Rules of attraction: Alice Lovejoy gets down with love

Film Comment, May-June, 2003 by Alice Lovejoy

According to self-help books like Novak's, love is a game you can master, a skill you can learn, a process whose workings you can divine. If this process happens to be difficult, or emotional, you're clearly not a Rules Girl, and you're doomed to have your heart broken. This idea is the antidote to the terror-inducing image of the single woman, wanly popping chocolates and watching the We channel on a Saturday night, the archetype out of which Bridget Jones's Diary (for my money, Zellweger's last good role) managed to make a whole person--only to undermine it. According to this ethos, the person you are is always replaced by the relationship you form; an either/or choice based on the grim hypothesis that with a man, you may not be happier, but you're better off. But what Shakespeare's women know, and revel in, is the fact that love/s difficult and volatile and unpredictable. The hoops we jump through, the pain and the uncertainty, are all part of the passage from not-love to love, a passage that makes you both part of a couple and irreducibly more yourself. In Pillow Talk, to finally win over Doris Day, Rock Hudson must carry her kicking and screaming through the streets of New York, from her bedroom to his, blankets and all. And at the end of Down With Love, as Catcher and Barbara fly out over New York, suspended from the ladder of a Vegas-bound helicopter, you know they're going to be okay. After all, what's the point of falling in love if there's no story to tell about how you got there?

Alice Lovejoy is FILM COMMENT'S Managing Editor.