Genre and contemporary Romantic Comedy

The aim of my thesis was to look at the evolution of the Romantic Comedy throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, to attempt to establish what changes occurred within the genre and how these changes influenced our understanding of genre theory as a whole. Through this discussion, I hoped to develop tools that could be used to examine different genres with varied historical records. My initial examination of genre theory showed that Genre History was one of the largest problems in the study of film genre, and relying on the influential works of Rick Altman and Stephen Neale I was able to build a methodology to identify key aspects of the Romantic Comedy and use them to analyse particular films. When these tools were applied to creating a definition of the Romantic Comedy, and looking at how the genre spanned the majority of film history, I encountered a number of different viewpoints regarding how the genre changed over time and the specific points in time that each of these changes occurred. In particular, Tamar McDonald and Leger Grindon disagree heavily on how the Romantic Comedy evolved throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. I had expected to encounter this in my research, and this is why my thesis focused on this time period in our examination of the Romantic Comedy. Building on the terminology used by these authors, I deemed the key cycles of the Romantic Comedy to be the "New Romantic Comedy"- a cycle which builds throughout the 1990s and uses nostalgia to reinforce classical motifs of marriage and true love- and the "Ambivalent Romantic Comedy"- which builds a level of realism onto the New Romantic Comedy, acknowledging the issues people have in finding 'true love' and demonstrating issues couples face beyond their initial courtship. While the characteristics of both of these cycles are clearly defined, there is debate over when each of these cycles begins or ends. By looking at two pairings of films - one of which was released in this area of inconsistency, the other in a clearly identified generic category- I was able to see the evolution of the genre as elements of one cycle were dropped while the other cycle developed. While I was able to identify this trend, there was some difficulty in classifying it in a manner that maintained consistency across the genre. I was able to present a number of options - the development of a cluster between these larger cycles, adjusting the dates of the cycles to allow and overlap or abandoning the assignment of dates to the cycles altogether- and each option served a different purpose depending on what the desired outcome of the discussion was. When I compared these outcomes to our initial problems posed in Genre Theory I came to a similar conclusion -that depending on the genre and time-span being discussed, the methodology for generic discussion will need to vary greatly, and while I set out to find an approach that would work across generic discussion as a whole, I instead found a number of tools that will work well in different circumstances.