Cynics in search of a Fairytale Ending

We’re all jaded by romance, but we are unwilling to change the end of the story

“the revolution is for Lovers”

Everyone’s a cynic, but you’ll have to pry the fairytale ending from our cold claws. We’d rather twist and turn and figure out how to play out the same endings, over and over, instead of realizing that perhaps the storyline doesn't work; not for everyone. Maybe not even for most.

People of my age are wringing their hands about the prudish, regressive sexual politics of Gen Z so much that the criticism itself has become a joke.

this won’t stop me.

People are having less sex, though. People are burning out epically on dating apps, but remain hungry for narratives that involve 1+1s. Even as we flee the burning rafts of the Hinges and Bumbles, we’re suckers for a romantic ending. In fact, if it’s not romance, it’s not an ending. Single people are an unfinished phrase, an ellipsis.

We desire for every story to end in the same way, even as we grow more and more jaded about every plot point along the way. We devour romance books at an increasingly voracious pace — romance novel sales have doubled in recent years, and the (admittedly tiny) number of romance-only bookstores has increased tenfold — even if we lack the time, the “third spaces”, and interpersonal skills to manage an in-person meet cute anymore.

Two of the results from searching "romantic" in my photos

We salivate at the notion that someone is finally going to “bring back” the rom com movie, but maybe we’re just too ruined for that kind of plotline anymore. This leads me, like too many conversations these days, to Materialists, a charming press tour appended by a mostly joyless slog of a film.¹

One might say that Materialists has bewitched me, body and soul². Not a single day has passed in which I haven’t thought about, read about, or argued about this movie. I have not enjoyed a single day of peace since I saw it. I’m torn between the role of raving madwoman warning others away from her fate, and the sick desire for everyone I know to watch this movie immediately so that I can talk about it EVEN MORE.

I will not address its full hosts of faults, which others have done more comprehensively. I’m interested, however, that many people —even those who enjoyed it— reported leaving the theater feeling uneasy. That feeling, I’d venture, is incongruity: between the increasing difficulty of living a “good life”, and the idea that the best way to do it is to center romantic love. Don’t worry about money, and other shallow markers of desirability. Don’t worry about the inability to elevate yourself from squalor while working fulltime as a service worker. Don’t worry, you will never overcome the post-Reagan barriers to crossing class boundaries. Why would you need to worry? You have true love!

The film addresses the joylessness of finding a life partner in today’s economy. It superficially contends with the impossibility –and risibility– of lifelong happiness. It accidentally shines a light on the fundamental friction between building a stable and resource-rich life, and simultaneously doing so in a state of delirious love within a heteromonogamist marriage. That much is true: it is wild that in a country where merely staying afloat is harder than ever, you’re expected to grow your wealth and file your taxes solely with the same person you’re also meant to remain obsessed with and sexually attracted to for life (or, worse yet, do it entirely alone).

But in the end, like most romantic endings, it casts aside these matters in an unsettling instant. In the end, of course you must choose love, and suffer any misery, any discomfort, and any penury in its service.

This movie could only be a product by and for our late-stage-capitalism-addled brains. Even if we are starting to feel a twinge of misgiving; we may even see the shortcomings of a romance-centered life in a world that demands collective resources. Yet, we still insist upon the most illogical, traditional happy endings, against all reason and odds.

it’s the capitalism, stupid! Screenshot via youtube

It sucks to be poor. It sucks to be an island of two people, struggling through a capitalist hellscape. It sucks to be unable to pool your resources or care for one another collectively. Consider: no one in the film has even one friend.

This makes the decision between a rich, loveless marriage and a penniless, loving one, a red herring. Of course neither of these relationships works. They both offer different shades of loneliness and misery. But in the absence of any other way to end the story, our heroine must choose between these two bleak futures. We’re unwilling to tell any story that doesn’t end in monogamy and social isolation, forsaking all others forever.

I’m not the kind of person who goes to a romcom expecting it to end in some kind of anarchical post-relationship jamboree. I’m not a total moron. I understand the genre. I never would want us to outgrow our optimism in love, and romance. But maybe we’ve outgrown the adequacy of these storylines (with their inevitable march to the scaffold of marriage) to say something meaningful about the modern human condition, and the economies in which our love affairs unfold.

---

This week’s Assisted Living playlist

1. EDITOR’S NOTE: Andrew walked out of the theater a mere fifteen, interminable minutes into its run time

2. per the references on Celine Song’s deluded inspiration list