Obsessed

From Molly Ringwald to Amy Schumer: What 30 Years of Rom Com It Girls Has Taught Us About Love, Life, and What We Want Out of It

All week long at Glamour.com, we're taking a deep-dive look at the romantic comedy—from the highs (like Amy Schumer's game-changing Trainwreck this past summer) to the lows (i.e., those rom com cliches that never happen in real life), we're investigating the genre we both love and love to hate. First up: Megan Angelo's take on what we've learned from rom coms' leading ladies. Read on! There are two ways to watch a romantic comedy: dreaming of meeting the hero and dreaming of being the heroine. I've always been a fan of the latter method, partially because puberty did not make me any less practical. Even at 15, I understood that it would be harder to achieve whatever kind of life led to Julia Roberts' sunlit flat in Notting Hill than it would be to meet a stammering, impish Hugh Grant. But the real reason I, and a lot of us, feel more wooed by the girl in the rom com than the guy is simple: How can we not? Invariably, she glows with perfection: She has the career. The apartment. The smooth-haired, smart friends. Sure, she's got some fatal flaw—she's at the job too much, exiting way too late

*All week long at Glamour.com, we're taking a deep-dive look at the romantic comedy—from the highs (like Amy Schumer's game-changing Trainwreck this past summer) to the lows (i.e., those rom com cliches that never happen in real life), we're investigating the genre we both love and love to hate. First up: Megan Angelo's take on what we've learned from rom coms' leading ladies. Read on! *There are two ways to watch a romantic comedy: dreaming of meeting the hero and dreaming of being the heroine. I've always been a fan of the latter method, partially because puberty did not make me any less practical. Even at 15, I understood that it would be harder to achieve whatever kind of life led to Julia Roberts' sunlit flat in Notting Hill than it would be to meet a stammering, impish Hugh Grant.

But the real reason I, and a lot of us, feel more wooed by the girl in the rom com than the guy is simple: How can we not? Invariably, she glows with perfection: She has the career. The apartment. The smooth-haired, smart friends. Sure, she's got some fatal flaw—she's at the job too much, exiting way too late onto the sidewalk to hail an ever-present cab with a flawlessly manicured hand, luxurious coat wrapped tight around her tiny waist. None of us feel, watching her, like we'd particularly mind having the fatal flaw. Even when she's painted as a klutz, a nerd, or a perennially single introvert, we know better than to write her off—after all, she was on the poster. And no lead is more appealing than the certified rom com It Girl of the day—that actress with a string of memorable swoons under her belt.

Molly Ringwald was the starting point for the rom com heroine's revolution. She pre-dated perfection. Her characters were flawed—not, like, Jessica Biel with a dab of zit cream flawed—deeply flawed. They struggled. They were poor, insecure, and forgotten on their birthdays. Ringwald always looked like she'd styled herself, and like she was truly disgusted when something disgusted her. She stood for the idea that you could be wholly yourself and things would still work out. It was so fun to root for her—but not many years later, the rom com game would shift from rooting for relatable heroines to aspiring to be like them.

That change began to take hold with Meg Ryan and Roberts, queens of the early '90s rom com. Their early characters were Ringwald-esque, rocking a grownup underdog quality. Roberts' Vivian, in Pretty Woman, was a hooker; Ryan's Sally, in When Harry Met Sally, could get down with ride sharing and deli sandwiches. Fast forward a few years later, and those same actresses were playing rom com leads with the scrappiness surgically removed. I love Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, but let's be honest: With her swishy suits, French braids, and Bill Pullman fiance, her life was like a comfy bougie museum. As for Roberts: Who can forget learning just minutes into My Best Friend's Wedding that, at 28, she was the most feared restaurant critic in the city? (Cue all of us writing down "will be esteemed writer by 28" in our diaries and feeling completely reasonable.)

Just when Hollywood straightened Ryan's hair and gave her a Manhattan book shop (in You've Got Mail), the industry abruptly switched course in its casting. It's like they could sense a normal-woman's rebellion brewing. (Said uprising probably began with women living on the Upper West Side, who could barely afford to own a book, let alone a whole store of them.) Maybe the studios were in cahoots with the daisy-printed baby-doll dress industry, but all of a sudden, Roberts' and Ryan's neurotic college girls were out and natural, free spirits were in. Love & Basketball featured a madeunder Sanaa Lathan (who also starred in the previous year's The Best Man)—most of that movie's romance scenes involve at least one pair of mesh shorts. In films ranging from Never Been Kissed to Fever Pitch, Drew Barrymore cultivated an onscreen character best described as "cute dork with cuter snort." Sandra Bullock put together a range of interpretations of the free spirit dream girl vibe—one day she was wearing denim vests and riding in pickup trucks with Harry Connick Jr. (Hope Floats), the next was playing a prickly quasi-goth getting Ben Affleck to lighten up (Forces of Nature). Playing to a younger crowd was Julia Stiles, who trademarked the "nobody understands me until the right guy totally understands me" angsty Cinderella thing in films like 10 Things I Hate About You, Down to You, and Save the Last Dance. (Stiles single-handedly misled me into thinking always looking mean was a fail-safe route to finding The One.)

This was Hollywood's idea of plating up different types of women in the post-Ryan/Roberts era, and they didn't stop until they'd nailed every girl in the dELiA's catalog. I say "different" because "diverse" would be way too much of a stretch. Jennifer Lopez snagged mainstream roles, playing demure-but-wise in The Wedding Planner and Maid in Manhattan. But as Lathan, Nia Long, and__Gabrielle Union__ became go-to romantic heroines, their films remained promoted as "black" movies and kept in a different lane with marketing budgets that likely totaled less than Roberts' mousse allowance on her movies.

Then came the reign of the woman I'd argue is the most important one to the genre ever: Kate Hudson. That's right. Her characters may not be as quotable as those in the Ringwald/Ryan/Roberts canon, but she's the rom com equivalent of a good company man: reliable and productive. In eight years, she made eight rom coms—more than anyone else mentioned here—starting with How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which grossed over $100 million in theaters. Her smart blonde contemporaries in the rom com field (Reese Witherspoon and Cameron Diaz) simply couldn't keep up with her output.

In Hudson, studios had found the holy grail: An actress who seamlessly combined the earnestness of the early '90s girls and the quirkiness of the next wave. She was almost always a career girl, skeptical of love and settling down—the whole premise of Raising Helen is that she's the last woman who could handle a family—but she always succumbed to vulnerability, cracking jokes at Matthew McConaughey's expense right up until the moment she melted into his arms, rendering them one continuous mass of tan and blonde. (BTW, where is Hudson's special Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in Making Matthew McConaughey Seem Believable as a Regular Human?)

We ate it up. Finally, as viewers, we had it all: Hudson's characters always had polish and an inner freak. And Hudson herself always seemed like she was in on the act. Even in her silliest moments, she refused to seem unintelligent. Think of Bride Wars, with its escalating salon warfare—where another actress might have unleashed a classic horror-movie scream upon seeing her hair dyed turquoise, Hudson glared at the stylist in the mirror and barked, "BLUE! My hair is blue!" Her smarts made us feel smarter, aware that we were indulging ourselves by watching rom coms, not flinging ourselves into their truths. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was the decade after 9/11. Even in our escapism, we demanded more self-awareness than we had before.

Halfway through her run, Hudson got some stiff competition in the form of Katherine Heigl, a star of Grey's Anatomy whose film breakout moment came when Judd Apatow cast her in Knocked Up. Her next movie, 27 Dresses, was a mashup of every rom com element ever conceived—so much walking down the street with one's sassy best friend, so much being scammed by a dreamy-eyed reporter who falls in love with one on the job, so much bar dancing and making out in the rain and dress montage action.

It was an instant hit. Heigl made two more bankable rom coms in swift succession: The Ugly Truth, opposite Gerard Butler, and Killers, with Ashton Kutcher. In all of them, Heigl played "the sexy love spaz," i.e. a woman who excels in every area of her life, but she turns into a Chihuahua around a good-looking guy (jittery, yippy, and deathly afraid of eye contact). Heigl wasn't smooth, like Hudson, begging to be chased. She slipped and sputtered and got bamboozled by even inanimate objects, like Ugly Truth's vibrating panties, which brought her to orgasm in front of her colleagues before she could figure out any way to prevent it. (You know those moments that leave you going, sorry, no, she'd have gone to the bathroom no matter what?)

Her run wouldn't last long. The schtick that felt fresh and endearing in 27 Dresses expired quickly as Heigl's signature incompetency, combined with the heavily retread territory in her films—really, what is Life As We Know It but Raising Helen and The Ugly Truth combined?—made both her and the rom com itself feel suddenly exhausted. Hudson and Heigl were both out of the game by 2011, and anyone who paid to see their last rom coms (Life for Heigl, A Little Bit of Heaven for Hudson) in the theaters was probably ready for a break from the genre. We'd finally come to the point where romantic comedy cliches stopped comforting us and started annoying us. There had simply been too little new ground broken, and it was difficult to connect to these characters, the same way it's hard to listen to a friend whine about the exact same dating issue for a decade.

Since then, the rom com queen crown has been up for grabs, with zero solid contenders. Ensemble flicks like He's Just Not That Into You, Valentine's Day, and New Year's Eve—you know, the ones designed to include the viewpoints of multiple white people—have replaced traditional two-handers on studios' slates. Funny, simple boy-meets-girl stories are now the province of raunchier, messier indie-leaning films, like 2015's Sleeping With Other People. Amy Schumer's Trainwreck became the rare intersection last year, lighting up the box office with a rom com that was relatively traditional in structure.

Of course, Trainwreck didn't hand us a new celluloid heroine whose ambition and hair we were meant to copy. Schumer's character actually brought us full circle to Ringwald's brand of realness. If the days of rom com leads with aspirational life paths and perfect blowouts are over, is that really a bad thing? I don't think so. Because now that I'm an adult trying to actually run an adult life—not watching starry-eyed in a theater as my parents' van idles at the curb—I've accepted that these perfect women aren't lingering somewhere just ahead of me in life. I won't simply age into their perfect kitchens and corner offices; their ideal existences were propped up by, literally, an entire cast and crew. Yet they weren't all bad, either. Ringwald, Roberts, Ryan, Hudson—they never quite convinced us that we'd all be handed happy endings like they were. But they taught us to aim for them, and that's worth something. Any teenage girl today, raised on Divergent and Hunger Games, could stand to on-demand Sweet Home Alabama. There's nothing wrong with a little hope.

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