The Not So Tender Trap: Romantic Comedy and Revolt in the Fifties and Fifty Years Later

The Hollywood romantic comedies of the 1950s and early 1960s fashioned sex and marriage from the struggle between dapper playboys and prudish career women. In the twenty-first century, the dominant mode of the genre forces a similar heterosexual life narrative through a refigured struggle between immature male slackers and sexually liberated career women. Why would such similar romantic comedy cycles emerge in such distanced and dissimilar contexts? In employing a research based, cultural studies approach to the above question, this dissertation engages the surprising generic and ideological intersections between the midcentury sex comedy and the raunch/romantic comedy hybrid known as the millennial "brom-com", in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the power struggles informing the dominant intimate culture in the twenty-first century.;Each chapter compares the key representational strategies and thematic conflicts between a sex comedy (e.g. That Touch of Mink, The Tunnel of Love, Send Me No Flowers) and a brom-com (e.g. The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, I Love You, Man), as situated in relation to the films' respective historical contexts. Such a comparative engagement demonstrates that while the specific figurations of the immature male, the heterosexual couple, and the broader socio-political landscape may change, the cycles' overlapping thrills, anxieties, and limitations present a similar set of heteronormative expectations rooted in the postwar breadwinner ethic.;In reinventing the sex comedy's flirtations with false liberalism and male regression, the brom-com suggests that such expectations are deeply unsatisfactory. The brom-com's male revolt against these gendered expectations is especially evident in the cycle's celebratory, albeit nervous indulgence in the queer-straight form of male homosocial intimacy popularly known as "bromance"---a prominent yet unnamed phenomenon in the sex comedies. Despite the brom-coms' spirited stagings of revolt, however, the cycle remains curiously resistant to detaching from the patriarchal fantasies of postwar optimism.