Chapter 6: 23 Going on Spinster

Having hit that point in my work schedule where my brain is only capable of watching romcoms for any extended period of time, today I watched “13 Going on 30” for the first time in maybe years. It is not one of my favourite romcoms by a long shot: I don’t buy into the whole ‘watch what you’re wishing for’ and ‘enjoy your youth while you can’ jangle, not to mention that for some reason I find Jennifer Garner’s face inexplicably annoying (sorry Jennifer Garner) - but the film is set in New York. In fact, it is one of the very few comedies set in New York that I do not know by heart, so I had to make do just for the pleasure of hearing someone say “he lives in the village”, or something to that effect. (Yes, I know, my NYC obsession is getting more ridiculous by the day).

At any rate, the film was better that I remembered, perhaps because I am beginning to buy into the ‘enjoy your youth while you can’ jangle after all. While watching it I understood a couple of things about the universe and everything: 1) I need more Mark Ruffalo in my life and 2) romantic love is overestimated, and frankly kind of borning. Of course, these two universal truths were always in me, really, I just needed a prompt to get them out. My prompts were, respectively, Mark Ruffalo’s face and the actress playing Jennifer Garner’s evil friend with the nose job. Now, the last passage could result complicated to people living outside my head, so please bear with me. The reason why the actress playing Jennifer Garner’s evil friend with the nose job made me realise romantic love is overestimated is that she also plays Jennifer Lopez’s non-evil friend without the nose job in “The Wedding Planner”, which made me think about my favourite scene in “The wedding planner”. Believe it or not, it does not have Matthew McConaughey in it.

It is a scene towards the beginning of the film with just Jennifer Lopez in it. It is the kind of scene where there is music in the background and the protagonist is living their life, totally unaware (aren’t we all?) they are the protagonist of a romantic comedy. Apparently oblivious to the call of romance, JLo has just come back from a long day at work. She puts the leftover she brought from the wedding she organised on a plate, gets some white wine, puts it all on a tray table in her living room, and turns the tv on. Now, this is the point of the film where you are supposed to feel sorry for the wedding planner because her life is not romantic at all, it’s lonely and prosaic. I, on the other hand, even as I watched the film as a little girl, always thought the eating-dinner-alone-in-front-of-tv scene was utter bliss. The Lopez’ character goes on to spoil everything by starting to clean her house and fold her clothes, which is most certainly not utter bliss, but that is beside the point, the point being that I never felt sorry for the Wedding Planner for being alone. On the contrary, I envied her her independence, and wished I too could grow up to come home to pre-made food, a glass of wine and tv.

What I realised when I saw Jennifer Lopez’s non-evil friend without the nose job playing Jennifer Garner’s evil friend with the nose job in “13 Going on 30”, then, was that I got exactly what I wanted: after a long proficuous meeting with my supervisor, I walked home, made myself scrambled eggs and a cup of tea, and sat on my couch to enjoy Mark Ruffalo’s face. But in the “Wedding Planner” no one ever cares that Mary enjoys her life and her job and is good at doing both, they only care that she is not married - very realistic, since her family is Italian, but shameful nonetheless. Much worse, if i remember correctly (and I believe I do, having seen the film so many times when I was little that at one point I could recite it word by word), she leaves her non-evil friend without the nose job in charge of Matthew McConaughey’s wedding, even though that means not getting her promotion or something like that, to go and get married to the annoying Italian guy. Seriously, please, let’s take some time to internalise the wrongness of all this. Wronger still, in “13 Going on 30” we never even get to see what Jennifer Garner’s job is in her ‘real life’, after she has gone back to 13 and grew up as a good girl instead of the biatch she had become. What we do get to see is that she gets married to her high school boyfriend and they go to live in a pink house, so who cares about her career, right? Who cares that in her previous, bad girl life she had the job of her dreams, which she was great at, and this gorgeous apartment in midtown Manhattan? I care, reader, and because I care I came to the conclusion that the Matthew McConaugheys and, however hard to admit it, even the Mark Ruffalos of this world are hugely overestimated. The list could go on and on, sadly including some of my favourite films: “Sweet Home Alabama”, “27 Dresses”, “Just Like Heaven”, “The Holiday" … Women in these films get criticised, explicitly or implicitly, for being hard-working, independent beings. The happy ending is always in lovers’ meetings, which is fair enough since they are romantic comedies - except that the morale is often dangerously close to “stop working, start flirting”.

Me, I’d pick the apartment in midtown and eating alone in front of tv any day.

Yours always truly,

Raf xxx

#romcom #newyork #markruffalo #feminism #strongindipendentwomen #happyspinsterhood