The Comic, the Serious and the Middle: Desire and Space in Contemporary Film Romantic Comedy

Abstract

The most interesting things in romantic comedies happen in the middle. It is there that the characteristic tensions between melodramatic intensity and comedic cool, between laughter and frustration, between the social and the psychosexual take place. In this article I want to move away from traditional theories of romcom which privilege the happy ending as the repository of all the meanings and ideology of the genre and theorize the magic space of romantic comedy and its relation with the social world and sexual discourses at the beginning of the 21st century. In order to explore the ways in which this magic space works I focus on two romantic comedies from 2009: The Ugly Truth and (500) Days of Summer.

Keywords

• celestino deleyto
• desire
• film
• happy endings
• laughter
• middles
• romantic comedy
• romcom
• space