Screen Machine

Feature: The Terror of the Rom Com

I recently endured While You Were Sleeping, a 1995 romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock. Sandy B. Bullock works at a toll booth at a grey Chicago train station; she is very lonely, and wears beanies because she is sad. Her day is brightened by the smile of an attractive businessman (Peter Gallagher, whom we now recognize as yummy daddy Sandy from The OC). One freezing Christmas morning, Bullock and Yummy Daddy have the station to themselves, until two muggers arrive. In awesomely incongruent Jersey accents (I do believe this film is set in Chicago):

Mugger 1 taunts, “Noice Jaaaaket.”

Mugger 2 corroborates, “Meeeeehhhry Krysmussss.”

Yummy daddy falls on the tracks! Bullock saves Yummy Daddy’s life by rolling him out of the way of the oncoming train.

Later, at the hospital, a cheery nurse mistakes Bullock for the fiancé of (now comatose) Yummy Daddy, and introduces Bullock to his ‘carrraazyyy’ (but warm-hearted) family with this title. Bullock, being so very shy/bumbling/sweet/small town/fatherless/lonely (“I’m so lonely – cooooooo – that I’d prefer to lie and pretend I’m a coma man’s fiancé than comply with basic standards of honesty”), does not correct them, most definitely lying by omission. From here on out, Bullock attends Coma Man’s family Christmas, fabricates cute stories about their past, and even begins to assume girlfriend/fiancé duties, gaining access to his apartment to feed his cat.

As Coma Man’s family becomes progressively more and more fond of Sandy, I suppose we (the audience) are supposed to forgive this rather psychopathic conduct on account of her winter woolies and vague rendition of ‘sweetness’. I think I understand the logic.

If

x: lady appears sweet and non-offensive

Then

y: It is cool to lie to a dying man’s family, claiming that you know/are engaged to him.

As my 13 year old sister pointed out, Bullock’s deception is a more appropriate premise from which to launch a thriller or horror film. This narrative exploits a real-life fear – that the abuse of those we trust is a greater violation than the dangerous potential of strangers. Horror films often rely on this fear, making the protagonist ultimately distrust those closest to them – sometimes even themselves.

The funnest thing about WYWS is that the film does not wish us to understand this premise as an act of terror. This narrative is presented within the formally pleasant characteristics of a bourgeois family drama, repressing this weird premise whilst maintaining a polite bourgeois distance from its dickhead subjects. Incredibly lame visions of how a ‘boisterous’ family (soooo ‘friendly’ and ‘mad’!) should be – the (acceptably) loopy nanna in her paper Christmas hat (not that loopy when it is Christmas); the token teenage daughter who acts and dresses awkwardly childlike (a far cry from my teenage Christmases, which definitely involved more champagne theft).

The film’s family-friendly veneer presents dishonesty as an acceptable element to an archaic notion of feminine ‘passivity’, and promotes deception as a suitable premise from which one can establish a romantic bond. Alfred Hitchcock tapped into this black intersection of the gore and the ‘giddy’ much earlier on with his 1955 film The Trouble with Harry, in which widow X and man Y fall in love over the corpse of her husband. WYWS carries on, presenting lies and perversion as normality, hiding them, as the film itself comes to embody an arena of middle class repression.

I suppose the rom com must repress a lot of the truths propelling it forward – that the manner in which people in love behave isn’t usually very funny, or that they wish to follow up that pash on the Empire State Building with a bit of (not quite so innocent) grinding. It is as though WYWS is fighting against its own instinctive forces: whilst it tries so hard to be a politely distanced comedy about the redemptive powers of Volvos and labradors, it fails at concealing its own nature, and these repressed elements slide up to the surface in the most uncomfortable moments for characters and spectator alike.

At one point, Bullock reveals that she knows that Coma Man has only one testicle. Uncle Geoff (aware of Bullock’s charade) mutters, “I don’t want to know how you knew that.” Bullock’s admission reverberates beyond this moment, a reminder of how perverted her position as an admirer of Coma Man is. In this particular moment, all these repressed perversities briefly return to the surface, and Uncle Geoff, along with the spectator, wonders for a sec what the sexual or physical relationship between Bullock and Coma Man actually is.

What if these repressed instincts slid to the surface more often? And were developed? What if we replaced Bullock’s ineloquent bullshit with the immediacy of a horror heroine shrieking? And saw her hop into bed and molest Coma Man?

Is WYWS just a horror flick, albeit one with a truncated narrative and repressed instincts? I wonder whether a horror film can be viewed as the (honest) extenuation of a (dull and repressed) rom com. Perhaps we could replace the title of the film (itself a repressed euphemism, suggesting both that the man was ‘sleeping’ when he was in fact comatose, and that this sleeping subject is the principal object of desire), with something more under the lines of While You Were Comatose, I, A Perfect Stranger, Convinced Your Family That We Knew Each Other, and Were Engaged to be Married, Meanwhile Your Little Bro and I are Keen on Each Other, But You Woke Up and the Fam is Now Convinced That You Have Amnesia (Because You Don’t Know Me), But Don’t Worry, We’re Going to All End Up Happy, or something more concise: Psycho.

Emma recently completed a combined honours degree in Literature and Cinema at Monash University, and has also studied at the Freie Universität Berlin, in 2008-2009.

→ more articles by Emma Jane McNicol