Battle of the Sexes in Romantic Comedies (Spoiler Alert: The Guys Win)

The month of May in The Rom-Com Project was originally going to be Bickering Bickersons month, where I focused on romantic comedies that had a bickering couple at the center. Then I remembered that “bickering couple at the center” described about fifty percent of romantic comedies and realized that I needed to narrow my focus. Instead, I declared May as “Battle of the Sexes” Month, focusing on romantic comedies that had a male and female lead in direct competition with each other. Then I sifted through the suggestions I received from my readers and picked the comedies that fell into this category. This month, I watched Adam’s Rib, The Shop Around the Corner, You’ve Got Mail, and Someone Like You.

In three of these movies, the male and female lead are in direct professional competition with each other. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib are the district attorney and a defense attorney in a high-profile trial, and they also happen to be a married couple. Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in The Shop Around the Corner are two employees of a Budapest gift store who work together but can’t seem to get along. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail (a modern update of The Shop Around the Corner) are two rival bookstore owners, he of the Barnes & Noble-esque megastore and her of a quaint children’s bookstore. Finally, Ashley Judd in Someone Like You is not in professional competition with Greg Kinnear or Hugh Jackman, but her relationships with both men inform and inspire her war against the male sex as a whole.

(It also feels noteworthy that three of these films star actors who have worked together on other romantic comedies. Hanks and Ryan were together in Sleepless in Seattle, Stewart and Sullavan were in three romantic comedies together, and I think I heard somewhere that Tracy and Hepburn did an obscure picture or two, here or there…)

Anyway, after watching these movies, I noticed a tendency among the filmmakers to try to play the Battle of the Sexes so that both sides win – except, in the end, the men win almost every time. In Battle of the Sexes comedies, the lead female characters usually possess two things: a job and a feisty and/or spunky independent personality, but by the end of the films, they have to Learn a Lesson about either their careers or their relationship choices – or, if they’re lucky, they Learn a Lesson about BOTH things.

First, let’s look at the career choices of these lead female characters. All four of them are employed, but with the exception of Katharine Hepburn’s lawyer in Adam’s Rib, they have the “woman who works in an art gallery”-type job that Mindy Kaling talks about in “Flick Chicks” – the kind of job that is professional yet ultimately nonthreatening for the male lead. Margaret Sullavan is a salesgirl at a gift shop, Meg Ryan is a children’s bookstore owner, and Ashley Judd is a production assistant at a popular talk show.

Next, let’s take their personalities into consideration. Hepburn is her husband’s intellectual equal with a sharp wit and tongue. Sullavan initially comes across as a shy, desperate young woman looking for a job, but proves to be an adept saleswoman who can easily take Stewart to task. Ryan is cute and spunky and makes a lot of “adorable” facial expressions (and her character’s name is even Kathleen Kelly, for krying out loud). Judd is professional, direct, and bright, enjoying a rapport with Jackman as she takes her womanizing co-worker down a peg or two.

These two qualities – a job and an independent personality – seem like prime ingredients for a feminist lead character and a feminist romantic comedy, right? Well, sure – but most recipes require more than two ingredients, and any feminist message that these movies might contain collapse when you don’t read the directions. (This is a really bad metaphor. I’ll move on from it now.) These independent women with careers each have to humble themselves and learn a lesson about work and/or romance, while their male partners get to stay the same and reap the benefits of being around the softened versions of the independent women they supposedly love.

Of the four female leads, Margaret Sullavan in The Shop Around the Corner probably has the best ending. She considerably softens her behavior toward Jimmy Stewart, yes, but not because she’s humbled or put into a position where she learns how wrong she was to judge him. She’s nicer to him because he’s nicer to her (after he learns that she was the identity of the “Dear Friend” he had been writing to). At the end of the film, she’s still his employee, so the power imbalance still exists, but the issue seems minor compared to the bond they created. She fares pretty well.

The same cannot be said for her modern counterpart, Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail. Ryan’s character starts from a higher position, in which she owns The Shop Around the Corner, but by the end of the film, her store has gone out of business thanks to the competition from Fox Books, the store owned by Tom Hanks’s character. Don’t feel too bad for her, though – there’s a quick scene in the film where she wanders through Fox Books and sees children happily browsing through the shelves, and she realizes that the megastore isn’t the soulless corporate monster she had been envisioning. Also, being forced out of her career turns out to be a good thing because she can now pursue a dream to write her own children’s book. This is supposed to make it okay that she ends up with the man whose business ruined hers, because she and Hanks were in Sleepless in Seattle together and REUNION MAGIC!

Meanwhile, Ashley Judd in Someone Like You is on a doomed mission from the beginning of the film, and everyone except her can see that it’s doomed. She falls too hard too fast for the Wrong Guy (Greg Kinnear, who was also Meg Ryan’s Wrong Guy in You’ve Got Mail), and when he inevitably breaks her heart, she develops a faux-scientific theory about why ALL men are predisposed to being unfaithful. We all know she’s full of crap, but she doesn’t know she’s full of crap until the eleventh hour, and the only reason she comes off as remotely smart is because Ashley Judd has an intelligent, likable presence onscreen. She learns at the very end that all men are not jerks and has to humble herself in front of Hugh Jackman before he kisses her in the street.

Finally, Katharine Hepburn’s character in Adam’s Rib has the most disappointing, frustrating trajectory of all, because hers was the story that began with the most potential. She takes the case of a woman who shot her husband, hoping to argue that her client was not in her right mind. The case particularly interests her because she knows that a sexist double standard could work against her client. I was interested in this story, foolishly expecting to see a somewhat nuanced take on a courtroom dramedy and a humorous portrayal of a loving couple sparring in court. I should have known better. As the film went on, it became clear that Tracy’s character was entirely in the right and Hepburn’s character entirely in the wrong. He had the objective, correct take on the case while she was the overly adamant feminist harpy who flirted with another man and humiliated her husband in court. In the end, she has to admit to being wrong after her husband threatens her with a gun – a gun that turns out to be fake, but the damage is still done.

After watching these four films in succession, I can’t claim there’s a strong anti-feminist message in all of them. No, these stories have messages of faux feminism – or milquetoast feminism, or wishy-washy halfway-feminism. The female leads can be feisty, they can spar with their romantic male leads, and they can have jobs, but they can’t be more successful than their romantic male partners, and they’d better not take the sparring too far, even if their careers and livelihoods depend on making successful arguments. And don’t even try to be a woman who takes a stand for other women, because your arguments are either completely stupid (Ashley Judd in Someone Like You) or you present them in an inappropriate forum during the wrong time (Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib).

I also can’t help but feel that, if the roles in You’ve Got Mail were reversed and the female lead was the person who owned the megastore, she would have had to close it down or resign her position after learning that love was more important than money.

Maybe there are more “Battle of the Sexes” romantic comedies where the female lead is the one who triumphs – or, better yet, where neither triumphs and the message focuses on mutual respect and understanding. If such movies exist, I’d definitely like to see them.