or not. 

I love Annie Hall because it’s honest, and life has made me a bit of a cynic. But I love When Harry Met Sally…, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail because deep down, I’m a romantic. It feels passe, but there it is. A little more honesty about our unfashionable desires would go a long way to undo all the alienating irony and detachment we swim in. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caitlinhart.substack.com

In the fall of 2016, I was enrolled in a Women and Gender Studies seminar about art and activism. Our conversation on dance critic Arlene Croce’s essay “Discussing the Undiscussable” was heated, against Croce and each other. The essay, about Bill T. Jones’ AIDS ballet Still/Here, wondered aloud: can you critique “victim art”? We argued about the label of “victim art” because it was 2016 and “victim” was a dirty word, especially in a gender studies course. We argued whether “victim art” even existed, if Croce was just too cowardly to critique the performance. I left class feeling that Croce was wrong, and that we had been assigned the essay in order to disagree with it. 

When I began writing this essay, Croce’s critiques were still ringing in my head, 5 (!) years later. I can’t recall much else I read that semester (some poem about a lesbian vampire for my Romantics course?) but Croce managed to lodge herself in my brain, unconsciously helping form my own theory of criticism and art. 

Once respected as an art in its own right, criticism is now regarded as clickbait by and for killjoys and haters. They don’t build statues of critics, the anti-critics intone. The job of a critic is treated with such suspicion and disdain that even a generally positive review can send angry fans — and sometimes, angry artists — on a witch hunt against critics. Stan culture has transformed the act of consuming work and being a fan of movies or music into idol worship, training one's love for a medium on a single artist. We have lost sight of the fact that criticism isn’t just about the failures of art, but its merits — and that to criticize is to engage, to question, and often to love something deeply and rigorously. 

As a teenager, I imagined dinner parties would be replete with conversations about modern art and the French new wave and Russian literature, that adults had intellectual conversations and sipped martinis and exchanged witty banter. In reality, at the house parties and dinners I attend, my peers and I are more often listing works we wish we understood, pursuits we dream of having time for if only we could tear ourselves away from Twitter, where all the poptimism and distrust of criticism festers. Mostly, we lament that we don’t read anymore. As Caleb Crain writes in the New Yorker, “between 2003 and 2016, the amount of time that the average American devoted to reading for personal interest on a daily basis dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours.” I doubt this data has improved even over the pandemic when so many of us optimistically believed we’d finally finish Infinite Jest or Anna Karenina (myself included! They’re in a pile along with Roots, which I’ve mentally labeled “will probably never read, but makes me look smarter that I have them on my shelf). 

The fact that so few of us are reading (and spending more time on Twitter) gives way to the distrust of art, criticism, and any work that challenges its audience. The internet ecosystem created in the blogging era heralded a critical climate where it’s more relevant to give an old Spice Girls album a celebratory retrospective than, say, give a less than laudatory review of a Taylor Swift album, or try to introduce your audience to an artist they haven’t heard of yet. You’re more likely to see someone beg (half-ironically?) for Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion to be added to the Criterion Collection than see someone genuinely discussing an actual Criterion film.

I’m not against enjoying something lowbrow every now and then. On my Letterboxd, I give both Sleepless in Seattle and Parasite four stars. I’m not a snob (I hope). But by not engaging in work that challenges us, or makes us think, or changes our viewpoints, we’re engaging in a cultural feedback loop that closes us off intellectually and creatively. The media is full of hand wringing about how people are in political bubbles, that we’re polarized — how true has that become in the cultural sphere?

In the face of poptimism, criticism is out of style and out of touch because it seeks to truly evaluate the merits of a work, to pull it apart and critically engage with each element. Many cultural products now are celebrated for the nostalgia effect (ad nauseum reboots and remakes) or for the nods to representation they offer, however flimsy. Critics are obligated to give Lizzo a good review, because she is a fat, Black woman and she sings positively about those identities. When critics question the unchecked positivity of her music they are lambasted online. Criticism is seen as a personal attack, rather than a response to art. Lizzo herself responded to negative criticism by tweeting that reviewers who aren’t themselves musicians should be unemployed, that those who don’t make music have no business critiquing it. Bashing Pitchfork, the publication Lizzo was subtweeting, is a popular pastime online, presumably because Pitchfork is one of the last places where stan culture and the PR machine doesn’t have a chokehold on the masthead. Instead, Pitchfork publishes actual criticism, which is often challenging to pre-conceived notions of artists and their work. All art should be held to critical standards, although fans often recoil from any criticism of work they enjoy. When you only encounter criticism as a form via an out of context Tweet, linking to a negative review of something you love, you’re not likely to seek out more of it. So criticism becomes irrelevant. 

Literature, too, has its own kind of poptimism in the form of adult readers of young adult fiction. YA adults ardently defend their love for books written well below their reading level. This is perhaps the final boss of not engaging in work that is challenging, and disguising that avoidance as progressivism. It’s about representation, they insist. The classics are all about old white men; young adult books represent queer people and people of colour in positive ways. Arlene Croce calls this “utilitarian art”: art which exists for a social purpose. Representation, no matter how you slice it, is social, not political. And YA books, no matter how much you enjoy them, are more utilitarian than art. YA defenders almost never suggest these books are art; they insist on their social purpose, or the escape they offer. Beach reads have their place on the shelves of bookstores, but to build your identity around young adult books, and to consume them to the exclusion of anything else, anything more challenging or edifying, is to do yourself a disservice.

Recently, Yair Rosenberg wrote about the perceived critical turn against works like Hamilton, Harry Potter, and Parks and Rec in his newsletter for the Washington Post. His argument, that critics should be more connected to the “average” person, rather than the niche of left-ish Twitter cultural critics, is a misunderstanding of what criticism’s value even is. Rosenberg is calling for critics to abandon criticism. Basically, he argues, because a book or tv show is popular, critics should throw their support behind it. Forgetting, of course, that many critics do like these works (Hamilton has a Pulitzer!) Rosenberg focuses on the vocal minority that demand more rigor from both art and criticism. It’s not a stretch to say that criticism is seen as a coastal thing, disconnected from the fabled “middle America” that so many people theorize about and few actually interact with in a meaningful way. At the heart of Rosenberg’s piece is his lament that his love for broad appeal network sitcoms and Broadway musicals isn’t popular amongst his fellow staff writers and coastal tastemakers. Perhaps what he needs — what we all need — is to separate our love for something from the critical response to it. Reading criticism of the work you love should be a clarifying experience, one that strengthens your love of it, as you deepen your understanding of the work. The same way that hearing the opinion of your political adversary will strengthen your reason why you believe in what you do, so too should engaging with dissenting opinions on art deepen your understanding and appreciation.

The same people who detest criticism also expect a great deal from their entertainment. The rise of the anti-critic sentiment seems to have emerged at the same moment as the over-reliance on media to portray politics, and portray them correctly. Not only Rosenberg’s beloved Parks and Rec and Hamilton, which are blatantly political, but every new series or film is telegraphed with the politics of the moment. Films like Parasite are assigned great meaning, believed to be transformative, art with a message — so when Barack Obama called it one of his favourite movies of the year, he was accused of “missing the point”. We believe too much in what movies can accomplish. Ronald Reagan watched Dr. Strangelove, but it obviously didn’t change his politics — he was just left wondering where the war room was when he arrived at the White House. The Reagans were also big fans of the 1981 film Reds, which they screened at the White House. Reagan’s only criticism was that “it didn’t have a happy ending” for American Communist Party leader John Reed — which seems strange in the context of like, everything we know about Reagan. But our confusion about the president’s affinity for such films is just our own flawed understanding of art. We ascribe a transformational power to cinema that is only available if one is open to it, if one believes in that power, and sees art as something more than a consumable product, or a fun time. Sometimes a movie is just a movie — “not getting it” when someone doesn’t extract the “correct” moral of the story is not so much a failure of art as a failure of morals, and the false expectations that we place on art in the first place. It isn’t the responsibility of art to teach; it isn’t the responsibility of art to stop wars.

As Pauline Kael writes, “The movies may set styles in dress or lovemaking, they may advertise cars or beverages, but art is not examples for imitation—that is not what a work of art does for us—though that is what guardians of morality think art is and what they want it to be and why they think a good movie is one that sets “healthy,” “cheerful” examples of behavior, like a giant all-purpose commercial for the American way of life.” In the context of the 2020s, we probably wouldn’t demand “cheerful” examples from our movies, but many audiences do demand that television and film inform audiences about what behaviour is acceptable. If someone in a tv show says or does something racist, sexist, homophobic etc etc, there should also be a lesson, a come to Jesus moment where the character learns the error of their ways. 

Audiences lack a kind of art literacy, perhaps because they (okay, we) resist engaging in work outside our cultural comfort zones. Croce writes that “we have also created an art with no power of transcendence, no way of assuring us that the grandeur of the individual spirit is more worth celebrating than the political clout of the group”. The audience for Don’t Look Up or Promising Young Woman does not watch those films to be transformed — they go seeking to see their own (cynical) views, about both art and the world, reified. And then, when critics or the public don’t fall in line, they react as if struck to the heart of their own politics. Films then become a declaration of the audience’s politics — thus the confusion over Obama’s appreciation of Parasite. Audiences and creators alike participate in this — Adam McKay’s meltdown over the online reaction to Don’t Look Up just the most recent example. As Croce said, “Now the philistines are likely to be the artists themselves.” 

On the flipside, films like Licorice Pizza that offer a story without overt politics or morals are treated with deep suspicion by a vocal minority of the public. But the majority of movies no longer demand we engage with them on a social and psychological level — they exist only to, as Croce writes, “justif[y] the bureaucracy’s existence by being socially useful.” This is true of both corporations like Netflix and smaller scale arts organizations like Croce was writing about, which rely on grants to sustain their creation — grants demand social relevance from art, which artists must engage in to stay afloat, and on we go. 

This issue seems to reappear in culture every 10 or 15 years — the panic about rap music and violence in films in the 80s, the fear of Marilyn Manson and video games in the wake of Columbine, and now the moral panic borne out of the Trump era where anything that doesn’t promote the correct politics is suspicious, even fascist. Like violent crime and school shootings, we’re responding to a social and political fear with culture. We can look back and laugh at the fact that authors and booksellers and comedians were ever put on trial for saying bad words or writing about sex, but because we are fighting our political wars via cultural products, we’re in the next phase of the same project — moving obscenity trials from the courtroom to social media. As Kael wrote in 1967, “people see Bonnie and Clyde as a danger to public morality; they think an audience goes to a play or a movie and takes the actions in it as examples for imitation. They look at the world and blame the movies.” If art is not sufficiently liberal in its execution, then we can blame the ills of the country on art, rather than on the politicians, the populace, wherever the problems actually reside, wherever the rot is. 

Croce wrote that “[t]he sixties were about creating your own rules; the eighties were about getting grants.” The 2010s were about scripting gifable moments. What will the 2020s legacy in art and culture be? 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caitlinhart.substack.com

This is just a little intro to the latest addition to the Extremely Online project - audio newsletter! Each month, I’ll release an audio recording of my newsletter. I know many people prefer to listen rather than read, so in the interest of accessibility and reaching more people, an audio newsletter! Enjoy.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caitlinhart.substack.com