I'll Have What She's Having

Despite the ongoing brilliance of Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman, these are sad times for ladies, I find. The daily tyranny of the Daily Mail’s online sidebar of shame, cataloguing who is a tiny bit fatter/thinner/happier/more sad/wearing too much and ‘covering up their curves’/wearing a bikini and ‘flaunting their curves’. ‘Curves’, of course, being newspaper and magazine shorthand for ‘unfortunate lady measurements that mean you will never be Gisele, and which, therefore, should make you constantly neurotic about your looks’. Although, confusingly, in fash mags, Gisele is described as having ‘curves’ because in model terms, she has a semblance of a cleavage. There is also a subtext that because she is Brazilian, and all Brazilian women are apparently enviably ‘curvy’ – the Daily Mail struggles with this because they are both curvy and foreign, obviously – she goes in and out in a way that is remarkable. To my eyes, she is as curvy as an ironing board, but there we go. Model standards have changed. I count myself lucky to have spent my teenage years admiring the original ‘supers’, such as Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell, who had curves that no-one could dispute. That shot of them all together in George Michael’s Freedom video makes them look like Amazonians compared with the current crop of Avatar-tall coathangers striding down the catwalks.


Other evidence that these are sad times for ladies: Fifty Shades of Grey being dubbed ‘mummy porn’. Well, that and the fact that such a stratospherically bad book has sold nearly 400,000 copies. In a week. Actual, physical copies, not even ‘I could be reading George Orwell for all you know’ Kindle copies! Have you no shame, women of Britain? Given the acres of coverage about what a phenomenon it is, it’s in many ways a good thing that someone came up with the snappy moniker of ‘mummy porn’ for it. (Perhaps this is one of the very reasons that it has totally taken over newspapers, radio and the interwebs – people love being able to use the word ‘porn’ but undercut it and make it seem tame by teaming it with the word ‘mummy’). After all, if they hadn’t come up with that, they’d have had to call it ‘embarrassingly poorly written erotic literature’, which isn’t nearly as catchy. And takes you four times as long to type.

‘Mummy porn’ annoys me in so many ways. Why not ‘mum porn’ for starters? Because women, even mums, for heaven’s sake, have to be infantilised. ‘Mummy porn’ makes it sound like a silly, giggly pleasure. Like sneaking a cream bun when you’re on a diet. Nothing to do with actually getting your rocks off and then subsequently having sex. Probably quite kinky sex, based on the BDSM themes of the books. It’s also, what, porn for middle aged women? Based on what? The dubious ‘heroine’ is in her early 20s. Are blokes reading it? Generally if something’s selling that many copies they are (even if only out of curiosity). What are they supposed to think of the fact that they’re enjoying ‘mummy porn’? What about the legions of women who are reading it who aren’t mums? Is it going to transform them into Laura Ashley skirt-wearing women, fretting about their non-existent children and whether or not they’ve got their ‘pre-baby body’ back? (Again, per the Daily Mail, this is all mums are supposed to be concerned with). It’s all so fecking patronising, like erotica for women can’t really be termed proper porn; that proper porn can only be created by men, for men.

Ugh. Anyway, the thing that made me particularly sad for ladies today was hearing that Nora Ephron had died. Will there ever be another romcom as good as When Harry Met Sally? I could still happily watch that film at least twice a year. It’s brilliant. And judging by the happy relationships of quite a few of my friends who have got together with their best male chums, it clearly had a lasting effect on my generation. I persist in going to see modern romcoms, in the hopes that they will make me feel as warm, fuzzy and hopeful of falling in love as When Harry Met Sally does. Unfortunately, writing them appears to be a lost art. Studios seem to spend all the money on hiring whoever is in them instead of investing in a really corking script. Which means that now we have Jennifer Aniston and her Hair (which I think gets paid a separate fee), just with a different leading man each time. She stands/sits/walks and we look at her hair. And we think, ‘Why is Jennifer Aniston deemed to be our romantic role model? Does anyone still want to be Jennifer Aniston? Her hair is really boring. I am sick of her face. I am sick of the fact that she never says anything interesting in films. Or not in films. At all. I find her utterly emotionally unengaging. Oh god, why won’t she leave me alone?’ I feel persecuted by Jennifer Aniston’s blandness.

My most recent foray into romcommery was The Five Year Engagement. I like Emily Blunt (she seems nice and down to earth, and a laugh). It has a chap called Jason Segel in it, who I think I’ve probably seen in other things. He looks to be tall, with a nice face (I have such low standards! Seriously, why am I still single? I’d probably be happy with someone of average height, with a nice face! Where are they?) Tall, nice-faced Jason Segel wrote the film, which is perhaps where its problems start. Women know what they want from a romcom – a nice man, a likeable heroine, some reasons for the two to be apart, then a big finish in which the man sets out all the reasons he loves the woman in a dramatic speech – usually involving a combination of rain, airports or train stations and/or one of them turning up somewhere massively inappropriate, like in the middle of the Leveson enquiry when the other is presenting evidence, or at the Olympics, right before Tom Daley is about to do his last dive, which might get him a gold medal, something like that. She goes gooey and says, ‘I love you too’. We all melt a bit, wishing life were actually like that. The end. That’s why women should write romcoms. Men like films in which cars/bridges/The Empire State Building blow up and lots of other men go ‘grr’ or beat each other to a bloody pulp. They do not like seeing romcoms, ergo they are not well versed in their tropes.

Therefore, despite Lovely Emily Blunt, The Five Year Engagement marks a new low in romcoms in that it seemed to contain neither rom nor com. For two hours! It’s rare that you see a film and think, ‘That should have had an hour taken out of it’. They made arranging a wedding seem akin, in terms of negotiations and compromise, to the Northern Ireland Peace Process. When a friend of mine got engaged in February, and is getting hitched at the end of September. In a church. With a marquee in a field. All of that – proper, organisational stuff, which requires both time and effort. Done, in six months.

The obstacles to them getting married are:

They move, because Emily Blunt has been offered a really good job, from San Francisco to somewhere which snows a lot (the five years that elapse are demonstrated by shots of snow, interspersed with shots of green-leaved trees. That’s pretty much it). This is not, in itself, much of a hindrance. Pick a date in Spring! Or not, I mean, you might want to wear a big cape or something and have a Narnia theme.

Emily Blunt has a better job than Jason Segel when they move to Snowsville. Jason Segel gets a job, but feels it is beneath him. (He is a fancypants chef, who ends up in a less fancypants place). So, do it for six months and then find another job, Jase! That’s what people do! No, Jason decides to be miserable and resentful at Emily having a better job than him and forcing him to move to Snowsville. He also grows the world’s worst stuck-on moustache and beard combo, and takes up hunting, making homebrew and wearing hideous knitwear. Again – a shave, an outfit change and drinking proper booze instead would sort that out. No need to stop planning the wedding.

He becomes so miserable that he has to move back to San Francisco, and break up with Emily. (This, conceivably, is actually a bar to them getting married). They both have to have terrible new relationships, to prove how much they should be with each other. Emily’s is with her boss, played by Rhys Ifans. He is a creepy, patronising, controlling professor. We know he is creepy because he spends quite a lot of the time wearing a poloneck. We get he’s not right for her! Stop making him wear a poloneck! It’s overkill! She has marked the end of her engagement by having an unflattering fringe. Jason is going out with a quite unnecessarily awful 20-something blonde. Who in reality would never have given him a second glance, let alone, from the passage of snow to green leaves and back again, seem to have gone out with him for over a year.

There is then an agonising period of time in which Jason sets up a business (I know! You practically have to sit through him going to the bank and talking them through his business plan and profitability predictions for the next five years). Why he didn’t decide to do this in Snowsville is anyone’s guess. So, he’s running a business, albeit one that involves him selling tacos from a truck. He’s hardly working 24/7 creating the next Apple. He could take some time off. You know, to get married. That bit only takes a day.

The plot also deems it necessary to kill off, I think, three grandparents. For no other reason than to illustrate how hopelessly tardy these two are at organising their nuptials. It is resolutely unfunny, no-one ever refers to the sadness of losing said grandparents (to whom they all seem close) and it does nothing to move the plot forward, other than when one of Emily’s grandparents dies, and she has to go to England for the funeral (she is English, for no apparent reason, and her accent wanders around a fair bit; plus her sister, also living in San Francisco, appears to be American). Thus we have our Dramatic Declaration of Love moment, when Jason makes the effort to fly over there, unannounced. Even then, she’s still talking about going back to Snowsville when the ‘semester’ starts. Despite the fact that her boyfriend is a PATRONISING POLONECK WEARER.

Given the number of deaths, it might as well be called Arranging a Wedding is a Terrible Bore. Funerals? Less so.

By the end, I not only felt as though I had lived through their entire five year relationship, but that I never wanted another relationship in my life as the whole thing seemed so boring and so much hard work. I’d wager that the anticipated result of a romcom is not for the viewer to think, ‘Oh, thank GOD I’m still single.’

The last ten minutes are funny, though, if it’s ever on TV and you fancy doing the televisual equivalent of a child refusing to eat broccoli and just going straight for dessert by only tuning in for that bit. Instead, I am going to indulge in a marathon Ephron tribute session with a large stack of DVDs and dream of marrying either Billy Crystal or Tom Hanks. Here’s to you, Nora, you were really something special.