Rawle Nyanzi

I’ve talked about the denigration of romance in modern media before, and once again, my social media friend Misha Burnett hits it out of the park with a post on Google Plus.

One thing I’ve noticed in recent TV and movies is the continual inclusion of a scene in which an awkward male character makes clumsy pass at a cool female character and gets publicly rejected.

It’s so prevalent, in fact, that it wasn’t until recently that I started questioning it. Because it gets shoehorned into all kinds of stories, many of which have no romantic element whatsoever, except for that one cringe-worthy scene. There is no narrative reason to include it–it doesn’t lead to any change in the group dynamics. It doesn’t usher in any romantic subplot that ends in characters becoming an item or any emotional growth in the characters.

It just sits there, an undigested lump of exposition wedged into the middle of a cop show or a disaster epic or a space opera–stories where a romantic subplot would be an unnecessary distraction from the main plot in any event.

It seems to me to be included more or less by rote–if you have an ensemble cast that includes both male and female characters (or, more often, one female character in a group of men) the writers feel the need to stop the action and explain that even though the female character is dressed in skintight leather pants and high heels she is not to be seen as a sex object, and we’ll demonstrate that by showing an icky man (usually the most maladroit of the characters) trying to hit on her and getting shot down.

Once I started seeing it, though, I can’t not see it, and I start waiting for it to come up. Very seldom does it not happen, usually fairly early in the film or in the pilot of the TV show.

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