The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.
I subscribe to over 100 Substack newsletters, but one of the most thought-provoking that I look forward to in my inbox is from Ossiana Tepfenhart. Earlier this week, she wrote about the death of romantic comedies (“rom-coms”) and the impact the genre had on an entire generation when it dominated the 1990s:
“I believe romantic comedies damaged an entire generation’s expectations of dating. … There’s an entire generation of men and women who think dating should be like a romance movie. … Rom-coms were great at tricking women into seeing the best in awful men and tricking decent men into being total losers. These movies (and their toxic messages) wrecked the love lives and dating mentalities of millions of people.”
Those excerpts lose a lot of the nuance Ossiana brought to her excellent article (so you should read the original!), but hopefully illustrate some of the brilliant points she made.
Her “micro” view into the average personal impact rom-coms had on individuals growing up in the ’90s, however, got me thinking about the “macro” implications of such changes in our overall entertainment culture, and what it might mean in terms of their larger societal and political ramifications.
Movies both reflect and, occasionally, lead culture. Sometimes they’re even at the leading edges of cultural change, thus both showing us new ways of thinking and being while also nudging us into those new ways of understanding and living.
We’ve seen this for generations, from Birth Of A Nation kicking off a nationwide Klan resurgence in 1915, to Jimmy Stewart’s 1946 It’s A Wonderful Life moving America into the New Deal notion that “we’re all in this together,” to 70s Vietnam War-era antiwar films like Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, to Michael Douglas’ 1987 Wall Street embodying the Reagan-era ethos of “greed is good.”
Perhaps Clinton’s 1990s era of optimism — on the verge of a new century with a handsome young president and his attractive, activist wife — seeded the cultural ground for the rise of rom-coms, while the movies after the frightening 9/11 attacks and throughout the first decade of the 21st century were dominated by action/adventure with black-and-white good-guy-versus-evil-villain films with superheros from Bond to Mission Impossible and the Bourne series.
Which brings us to today. Ever since 2015 — for almost a decade — the dominant factor in American life has been the militant, bellicose, angry, racist, avaricious, misogynist zeitgeist inflicted on us by Donald Trump, his rightwing billionaire funders, and the foreign autocrats (primarily Putin) who’ve promoted his rise to power.
Trump has provided, for half a generation now, a new template of a sick and twisted form of masculinity that’s been eagerly adopted by bloggers, influencers, hate-talk radio hosts, and men on networks like Fox “News” and Newsmax.
The result is that incels are not just out of the closet: they’re militant in their demands. White supremacist and largely anti-woman Republican avatars like Nick Fuentes are the new role models for millions of young men coming of age: Elon Musk arrogantly and publicly offers to impregnate Taylor Swift; Andrew Tate’s rape charges are celebrated.
These emotionally stunted boy-men, following Trump’s example, aren’t interested in the rom-com formula of unexpectedly discovering attraction, flirting, and, after struggling with the possible consequences of a long-term relationship, ending up in bed together and ultimately married.
Instead, these “manly men of the GOP” want dominance, control, and submissive tradwives. And they sneer at “childless cat ladies.”
But what does that mean for our culture?
Could it be that the rest of America — the “normies” among us — are so intimidated at some deep, unconscious level by all this faux hypermasculinity, and the threats to our safety and social stability they represent, that we’re thus drawn to “salvation” movies wherein the superheroes of the past decade (from Spiderman to Tom Cruise to Daniel Craig) ultimately rescue us?
And if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz do, literally, rescue us this fall and get sworn into office next January, what will that mean for our culture? How will that be reflected in our movies and TV trends? Will we — like in the hopeful Eisenhower/Kennedy 1950s and Clinton 1990s — enter a new era of optimism? Will rom-coms return to our entertainment, hopefully in a more diverse and less toxic form?
Or will the rightwing billionaires and social media trolls fight back with such ferocity that, like for much of the Obama presidency, the country is essentially paralyzed? After all, just this week we learned that Leonard Leo, the guy who almost singlehandedly engineered the hard-right packing of the Supreme Court, has big plans for the $1.6 billion he got from an elderly billionaire. He told The Financial Times:
“We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident. …
“Expect us to increase support for organisations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs, so that they have to pay a price for putting extreme leftwing ideology ahead of consumers.”
The massive state and national organizations the Koch brothers and their network created during the Reagan era are still with us, as is the media dominance of the billionaire Murdochs, the billionaire who owns Sinclair’s TV stations, and multiple billionaires who operate rightwing radio, publishing, social media, and TV networks.
We live in a moment of extraordinary menace and uncommon opportunity. Dangers — from rightwing calls for a bloody civil war to weather disasters to the end of democracy itself — haunt us on the right, while on our left sparkles the possibilities of a new world powered by the sun, racial and political harmony, and an America where we no longer fear bankruptcy-by-sickness or student debt.
Which way will America turn? And what will that mean for our movies and other entertainment media and their impact on the generation coming of age now, forming the future?
Will we finally feel safe and optimistic enough that romance will return in a big way? That policies and legislation which help families and lift children out of poverty will begin to pass again? Will we rediscover our love and our smiles when the ugly MAGA threat is defeated?
Stay tuned…
