"I'm Taken … by Myself": Romantic Crisis in the Self-Centered Indie Rom-Com

romantic comedy has traditionally been one of Hollywood's most popular genres, but the 2010s will probably be remembered as one of its bleakest decades. Nothing at the turn of the century seemed to foreshadow the reversal of the genre's fortunes in the new millennium. In 2002, for instance, there were eight rom-coms in the top one hundred highest-grossing films of the year, and they collectively took in $687 million in domestic box office alone. But these figures went into steep decline as the decade progressed. The last reasonably successful rom-coms (Silver Linings Playbook and The Five-Year Engagement) were released in 2012. Since then, the genre has plummeted at the box office or virtually disappeared altogether from the big screen. In 2017 only two independently produced romantic comedies made it to the top one hundred (neither of them in the top fifty): The Big Sick (ranked 64) and Home Again (ranked 87), with a combined domestic gross of only $70 million (Box Office Mojo, "2017 Domestic Grosses"). In 2018, however, the genre started to show signs of recovery, with five rom-coms in the top one hundred, one of them being the breakout hit Crazy Rich Asians, which made a remarkable $174 million in the domestic market alone (Box Office Mojo, "2018 Domestic Grosses").

Critics' focus on romantic comedy's commercial failures during the 2010s¹ tend to sidestep the creative efforts that are taking place in less visible sites. As I have argued elsewhere, mainstream romantic comedy may not be in its finest hour, but it is thriving on the margins (Oria). Contemporary US independent cinema is not producing "canonical" texts, but it is prolific in the output of films that deploy the conventions of romantic comedy, reinventing the genre in the process through new formulas that are contributing to its renaissance. One of these new approaches will be the object of analysis in this article: there is a clear tendency in the contemporary indie rom-com to "diversify" the film's focus—that is, to pay attention to other issues apart from romance. One of the most frequent variations is emphasis on the characters' quest for identity and self-improvement. This article will look at the tendency in contemporary romantic comedy to focus on the self rather than on the couple as a symptom of a general sense of anxiety about coupling in a social system characterized by unsettled gender power relations and of the narcissism of the millennial neoliberal culture. The films mentioned in this article participate in a discourse that connects them with relationship gurus and contemporary social theory, so I will focus on the latter—especially Eva Illouz's ideas on modern romantic suffering—as a theoretical framework to explore these movies' underscoring of self-realization and the de-emphasis on romance to achieve it. I will also take into account the neoliberal rationality that informs many of these films in an attempt to explain their construction of certain models of subjecthood. To do so, I will turn to the area where the genre has been more prevalent during the 2010s: the independent sector. More specifically, I will offer a close reading of Daryl Wein's Lola Versus (2012), a movie that can be considered representative of this trend for its paradigmatic plot, characters, and indie credentials.

The Self-Centered Rom-Com

One of the paths toward the regeneration of the rom-com lies in the expansion of topics it is willing to tackle. These new topics may include atypical or thornier issues than the genre has traditionally dealt with, such as abortion (Obvious Child [2014]); mental illness (Greenberg [2010], It's Kind of a Funny Story [2010], In Your Eyes [2014]); death (Seeking a Friend for the End of the World [2012], The Pretty One [2013], Life after Beth [2014], Tumbledown [2015]); parenthood (Happythankyoumoreplease [2010], Friends with Kids [2011], Gayby [2012], Begin Again [2013], Maggie's Plan [2015]); addiction (Don Jon [2013], The Spectacular Now [2013], Newlyweeds [2013], Sleeping with Other People [2015], Unlovable [2018]); sickness (Take Care [2014...