Movie Mondays: The Legacy of Hanks and Ryan

Pop quiz!

There is a big, red, spastic, chocolate-addled event on the horizon that will be welcomed when it finally arrives but better when it’s all over. Is it:

a) your next period (or a loved one’s)

b) Valentine’s Day

Probably both, but since periods are seldom discussed in movies unless one is missing (Juno, Caddyshack) we’ll pick Valentines Day. It's on it's way, you know, and just last week one of my favorite programs, Current TV’s The Rotten Tomatoes Show, did a great segment on Romantic Comedy “Couples Who Should Break Up,” and at the top of the heap were the saccharine standard-bearers of the 90’s Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. And back in the day I would have totally agreed.

We like to think we’ve been freed from the calcified images of perfect domestic life conjured in the 50’s. What fools we’ve been. Sure, many things have made us wise to sham of domestic perfection but we’ve just cobbled new ones together (porn bodies, Kardashian-level wealth, Big-and-Bradshaw romance) that might be less constricting in some ways but are even weirder in others and, moreover, available 24/7. Our teeny bopper devotion to cultural mythology hasn’t changed; we’re still keeping up with the Jones’ except the Jones’ are global, surgically enhanced and tweeting.

I hadn’t considered this until watching that segment about Tom and Meg. They were, for some people, the Joneses of love, the Rock Hudson and Doris Day of their time. Tom and Meg got women to believe that love was destined and would find a way – especially if you gave it a shove in the forms of stalking, spying and other unethical behavior (Sleepless in Seattle). Then they spun the attractive the story of having the very prince who destroyed your career, legacy and dreams make it all better by loving you (You’ve Got Mail). That’s how sophisticated we became – we fell for it, ran to it and sucked it up with a crazy straw. What’s the difference between You’ve Got Mail and Leave it to Beaver? Beaver sounds dirtier but they were equally clean and unrealistic ( Tom and Meg were as sexuallymagnetic as a couple of thin Campbell’s Soup Kids).

The Ryan-Hanks duo was big when I was younger and knew more than I do now. I was frighteningly cynical about such sugar-coated rubbish, never watched such things and was sure that love was to be viewed with narrow, suspicious, accusing, jaundiced, steady eyes, despite having experienced much of its charms never having suffered more than the usual amount at its hands. Back then I, too, would have thought Tom and Meg should break up just to knock those simpers off their one-dimensional faces.

Then, just a few weeks ago I watched Mail and Seattle and was shocked to find I enjoyed them. They were cinematic comfort food –mushy and bad for you but a relaxing, like a little time-released painkiller.

I thought people were supposed to get less romantic and more jaded and as they aged; why I’ve gotten more romantic and sometimes even eagerly gullible I’m not sure. Maybe it just feels good. Maybe I’ve realized that when you have Limbaughs and Palins that Tom and Meg are not what’s wrong with the world. Maybe the more inexplicable shit I see that I have come more to believe that, for good or ill anything can happen, so why not romance?

Whatever occurred to relieve me of my Rom Com allergy I’m glad. It proves that even the things you thought could never change actually can change which, ironically enough, is one of the broader themes of When Harry Met Sally. If you live long enough to get broadsided by fate a few times you have to admit taht you really don’t know what’s next – you might fall wildly in love with a total stranger tomorrow, or you might fall down an open manhole and not be found for weeks. Anything can happen! There’s no harm in keeping your eyes open…for either extreme.

That said, so long as the fairy tale remains a lovely possibility and not a plan, something that turns into a dangerous psychosis or a tumor made of unrequited dreams you should be fine. Rom Coms are like the size 0’s that model clothing or like Martha Stewart or Marcia Brady or any other icons of perfection. You have to remember that they’re either not real or have staff, so there’s no onus on you have what they have until you have either a team PA’s just to keep you from tipping over or you become an actual fictional character.

This is a tough world and if Rom Coms are the Rita Hayworth poster you use to cheer up your little corner of Shawshank who cares? Everyone nurses secret dreams of tunneling to a better life; the only difference is how they plan to get there..

I vividly get Ellen Fox's take on Tom and Meg and loved her assessment of the four other Rom Com couples that made the list (check her out below) but now that I mind cinematic Vicodin less than I once did do I want them to split? Nah – since I don’t want either one they’re free to stay where they are, locked in cinematic history.

Now if there was a couple I’d like to see get closer it would be Kermit and Piggy. Imagine the apocalypse-portending spawn of this unnatural mix, part piglet, part tadpole. A pigpole. I want to see that and I want to see it soon.

It’s nice to know the inner cynic is still lurking in there somewhere.

(above image of Kevin Anderson and Reg E. Cathey in the theatrical version of The Shawshank Redemption, from The Guardian UK.)