Fine romance

(Patah Balek's Weekend Edition 1)

Romantic comedy civilizes desire, transforms lust into play and ritual—the celebration of union in marriage.

The lovers are fated by temperament and physical attraction to join together, or stay together, and the audience longs for that ending with an urgency that is as much moral as sentimental.

For its amusement, however, the audience doesn’t want the resolution to come too quickly.

The lovers misunderstand each other; they get pixie dust thrown in their faces.

Befuddled, the woman thinks she’s in love with a gas-station attendant, who turns out to be a millionaire; an unsuitable suitor becomes a proper suitor; and so on.

It’s always the right guy in the end.

Romantic drama may revel in suffering, even in anguish and death, but romantic comedy merely nods at the destructive energies of passion.

The confused lovers torment each other and, for a while, us. Then they stop.

>>> "A fine romance" by David Denby, New Yorker (July 23, 2007) page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4, last page.