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Falling Out of love with Rom-Coms

Though short-lived, the 2000s rom-com era has lodged a place in my heart. I can’t count the number of weekends spent on the couch with my mom scrolling through our options: Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, 10 Things I Hate About You, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, 27 Dresses. We’d always land on the same few movies, but no matter which one we chose, it was like watching it anew. The faded city streets, the cookie cutter houses – all of it was like nostalgia baked into a film reel. 

You can tell these movies are cousins: slightly distinct personalities, but altogether made from the same blueprint. The female lead is typically a journalist in the big city paving her own path on the hunt for a brand new article. If not a journalist, she belongs to the world of books. She’s running a bookstore, she’s writing a novel. She’s the poet as opposed to the muse. 

Her co-star, her other half in their sweeping romance, can take a number of different forms. He’s a business tycoon hellbent on destroying her cozy bookstore, he’s a marketing agent about to take his own medicine, he’s an architect seeking hope through the radio. Regardless of the shape he takes, his role is to challenge our female lead. He picks at her worldview, her moral compass, and often her boundaries. (This last item has never sat well with me: In You’ve Got Mail, it’s border-line manipulation. Not cute.)

When playing rom-com roulette, The Princess Diaries is my choice. When I watch this movie, I feel as though draped in a cozy blanket, a quilt made up of silly makeovers and pop culture references I don't quite understand. Whereas most rom-coms take place in New York City, this one belongs to San Francisco. Throughout the movie, you can catch glimpses of the city. Mia and Lilly scooter up and down its hills on their way to school. Mia’s iconic firehouse stands proudly on Brazil Avenue in the city, drawing visitors to this day. Through the lens of The Princess Diaries, San Francisco is distilled to sleepy neighborhoods, quaint cable cars, and cute excursions to the pier. 

On a Friday afternoon in March, my Berkeley connect group and I venture out to San Francisco’s Russian Hill-Macondray Lane Historic District. We are heading for Broadway Street and Taylor Street, one of the locations where Mia scooters to school. As soon as we leave Berkeley, we are plunged into traffic, a Bay Area staple. The music from the car fades in and out between the hum of traffic. We’re listening to our favorites, both old and new: Hozier’s Wasteland, Baby!, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, and Renee Rapp’s Snow Angel. 

Easing off the Bay Bridge, we land in the city’s Financial District, a labyrinth of skyscrapers and suits. I’m white-knuckling the steering wheel and double checking my side view mirrors over and over again to cope with the frenzy of the traffic. Everything is sharp lines and unforgiving grays and whites. The sun is sliced up by the tall buildings, casting everything in shadow. 

When we arrive at the intersection of Broadway and Taylor, the view sharpens into focus. At the bottom of the hill, the bay yawns before us. The water is brilliantly blue, parenthesized by two green hands – islands that curve along the bay. Along the street, each house is painted a different color: one is mint green, another is yellow. The houses are unique, each brimming with personality.

To get to the next intersection, we walk up several flights of stairs. A garden engulfs the staircase on both sides. It’s a steep climb that leaves us breathless, but the view on top will render me speechless. The bay showing off her colors, the blue is blinding. Tiny white boats glitter on the water, and the ferris wheel spins lazily in the sun. Cars zip down the road, navigating the hills like experts. 

Finally, on the way back, we drive through North Beach. Outside a bookstore, laundry lines suspend opened books in the air so they look like birds mid-flight. On another corner, a hotel looks like a stack of green baubles trimmed with gold. San Francisco fades in the rear view mirror around 6:30 p.m. I feel like our excursion has barely scratched the surface of Russian Hill, and I have become guilty of the rom-com movie itself. I have perhaps glazed over the city, painting neighborhoods with my generalizations. 

But, I remember the details of the intersection of Jones and Green. A ceramic cat peering out a window on Jones and Green. The wallflower of the street, an ashy coal colored house amongst her brightly painted companions. A hidden garden connecting two blocks in the historic district. Granted, these movies were never intended to be our tour guides through each city they occupy. And The Princess Diaries might do a decent job of incorporating some of San Francisco’s quirks (most saliently, the cable car scene). But, a movie could be enhanced by paying proper dues to the unique place it occupies, by not ignoring the little details.

In the way the rom-com movie blends its city’s aspects into a pastel and homogenized smoothie, it does the same to romance itself. Perhaps the reason I find those movies so comforting is because I know never to expect something new. The romantic storylines are copy-paste versions of each other, with slight variations here and there. 

But, they leave me out. I don’t think I can identify with the Kat Stratfords and Mia Thermopolises that I see on my screen. My life has never been instantly better the moment I straightened my hair (I burned myself) nor when I took off my glasses (I’m scared of contact lenses). Nor can I identify with their romances. Despite being a prolific genre, there is little to no diversity between rom-coms. The thesis statement of the genre as a whole seems to be homogenized life, homogenized storylines. I never see myself in these movies anyways, pushing me to seek other forms of media. I think it could be a lifelong journey to find art that resonates with who I am. Intertwined with this search is my own pursuit of creating content that truly represents me. 

The beautiful nuances of love that I’ve discovered in my own day-to-day life are not captured by the movie magic of the 2000s. Now, two decades after their production, perhaps it’s time for me to move on from these romantic classics. Though romance is far from dead, I hope my decade long affair with the likes of The Princess Diaries is nearing its end for better or worse. 

Words: Sia Agarwal

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