Tag Archives: romance

Women’s Genre Fiction Fails the Bechdel Test

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This first ran on Salon…and then Salon deleted it. Not sure why; I suspect a glitch. I tried to notify the editors, but they didn’t do anything…so what the hey, I figured I’d reprint it here, since they don’t seem to want it.
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Lately critics have piled on the chick flick “The Other Woman” for one specific reason: it doesn’t pass the Bechdel test— Alison Bechdel’s famous heuristic which asks whether a film has (a) two women who (b) talk to each other about (c) something other than a man. As Linda Holmes says in a particularly scathing review at NPR, “ “The Other Woman” is 109 minutes long, and at no time do any of these women—including Carly (Cameron Diaz) and her secretary (Nicki Minaj), who only know each other from work — pause for a discussion, even for a moment, of anything other than a series of dudes…” Vulture put a clever new spin on this argument by collecting all the lines Kate Upton says in the movie, which included: “I can’t believe he’d lie to me, I really thought we were soul mates” and “We could kick him in the balls!”

Having a film featuring three female protagonists who do nothing but talk about men is, the Bechdel Test suggests, unfeminist. Let it be known, though, that “The Other Woman” does technically pass the Bechdel Test: Kate (Leslie Mann) has a very brief conversation with Amber (Kate Upton) about how good Amber smells. Still, the films female friendships are all based on the women’s relationship with a single, caddish guy. Those applying the Bechdel Test say that this is a failure. But if a movie for women, with female stars, about female friendships and the evils of male infidelity can’t pass the test, maybe the problem isn’t with the film, but with Bechdel’s rubric.

The truth is that female genre fiction (whether movies or TV or books)— designed for and consumed mostly  by women—not infrequently has difficulty passing the Bechdel Test, precisely because female genre fiction is often really interested in men. The Twilight films don’t do well. Neither do many romance novels, as romance novelists like Jillian Burns and  Jenny Trout have acknowledged.

Tessa Dare’s 2012 Regency romance “A Week to Be Wicked,” for example, features as its heroine Minerva, a determined geologist who becomes a noted scientist in the teeth of contemporary mores while also showing an unexpected flair for passion and screwball comedy. There’s no doubt that the book is self-consciously feminist — the scientific community’s exclusion of female scientists is a major plot point, and one of the things that Minerva loves about the hero, Colin, is that he isn’t threatened by her accomplishments. But despite such support for female empowerment, “A Week to Be Wicked” doesn’t really pass the Bechdel Test. When Minerva talks to her beloved sister or to her mother, it’s about Colin.  There are a few ensemble scenes in which Colin and Minerva fool a carriage full of women into thinking that they’re royalty on their way to a kingdom on the border of Spain and Italy — so that might technically count, if you were determined to make it. There’s probably another moment or two as well; books find the tests easier to pass just because they’re longer than films. But as with “The Other Woman” — or really even more than with “The Other Woman” — the story in “A Week To Be Wicked” is about the relationship between the female lead and the male lead. And that means that the female lead is generally either talking to the guy or talking about him. There’s not a ton of space for extraneous Bechdel-appeasing conversations.

A genre novel that fails the test even more spectacularly is Alex Beecroft’s “False Colors.”  There are hardly any women in Beecroft’s romance novel at all. It’s M/M — a gay historical novel set mostly aboard ship with the British Navy. Despite the failure to pass the test, M/M novels in general are hardly anti-female. Beecroft is a woman, her readership (as with most M/M) is probably predominantly women, and the female characters we do see are treated with sympathy and surprising depth given how little screen-time they get.  I particularly liked the fortiesh widow, Lavinia Deane, who flirts with one of the heroes and figures out (with no bitterness) why he won’t flirt back before he fully understands it himself (“Say you won’t try to be some sort of saint in the wilderness,” she says with earthy kindness, channeling the wishes of both author and readers. “I’d hate to think of you withering away untasted.”)

But such bright cameos can’t change the fact that, as far as the Bechdel Test goes, the novel fails big-time. I don’t think there’s a scene in which two women talk to each other, much less talk to each other about something other than men. As M/M writer Becky Black says about her own books and the Bechdel Test, “I personally usually structure the story so every scene will be from the Point of View of one or the other of the heroes. All of this means there isn’t much space for the female characters to have a chance!”

M/M romance, and associated genres like yaoi manga  and slash fiction underline the limits of the Bechdel Test. It’s true that a book like “False Colors” doesn’t have many female characters — but that’s because the author fully expects the audience to identify, and fantasize, across genders. In “False Colors,” both leads play the role of damsel in distress, and both play the role of heroic rescuer. The Bechdel Test assumes that men are men and women are women. But questioning that assumption can be a feminist project in itself.

The point here is simply that — as many of the romance authors I’ve linked say — the Bechdel Test has some limits. Alison Bechdel has said she doesn’t use it as a “filter” for herself , as her character Mo did. The test can be a useful way to think about how gender works in films or books, but alone it can’t tell you whether something is good or bad, or feminist or unfeminist.

It’s also, though, worth thinking about the way that the Bechdel Test fits a bit too neatly into cultural and feminist prejudices against genre fiction. Mo is a lesbian, so it makes some sense that she wouldn’t be interested in the kind of stories where women are focused on heterosexual romance (even though there certainly are lesbians who enjoy het romance.) But should that really be turned into a general rule suggesting that women’s interest in heterosexual relationships is somehow unfeminist, or a sign of aesthetic failure?

From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sneer at “that damned mob of scribbling women” to Lisa Jervis’ assertion that chick lit is responsible for the “evacuation of feminist politics,” men and certain strands of feminism have long been united in seeing female genre fictions as weak, foolish, corrupt, and even corrupting. Using the Bechdel Test as a way to chastise women for enjoying the wrong, insufficiently highbrow, unfeminist thing — whether that be The Other Woman, or “Twilight,” or romance novels — seems like it fits into that unfortunate tradition of gendered scorn. The Bechdel Test remains a useful lens for looking at art. But it’s important to remember that Bechdel’s Rule is, itself, a cultural and aesthetic product. If Bechdel’s comic can be used to test romance, or chick flicks, then romance, or chick flicks, can be used to test Bechdel as well.

Untrue Romance

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Tarantino is a somewhat erratic filmmaker. None of his films are actually bad (save his segment of Four Rooms, maybe) but some are fantastic and some waver around mediocre. It’s not chronological, either; he isn’t a filmmaker who has fallen off (yet, at least.)

There is one fairly common theme to his weaker moments, though, I think. It comes down to the fact that his grasp of men’s genre material is much stronger than his grasp of women’s genre material.

At least for me, all of Tarantino’s weakest filmmaking moments happen when he tries to do romance, or something like soap opera. The Butch/Fabiene romance in Pulp Fiction is treacly and deeply unconvincing; you end up hating both characters, not falling in love with them. Similarly, the soap opera aspects of Kill Bill are a mess. There’s never even a modicum of chemistry between Bill and the Bride; their endless heart to heart at the end of part 2 is tedious rather than heart-wrenching. The Bride’s transformative experience with motherhood is completely unconvincing, and also unquestioned. Django is supposedly built around a passionate romance, but it has no idea how to represent that, or really do anything with it beyond motivating Django to shoot lots of people.

Tarantino is generally very good at undermining, or tinkering with, or examining male genre conventions, whether he’s telling you how good it feels to watch someone cut off an ear, or thinking about what pacifism does to narrative (which is to me one of the most fascinating parts of Pulp Fiction.) But when he deals with traditionally women-oriented genre material, he’s just at sea. The best he can do is to lace his treacle with half-hearted irony. But he’s not passionate enough about the material to savage it or embrace it. He just sort of lets it sit there helplessly, until he can move onto something else. It’s telling, I think, that Tarantino’s great romances are ones that are not quite romances; Jackie Brown and Max, or Vince and Mia.

This isn’t to say that Tarantino is sexist. He sometimes is, I’d say, but he also has a lot of great female characters, who he treats with interest, compassion, and respect. And of course lots of women like his films, just like lots of women like “male” genre work. Compared to many male filmmakers, I’d say that Tarantino is even quite interested in representing a diversity of women on screen (though his casts overall still tip male.) But what he’s not interested in, or attuned to, is women’s genre work. A Quentin Tarantino romantic comedy, in short, would be a very bad idea.

Romance>Lit Fic

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Cover-SolarIan McEwan secretly writes romance. He’s supposed to be a lit fic author, but most of the books of his I’ve read — The Innocent, Atonement, and Sweet Tooth — all function like category romances, with a bit of meta-fictional trickery (which isn’t exactly foreign to category romance either. The last of these I read, Sweet Tooth, even works as a kind of love letter to the fan fic wing of romance. The book is narrated by Serena Frome, a low-level operative in MI-5 tasked with secretly funding propaganda funds to likely anti-communist literary sorts. She falls in love with Tom Haley, a novelist she’s gotten into the program…and then (spoiler!) it turns out at the end that she isn’t actually the narrator; instead, Tom is the narrator writing as her. The romance trope of switching between male and female protagonist consciousnesses is both tweaked and perfectly fulfilled, as is the fan fic genre trope of telling the same story from different characters perspectives. It’s a tour de force, not because it upends romance conventions, but because it fulfills them so gleefully and perfectly. Quite possibly McEwan doesn’t read category romance or fan fic—but he has enough common roots with the genre that he understands them, and loves them and makes them his own— or, if you prefer, lets them make him theirs.

So it was with some disappointment that I read McEwan’s “Solar”and realized that it was not a romance. It’s just literary fiction. And you can tell it’s literary fiction not because it dispenses with genre tropes, but because the genre tropes of literary fiction are all in place. The aging priaptic professor and his string of wives; the jabs at academic politics, the ironies, the metafictional asides (the main character, Beard embellishes a story “not because, or not only because, he was a liar, but because he instinctively knew it was wrong to dishonor a good story.”) And of course the inevitable, drearily happy unhappy ending, where everyone figures out that the main character is a horrible person and all his lies catch up to him, and so we’re left dangling in media res with disaster delightfully coming. Yawn. It’s almost as drearily cliché as the end of Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World” where the last scene is of the characters literally gazing at a rich tapestry. No, really.

Genre fiction, and especially romance, is generally thought of as predictable and structurally uncreative. Lit fic requires idiosyncratic genius. But for McEwan, at least in the four books I’ve read, the opposite is the case. Romance seems to inspire him to play with the genre; to stretch it out and move the bits around, to see just how far he can push his characters and his readers while still retaining their love. In lit fic, though, the pretense of no formulas seems to mean he can’t even see the formulas, and so he just goes trudging through them, without even bothering with variation or wit or invention. The box you know is there becomes an inspiration; the box you refuse to see is the one that holds you.

This isn’t to say that Solar is utterly without merit; there’s an incredibly funny bit involving sub zero urination and the consequences thereof. But the amusing set pieces never add up to anything interesting, because lit fic’s non formula-formula robs McEwan of invention as surely as his main character is (inevitably) bereft of inspiration and genius. Without genre, lit fic is at the mercy of its formulaic conventions.

The Romance of the Closet

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51AIyxdOPlL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_At the end of Pam Rosenthal’s 2008 regency romance novel The Edge of Impropriety, we learn offhand that Lady Isobel Wyatt and Miss Amory, two wealthy young women who had been seeking husbands during the season, have “determined to live together as companions and had set themselves up in a Welsh cottage.” The information is about minor characters, and is dropped casually — too casually, in fact. Rosenthal is telling us that Wyatt and Amory are lesbians, and in doing so, she rewrites, or reinterprets, every scene in which the characters appeared. When Miss Amory, the American heiress, watched eligible bachelor Anthony courting Wyatt, she was jealous — but the jealousy, we now realize, was because she was in love with Wyatt, not with Anthony. When we overhear Wyatt telling Amory that she has turned down Anthony’s proposal and is truly happy for the first time in her life, that happiness, on rereading, is not just because of a loveless marriage avoided — it’s because of a loving companionship embraced. Wyatt and Amory are treated throughout the novel as a kind of side plot; they are edges of Anthony’s love triangle. But then, at the end, we find that triangle was concealing another, and that the two women have their own hidden story, if you know how to look for it.

If Wyatt and Amory’s love is in a closet, though, it’s a closet within a closet. Because their Welsh cottage is not just their Welsh cottage, but the Welsh cottage of everyone in the novel. In The Edge of Impropriety, everyone, it seems, has a secret love, and, for that matter, a secret life. Lady Gorham, or Marina, the fabulous author and socialite, was once a poor Irish kept woman, forced to dance on tabletops for her upkeep. Helen, the perfect governess, is in love with the rakish, inaccessible Anthony. Jaspar, Anthony’s uncle and guardian, is actually Anthony’s father — and on top of that he’s concealing an affair with Marina. “Marina’s besotted lover and Sydney’s quaint, straitlaced guardian might inhabit the same body,” Jaspar muses, but they had very little to say to each other.” Everyone has a double life; everyone is playing his or herself for others, hiding a desire that dare not speak its name.

The key that opens the closets of that Welsh cottage, then, is also a key to the novel as a whole — which is to say, the novel is, in many ways, a closet. Wyatt and Amory are minor characters, perhaps, but Rosenthal’s emphasis on secret loves and secret lives makes them thematically central. To drive the point home, Rosenthal includes a scene lifted from (and directly referencing) the famous Catherine de Bourgh encounter in Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth realizes that Darcy loves her because his aunt tries to separate them. Romance is interpreted by hints and signs — and not just by hints and signs, but by hints and signs between two women, whether Elizabeth and Catherine, or Marina and Jaspar’s ward Sydney, or the (generally female) reader and that some female protagonist. Romance is a book you read for hidden, queer love — which means those two women, and their Welsh cottage, aren’t a marginal storyline, but the story itself.

This isn’t just true for romance, either. Take the hip sci-fi Canadian televison thriller Orphan Black, which I’ve just gleefully begun to binge watch. The series focuses on Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany), a struggling young woman who discovers that she’s one of a number of clones. She ends up impersonating one of her “sisters”, a police officer named Beth .

Sarah’s brother, and closest friend is Felix (Jordan Gavaris). Felix is flamboyantly gay — and the fact that he is so far out of the closet tends to force you to read Sarah as in. Sarah, after all, is, like the characters in The Edge of Impropriety, playing herself. She takes on Beth’s middle-class, straight life — wearing her square clothes, living in her square house, and (with a notable lack of enthusiasm, at least at first) having sex with her square boyfriend. In one sequence, Felix is asked over to a suburban potluck as a bartender in order to distract from the fact that clone Allison has her husband tied up in the basement for questioning because she thinks he’s a spy. Felix, out of the closet, is a screen for Allison’s kinky torture role-play — a doubled roleplay, since for part of the torture, Sarah is pretending to be Allison.

As the show goes on, Sarah’s square boyfriend turns out not to be what he appears either, which only perhaps underlines the point. Spy narratives are built on secrets and double lives, on passing for what you aren’t while keeping some sexy secret gun behind that secret closet door. It’s no surprise that one of Sarah’s clones turns out to be bisexual, since Sarah herself spends all her time passing. And for that matter, all those sci-fi clone and robot fictions, are about queer reproduction — a world in which heterosexual sex is displaced by alternate couplings.
 

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The Edge of Impropriety and Orphan Black both reflect a world in which LGBT people are more accepted, and more visible, than in the past. But that has not banished the LGBT experience as a fictional metaphor or trope. Rather, it seems to allow us to see just how pervasive, and important LGBT stories have been to the construction of narrative and genre. Critics of diversity sometimes argue that advocates are pushing gay content — but these stories suggest that in romance, in sci-fi, in espionage, gay content was always already there to begin with. It’s just that now, and hopefuly increasingly, it can come out of the closet.

Can a Romance Novel Be Ambiguous?

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2385082Multi-layered, ambiguous, nuanced, complex. That’s generally the sort of thing literary critics say when they are praising some important work of literary fiction for its importance, seriousness, and literariness. Great novels, or works of art, are supposed to have meanings within meanings, perspectives within perspectives. To be great is to be multiple. Pulp or genre novels, on the other hand, are often seen as being singularly utilitarian. A horror novel scares you; a spy novel gets the blood pumping, porn does what porn does.

In an interview with me last week, romance novelist Kathleen Gilles Seidel suggested that romance, too, was more singular than multiple, at least in some respects. As a writer, she says,

my relationship with my reader is a romance writer’s. I am not out to challenge her (or him), threaten her, or even change her. I am very controlling of her (or his) experience. The characters may be complex, and the judgment about them may be nuanced, but ultimately there is almost no ambiguity in the judgments. A reader is going to end up drawing the same conclusions that I have.

So for Seidel, romance novels are restrictive and, at least in some ways, unambiguous. Is this true?

There are buckets and boatloads of romance novels, and it’s hard to make any statement about them in general that would be true of every one. But it does seem to be true of one novel — Seidel’s own 1991 book More Than You Dreamed.

More Than You Dreamed is about an (extremely) wealthy director’s daughter, Jill Casler, and a basketball coach, Doug Ringling, who is the nephew of the famous actor Bix Ringling. Bix and Jill’s father, Cass, were both involved in the making of a 1948 blockbuster, Weary Hearts, a historical drama focusing on one Confederate family’s struggles during the Civil War. The making of the film is shrouded in confusion, and Jill and Doug work together to uncover the production mysteries. While falling in love. As you’d expect.

To repeat, that outcome is expected. You’re introduced to Doug and Jill on the first page, and you know what’s going to happen. That singular, predictable reading is mirrored, emphatically, in the film within the book. Just as the reader reads “Doug” and “Jill” and says, “aha!”, so Doug and Jill read various versions of the script for Weary Hearts — and those readings are always singular, immediate, crystal clear. When Doug and Jill find Bix’s original script, they both know it’s a masterpiece — and everyone else who sees it thinks exactly the same thing. When Doug and Jill see an early print of the film, they both agree it’s a failure, and for the exact same reasons. Art, in More Than You Dreamed, is unitary. It speaks to everyone with the same voice.

Or does it? Is Doug and Jill’s reading of Weary Hearts the only reading? Again, Weary Hearts seems based, at least in very broad strokes, on Gone With the Wind — another sweeping Confederate historical. Gone With the Wind, like Weary Hearts, was, and is, widely beloved. But it’s also extremely contentious. GWTW was a racist film; as a result, its tragically defeated white heroes can also be seen as awful, white supremacist villains. Instead of a romantic triumph, the film could be seen (and frequently is seen) as an ugly apology for evil.

And what about Weary Hearts? The film, as described, seems to be much less focused on race than GWTW — the characters are not landholders, but small farmers, and only one black character appears. But still, if you take seriously the idea that the Confederacy was a racist endeavor, the view of Weary Hearts has to shift. Is Pompeii, the one black slave in the film, really content to travel with the Confederate hero Charles as he wanders about fighting Yankees? Is that original print really flawed because of poor acting? Or does the early version lack power because it fails to confront the moral evil of the Confederacy?

There are clues in the book that perhaps support this alternate reading of the film. Doug, who looks almost exactly like the star of Weary Hearts, participates in a Civil War reenactment, during which he makes a passing joke about the South’s racist and sexist past. Later, and more uncomfortably, while he waits for a black basketball star friend, he quips, “I kind of like this, meeting him in a Confederate uniform. He can call me Massa, it will be good for him.” Jill replies that Doug should probably be the one calling Lynx master, since Lynx “could buy and sell you.” On the surface, it’s supposed to be a moment of fun banter. But it’s also an uneasy reminder of what the American South (and not just the South) was about. And though, again, it seems to be directly denying the continuing relevance of that history (Lynx has the power now) it could also be seen as a nervous suggestion that the past isn’t quite yet gone.

In researching Weary Hearts, Jill and Doug both want to prove that their relatives — Jill’s dad, Doug’s uncle — were good, thoughtful, brilliant, talented people. They succeed in doing so; that’s the message, and part of the happy ending, of the novel. But there’s ambiguity there too. Is it good, and thoughtful, and brilliant, to present a romantic Confederacy sans racism? The title line, near the end of the book (“…once you start to look, you may find more than you ever dreamed”) could be about the wonder of finding love. But it could also be an ironic comment on how dreams (filmic or otherwise) can ensure that you don’t look for, and don’t find, certain things.

Probably this isn’t the reading Seidel intended. But again, there’s some textual support. Jill, we learn in the novel, is an incredibly controlled person, terribly afraid that the people around her will become angry. “Jill’s goal in life was to get people to stop being angry. That’s what she did, calm everyone down so that things would get done”. Doug, for his part, lost his job at a Division I school; he is adrift throughout the book in part because he hasn’t let himself feel rage at the people who maneuvered him out of his position.

The book, then, is not only about the secrets of the past, but about repression in the present. And the two are linked. At the end of the book, Doug realizes that his uncle Charles, who played Booth the Confederate soldier in the movie, was a lousy actor. But he determines to keep that a secret: “He’s weak, he’s a coward, and he’s a quitter but he’s family.” Jill and Doug have connections, wealth, knowledge, and power; they can protect their own. In the name of family, history is altered, and myths promulgated. Does that refer just to Charles? Or does it implicate the film he was in, and it’s neo-Confederate romanticism as well? Jill and Doug’s happy ending also becomes a conspiracy about a happy past. Bliss in the present erases ancestral moral failings — which can be an exhilarating message, but which can also have less sunny connotations.

Seidel’s control, then, can itself be read as ambiguous. The characters in the novel find new scripts and scenes and perspectives on a classic story, and they refuse them — they push them away. The shelving of multiple meanings, though, can itself have more than one meaning. To reject ambiguity is itself ambiguous; to push aside a meaning is (multiply) meaningful. More Than You Dreamed settles on one romantic dream, but it also says, ambiguously, that there are more.
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For those interested in the question of romance and directed reading, Liz McCausland hosted a lengthy discussion on the issue which is worth checking out.

Subtitled Love Affairs: Why Millions of Americans Prefer Korean Television

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American television doesn’t want me anymore.

I realized this a couple years ago when I downloaded the first season of “Breaking Bad” for distraction on a plane flight. Although I admired the clever structure of the pilot, I discovered I wasn’t curious about what would happen next. Even though I’ve worked as a high school teacher and I carry debt for hospital bills, I couldn’t relate to Walter White. And perhaps because I’m a female writer in my late thirties, I thought Walter’s late-thirties writer wife Skylar was an unrecognizable stock character. I lost interest without finishing the short first season, and it’s still sitting on my hard drive whispering that I must be lacking in good taste.

The idea among television critics that we’re living in a “golden age” for American television overlooks the fact that some of us find critically-acclaimed American television boring. The shows that get the most buzz are smart, it’s true. But they aren’t necessarily entertaining. This isn’t a golden age of television for all Americans. It’s a golden age for people who prefer intricate plots over empathy. Who can enjoy a show even if they don’t like the characters.

Television can still move me deeply. But in the past year, the television producers who make it with me aren’t the guys in Hollywood or New York. It’s the guys in Seoul, South Korea.

I was surprised by my out-of-the-blue interest in Korea, which began while I watched the first episode of my first subtitled show. Internet video-streaming sites (including Netflix and Hulu) offer large libraries of these “K-dramas,” as English-speaking fans call them. And several million Americans are watching with me, though it’s hard to quantify the online viewership. One of the largest sites, New York-based Drama Fever, serves about six to seven million US viewers a month, of whom roughly 80% are native English speakers. That’s roughly the number of people who watched the penultimate episode of “Breaking Bad” in 2013. (Independent research firm comScore confirms the site’s audience is growing, but estimate the audience at a somewhat lower 3.4 million. For comparison, that’s roughly the average audience size for the first two seasons of Game of Thrones.) Most viewers are women, according to Drama Fever—and that’s about all we have in common. The audience includes all races and a variety of tastes.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the rise of subtitled Asian shows this summer with a touch of horror, but there’s no reason to look down on Korean television. After years of government investment in the industry, their production values are excellent. Their aesthetic is different from ours, which can be jarring in mediocre shows, and they can be as corny as a Frank Capra film bathed in the collected tears of Steven Spielberg. But when the cream rises to the top, the best shows are suspenseful, funny and heartfelt. And even though I don’t speak Korean and I’ve never visited Asia, the cultural differences are minor next to the fact that I can relate to the characters in a way I haven’t related to anyone on American television since Dana Scully and Buffy Summers left the air.

One reason to watch Korean series is for three-dimensional female characters. K-dramas have their fair share of stock characters, Korean versions of season one Skylar, but they also have a good record of developing great roles for women. The characters popular with fans in recent years include an ambitious pastry chef, a tough cross-dressing tomboy, a scatter-brained spirit medium and a cynical defense attorney.

Another thing drawing some women may be that popular Korean series have a much lower body count than popular American shows—roughly one-eighth corpse per episode (my unofficial estimate), versus the US rate of nearly five corpses per episode (three if you omit cable). Korean characters tend to die of illness or in car crashes, while most fictional American corpses are the result of murder or zombie apocalypse. The numbers themselves are less important than the narrative style they suggest. American television producers have faith in stories about crime, politics and violence—and they do a good job with these subjects. But it’s increasingly hard to imagine an American drama that doesn’t have crime, politics or violence. In contrast, South Korea makes prime-time one-hour shows about families, growing up, romance, friendship—the good stuff in life. Some series are comedies, some are weepy melodramas, but most of them touch in some way on the human capacity for mixed emotions. Here in the U.S., shows about families and romance tend to be placed in the 22 minute format time-slot, which officially makes them “comedies” by Emmy standards, even when a show like “Nurse Jackie” challenges the drama-comedy distinction.

It’s tempting to attribute Korea’s growing appeal to the declining number of female writers in American television. After all, 75% of American television pilots are developed by writing teams made up entirely of men, while the vast majority of writers for prime-time Korean series are female. Superstar writers like the Hong Sisters even become household names à la Aaron Sorkin. The worldwide hit romantic comedy “Coffee Prince” had a female director as well as writer. But this fact doesn’t explain much on its own. After all, it was male writer Joss Whedon who created a few of my favorite female television characters.

What distinguishes K-dramas isn’t their subject matter or the gender of their writers, but their tone—and it’s hard to ascribe a gender to tone. Korean series are less cynical. The heroes are idealists underneath their flaws. The anti-heroes aren’t quite as despicable. The loners aren’t quite as alone. These are all aspects of the central fact about K-dramas: they need to entertain a wide swath of the population to make money. The successful K-drama provides pleasure to as many people as possible—like American television did twenty years ago before DVRs and Netflix.

Korean television shows aren’t “gritty,” and this makes even their action thrillers very different from ours. The big 2011 hit “City Hunter”—based in name only on Tsukasa Hojo’s 1985-91 manga—looks pretty dark on paper. It follows a mysterious vigilante looking for justice against the men who caused his father’s death. Dozens of people die in the first ten minutes of the first episode. The first episode also features a terrorist bombing, a kidnapping of a baby, a bunch of commandos slitting throats, a noisy shootout at a Thai drug plantation, and a leg severed by a land-mine. Though the following episodes contain less killing, the plot still revolves around betrayal, manipulation and corruption. There are knife-fights, gunfights and a really cool walking cane with a sword concealed inside. In episode seven, we watch the hero dig a bullet out of his own shoulder.

But despite the violence—which is presented mildly enough for Korean network television—the show interrogates violence from an idealistic point of view we haven’t seen on American television since before Sept. 11. The hero, Yoon-Sung, is the adopted son of a ruthless drug kingpin who raised and educated him to be a professional revenge-seeker. But in the first episode he’s already questioning his father’s quickness to shoot first, ask questions later. The guy’s got great moves in combat, but he prefers to tie his enemies up, put them in a refrigerator box, and drop them off at the district attorney’s office along with conclusive evidence of their crimes. Take that! The emotional and moral heart of the 20-episode series quickly becomes the conflict between Yoon-Sung and his father over whether to achieve their goals through killing or MacGyver-esque stunts. And the MacGyver-esque stunts are way more fun to watch.

The style of humor in “City Hunter” also steers away from cynicism. Instead of relying on snarky one-liners, the show finds humor in the characters’ internal contradictions. It’s funny that Yoon-Sung’s earnest middle-aged sidekick is addicted to the home shopping channel. It’s funny that Yoon-Sung preserves his secret identity by pretending to be feeble in front of his judo-chopping girlfriend. Leading man Lee Min-Ho has great comic timing—he’s starred in more than one popular romantic comedy—making him an action hero more in the mold of a young Cary Grant than Vin Diesel.

And like Cary Grant in a Hitchcock movie, the hero often finds himself at the mercy of the women in his life. More than once the hero’s survival depends on his crush Kim Na-Na, a fifth-level black belt who works for the Korean equivalent of the Secret Service. She occasionally needs rescuing herself—she’s not quite Buffy—but she sometimes rescues the hero in turn. A second woman, a divorced veterinarian, provides crucial help (no spoilers here). And an important secondary narrative follows Yoon-Sung’s birth mother, whose life we learn about in flashbacks. These women aren’t accessories to the hero, but the people who make his success possible.

None of these elements—the idealism, the humor, the women with original personalities—are particularly “Korean” or calculated to appeal to women. We once found these things in abundance on American television. The idealism is particularly familiar. Our film and television spent the forties and fifties plumbing idealistic questions about the moral use of violence much like the ones in “City Hunter”—they’re at the heart of the classic Westerns by John Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. But today, these elements make for a thriller that feels unlike anything on American television right now. It’s a story about characters I want to root for.

Plenty of people enjoy America’s gritty shows. But a few million of us are bored by the joylessness on television. Before another long work week starts, we want someone to tell us a good story. If it’s a story that makes us feel like we’re living in a golden age of television, that’s even better. But first, tell us a story with characters we care for, with stakes that matter.

We didn’t leave American television. American television left us.

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Odessa Jones has a lot of degrees in a lot of subjects and she puts it all to good use in her commentary on subtitled Korean romances, including “City Hunter,” at K-Drama Today.

The Innocent Genre

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Earlier this week, Chris Gavaler argued that literary fiction is now willing to incorporate genre fiction — unless the genre fiction is romance. Chris argued that the exclusion of romance was due to the fact that “the new literary landscape allows anything but a convention-determined plot outcome.” Romance requires a formulaic happy ending; literary fiction requires a non-formulaic (often unhappy) ending. Thus, the two may never flirt, fall head over heels, and/or consummate.

I think Chris is wrong for a number of reasons. First, romance is a lot less formulaic than this suggests. But, more importantly, the premise is false. Literary fiction and romance cross-pollinate all the time. In fact, in many cases the basic lit fic plot is romance. Much of the traditional literary fiction canon — Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, Anna Karenina, F. Scott Fitzgerald, big chunks of Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, Henry James, and on and on — is based around romance plots. Lit fic doesn’t incorporate romance as genre, or see romance as genre, because romance, when in a lit fic setting, is always already lit fic. The distinction between lit fic and romance is really almost entirely a matter of marketing. And since it’s just a matter of labeling, removing the labeling makes the genre, as genre, disappear.
 

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As an example, look at Ian McEwan’s “The Innocent.” Like many romance novels, it’s got a historical setting — in this case early Cold War Germany — and the richness of the period detail is part of the sensual appeal that distances the reader from hearth and home, providing a setting for a different, fantasy love affair. And all the hallmarks of romance are there, from the instant, shocking moment of initial recognition (“Years later, Leonard had no difficulty at all recalling Maria’s face. It shone for him the way faces do in certain old paintings”) to explicit sex, and even to hints (and more than hints) of sexual violence and rape. Pamela Regis’ eight essential elements of the romance novel are all carefully articulated, from the meeting through the betrothal, and not excluding the point of ritual death — which here, in an excess of punctilliousness, involves an actual, accidental but brutal murder (of Maria’s abusive ex), and an extended dismemberment and disposal of the corpse.

It’s true that the precise order of Regis’ elements are somewhat scrambled — the moment of ritual death occurs after the betrothal, for example. And there are long, unexpected dislocations between one element and another. Most notably, Maria and Leonard actually break up and leave each other for decades, both marrying others and having children, before finally (tentatively) planning to reunite at the very conclusion of the book.

If you hadn’t read many romance novels, you might conclude that this was lit fic running roughshod over convention and breaking out of the romance genre straight-jacket. But, the truth is, romance novels mess with Regis’ order all the time, and aren’t even adverse to throwing some years and intervening marriages between the meeting and the final consummation. Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s folk rock romance “Til the Stars Fall,” for example, has its main characters meet during college and break up; Krissa rushes into a marriage with another guy and has several children before she divorces and she and Quinn reunite. Pam Rosenthal’s regency “The Slightest Provocation” is about a husband and wife who have fallen out; the plot is to get them back together, not to unite them in the first place. If you wanted, you could argue that McEwan is more unconventional because the ending is more indeterminate — but on the other hand, you could argue that Seidel is more unconventional because the main emotional energy in the book is on the relationship between Quinn and Krissa’s brother Danny, rather than on the relationship between Quinn and Kirssa.

There is one aspect of The Innocent which marks it as literary fiction rather than romance: it’s told from the man’s perspective. For most of the novel, most of the time, you’re inside Leonard’s head. This is virtually never the case in the romance novels I’ve read, where consciousness is generally split between the male and female leads. Even here, though, McEwan does not abandon convention entirely. At important points in the narrative, you shift into Maria’s head — as if to assure readers that yes, this is a romance, and not (despite the title) a lit fic bildungsroman, or a lit fic male psychodrama. McEwan carefully puts you in Maria’s head to let you see Leonard from her perspective, and understand why he’s attractive. After he tells her he’s a virgin, for example, you get this.

For hers was the laughter of nervous relief. She had been suddenly absolved from the pressures and rituals of seduction. She would not have to adopt a conventional role and be judged in it, and she would not be measured against other women. Her fear of being physically abused had receded. She would not be obliged to do anything she did not wants She was free, they both were free, to invent their own terms. They could be partners in invention. And she really had discovered for herself this shy Englishman with the steady gaze an the long lashes, she had him first, she would have him all to herself. These thoughts she formulated later in solitude.

You need this passage for the same reason you need both perspectives in a romance novel — so that Maria is a person, rather than simply a reward or an object of desire. Or, if you prefer, so that Leonard too is a reward and an object of desire — so that the story is about a relationship between two people, rather than about only one.

Similarly, when Leonard confusedly tries to initiate a BDSM scenario and ends up almost raping Maria, we’re mostly in his head — but we switch to her memory of seeing another woman raped during the war by Russian soldiers. The abusers perspective, the novel insists, is not the most important one, or the only one; Leonard wants to make her a part of his fantasy life entirely, but she is her own person. And finally, at the end, after the murder of the ex boyfriend and the break-up, and after the two have lived their lives, and had their separate marriages, the final words of reconciliation, by letter, are Maria’s. As a result we actually end up learning more about her life than Leonard’s — we know about her marriage, her kids, and about her continued love. “And in all this time I’ve thought about you. A week hasn’t passed when I haven’t gone back over things, what we might or should have done, and how it could have been different.” And yes, even that romanticization and flirtation with infidelity is a romance trope.

“The Innocent” shows that romance can be incorporated seamlessly into literary fiction — or rather, that what is needed is not incorporation, but merely a slight change in perspective. If the new lit fic purveyors of thrilling tales avoid romance, it is not because romance is conventional, but because one big convention of lit fic is romance. It’s embarrassing, when you want to go slumming with genre, to have the world find out that you’ve been happily married to her the whole time.