I have a real soft spot for romantic comedies — I am incurably vulnerable to their emotionally manipulative ways. While watching Sleepless in Seattle in class we were prompted to think about feelings and manipulation: what, specifically, is cueing you to feel a certain way at various points?

Sentimentality is one of the film’s greatest emotional touchpoints, and this is visible from the opening shot. In a graveyard, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) talks to his son about his deceased mommy, while plaintive piano music rises in the background. Every element of this scene, from the cinematography to the sound design, is working to put the audience immediately in a particular frame of mind — and to identify closely with Sam while also initiating the plot. Positioning much of the film in the point of view of a child is another way that the film manipulates its audience.

Interestingly, and perhaps even uniquely, for a romantic comedy is the fact that the romantic couple at the centre of the film don’t even meet until well after the half way mark. There is no “meet cute”. They live parallel lives of unhappiness, the film switching between them, before the two stories come together for their eventual meeting toward the end of the film.

This week’s reading¹ is exceedingly foundational, beginning with a literal dictionary definition of comedy and then going very deep on what exactly makes things funny (e.g. surprise, incongruity, implausibility, exaggeration and displacement). Nevertheless, it’s important to know exactly how the romantic comedy is differentiated from other genres (or from general, non-romatic comedy) and I did find especially interesting the contention that comedy about “childish energies that can no longer be contained by the adult frameworks”. I’m not sure it adequately describes all — or even most — comedies, but it’s an interesting thought.