From the screwball comedies of Hawks and Capra to the golden age of Nora Ephron, the romantic comedy has always revealed something essential about how a culture imagines love — and desire, and the acceptable limits of both. Entertainment journalist Laura Gommans joins to ask why, as our understanding of relationships has evolved, the genre that's supposed to capture those feelings has stagnated. Are the cliches the point, or has the romcom lost the freedom to be genuinely funny about what people do to each other? An episode about genre, pleasure, and why we keep waiting for a great one.
An essay exploring what changes when cinema’s erotic charge is directed by and toward women rather than performing femininity for a presumed male viewer. From the classic gaze theory of Laura Mulvey to the contemporary films rethinking how desire works on screen, this piece asks what female desire looks like when it doesn’t have to perform for anyone — and whether cinema is finally catching up with the women it has always claimed to be about.
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