Mindy Kaling is best known for the character she plays on “The Office”, the effervescent, outlandishly overstyled and chatty Kelly Kapoor. And this week, she’s running a piece in The New Yorker explaining her aspirations to write for the big screen (she’s already a head writer on “The Office”), with the sort of screenplay that would make Kelly bust her pink-pantsuits open with glee.
image via Just Jared
I love how she owns up to her rom-com adoration despite containing cheese-ball levels of fluff. As she points out, the success of the genre comes from the pleasure we get watching other people fall in love. Then she continues with a comprehensive run-down of all the female archetypes we see so often in romantic comedies these days. The brilliant list includes The Klutz, The Ethereal Weirdo, The Woman Who Is Obsessed with Her Career and Is No Fun at All, and The Woman Who Works in an Art Gallery. Props to Mindy for capturing the hilarious, and yeah, somewhat depressing flatness of most characters in contemporary romantic comedies.
But if these are the women we see too much of, who are the ones we’d actually want to watch more?
The Woman Who Has a Decent Job and an Acceptable Apartment
Most of the time a film features a professionally powerful woman as the lead, the rest of her life, namely the personal side, has to suffer. But, most women aren’t ripped from the pages of a Lauren Conrad book. And I get that a great apartment would seem to naturally go hand in hand with a bad-ass gig, but can a gal honestly get that lucky all before age 30? Why not a young HR rep or someone who works in retail and sells her own jewelry on the side? Oh, and her living room is not a white box with impeccably pristine blue accents. Things can be out of place, but leave out the “Along Came Polly” levels of disarray…
Because the reverse of the Woman-Who-Has-Everything-but-Love is the one who has nothing, and it’s hard to say which one is worse. Rom-coms love to take a woman at the bottom of her barrel and offer her only one beaming white path out: love.
Can we just have a regular woman who isn’t summering in the Greek Islands or working her summer at a fast-food joint? There’s something about watching a woman needing to earn love that feels like a slap in the face to the rest of us.
The Woman Who is Content
Does every woman in a romantic comedy have to be so manic about the state of their love lives? Either they’ve exhausted all dating energy to an absurd point or they obsess over it like a barely visible pimple. The same discontent trap goes over a character’s work life. Forget what I said before about the woman working at a fast-food joint, and let her work there. Make her content with the way her life is. Then love is a nice surprise, not the Only Thing that can save her.
The Woman who is a Hair Dresser
I know this seems out of place, but think of all the hair dressers you’ve ever met. There’s at least three with an awesome life story and/or philosophy. Like this one. If that doesn’t have rom-com-screenplay-you’d-totally-watch written all over it then I don’t know what does.
The Woman Who Already Has Solid Relationships – and We Get to See Them
I’d love to see a movie whose lead character is in social relationships that are vibrant, supportive, and resemble at least some fraction of human dynamics. At the very start. Let’s forget about arch nememis, and weird office rivals curiously hellbent on destroying our heroine’s career. Her friends aren’t grubby gossipers who only want to hear the details about her last hook-up. They’re adults who can share honest advice when asked for it, or not (Rosie O’Donnell’s character in Sleepless in Seattle always gave unsolicited advice , and I loved it). The point is, they resemble real and good friends. Why make our heroine a sad loner?
Add to the list, the woman who writes for a hit TV show, will probably write a hit screenplay, and still seems like she’d make me shoot mimosa’s out of my nose at brunch. That is to say, more Mindy Kaling, please!
