The emotional politics of limerence in romantic comedy films

‘Limerence’ describes the intensity of emotions often felt during the pair-forming stage of a romantic relationship, a period that is also the primary focus of many romantic comedy films. This article asks how filmmakers have used depictions of limerence to highlight spaces in which its potential for both disruption and loving care could be brought to political spheres. I look at a series of millennial romantic comedies that express emotional upheaval, vulnerability, and openness to change as qualities of relevance to both a romantic and political selfhood. These ‘political romcoms’ reveal a range of dynamic relations between notions of character competence, moral fibre, personality and deservedness, and invite investigation of complex emotions that modify a more generalised positive affect associated with romantic comedy cinema: humiliation as a comic device and the existential fear of rejection

Sentimentality in the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy: A Response to Berlant’s Optimism-Realism Binary

Lauren Berlant has famously problematised the sense of communal belonging wrought by sentimental humanism, yet in so doing has presumed a binary between optimism and realism, and tendered new strictures on acceptable affect. In suburban ensemble cinema we find an alternate view: sentimentality as a place of transition, and a more complex taxonomy of human relationality

Humanist Narratology and the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy

What is a “humanistic drama”? Although we might describe narrative works as humanist, and references to the humanistic drama abound across a breadth of critical media, including film and literary theory, the parameters of these terms remain elliptical. My work attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism. In particular, humanists ask how we use narrative texts to complicate our understanding of others, and question the ethics and efficacy of attempts to represent human social complexity in fiction. After historicising narrative humanism and situating it among related philosophies, I develop humanist hermeneutics as a method for reading fictive texts, and provide examples of such readings. I integrate literary Darwinism, anthropology, cognitive science and social psychology into a social narratology, which catalogues the social functions of narrative. This expansive study asks how we can unite the descriptive capabilities of social science with the more prescriptive ethical inquiry of traditional humanism, and aims to demonstrate their productive compatibility. From this groundwork, I then look at a cluster of humanistic film texts: the suburban ensemble dramedy, a phenomenon in millennial American cinema politicising the quotidian and the domestic. Popular works include The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Children, Junebug, The Oranges, and what is arguably the inciting feature in a wave of such films entering production, American Beauty. I provide examples of humanist readings of these films at two levels: an overview of genre development as social phenomenon (including histories of suburban depiction onscreen, ensemble cinema and affective experimentation in recent American filmmaking), followed by a close reading of a progenitor text, Ron Howard's 1989 film Parenthood

Abject Humanism in Tom Perrotta Adaptations: 'Election' and 'Little Children'

In ‘Literary Theory’, Terry Eagleton disparaged humanism as ‘a suburban moral ideology’. Humanist hermeneutics have often been criticized as politically impotent or lightweight owing to an emphasis on human kindness rather than systems of power and exploitation, yet close scrutiny of films labeled as humanistic or human drama reveals deep concern with antisocial behaviors, group politics, and the political consequences of our attempts to identify and ostracize transgressors. This paper uses adaptations of Tom Perrotta’s novels ‘Election’ and ‘Little Children’ to articulate a concept of abject humanism, asking how we can acknowledge negative affect and maleficence without becoming convinced that they are representative of all human experience. In turn, Perrotta’s works depict the problems we encounter when we do not admit darkness in our lives; they take us to the brink of human cruelty in American suburbia, and then see what is salvageable

Sentimentality in the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy: A Response to Berlant’s Optimism-Realism Binary

Lauren Berlant has famously problematised the sense of communal belonging wrought by sentimental humanism, yet in so doing has presumed a binary between optimism and realism, and tendered new strictures on acceptable affect. In suburban ensemble cinema we find an alternate view: sentimentality as a place of transition, and a more complex taxonomy of human relationality

Going to the movies in VR: Virtual reality cinemas as alternatives to in-person co-viewing

Virtual reality cinemas offer computer-generated screening environments that resemble physical-world movie theaters for avatar-based viewers. Reflecting on virtual spectatorship in the context of social isolation, the present study investigates whether VR cinemas could provide an alternative for collective movie watching and whether they could facilitate an engaging experience similar to other, physical-world co-viewing environments. To measure these effects, we designed a behavioral experiment in which participants watched a feature film sequence either in VR or a physical screening room in the presence or absence of viewing companions. After viewing, participants' experiences—including emotional engagement, narrative empathy, presence, social experiences, and physical and mental well-being—were recorded using survey methods. We observed that VR viewing can produce an equally enjoyable film experience, as well as similar levels of emotional engagement and narrative empathy, while it leads to increased comprehension of characters' feelings and sense of narrative engagement. In addition, social viewing may mean less engagement and more distractions depending on the screening environment. We also found that even though previous virtual reality exposure negatively correlates with comfort and well-being during viewing, early adopters of technology and VR supporters are more likely to have an enjoyable and engaging film experience