A Balloon in a World of Pins
My roommate, Chloe, and I like to do this thing where we journey out of our apartment every weekend for a Wild Night Out. We are most often dressed in pajamas — having probably just gotten off work — and roll up to our local AMC theater to watch any random movie and eat a massive bag of popcorn. Last night’s movie of choice was Meg Ryan’s newest romantic-comedy, What Happens Later. I felt deeply compelled to see this one in theaters. Meg Ryan is back, baby.
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Sometimes it feels like I was born with rom-coms in my blood. I cannot recall one defining moment or instigating factor that made me fall in love with the genre — it has always just been. Perhaps my father can be credited with giving me the rom-com gene. If we weren’t watching Star Wars, we were watching a Hugh Grant, John Cusack, or Meg Ryan film. Every Christmas was Love, Actually and The Holiday. Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink were quoted daily in our household. I remember watching When Harry Met Sally for the first time, sitting in between my parents, and they covered my ears when Sally fakes the orgasm in the diner.
That is a wonderful way to have been raised.
It undoubtedly shaped me into the person I am today, and now I study romantic-comedies like somebody is paying me to do so. Everything about the genre fascinates me. It never occurred to me to think of rom-coms as silly and unrealistic — they always carried some kind of truth for me. For a while, I thought love stories were the only ones worth telling (I’m over that now (mostly)). Every story is a love story of some kind, but what I respect about rom-coms is their ability to bring order to the chaos of falling in love. Girl meets Boy. Girl loses Boy. Girl gets Boy back. It never changes. It Happened One Night did it first in 1934 and we’ve been following that pattern ever since. Sure, sometimes Boy is the one getting Girl, or Girl gets Girl, or it’s ambiguous whether anyone is getting anyone at the end, but at the core they’re all the same.
I never tire of it. I find such joy in watching every new rom-com to see how the writer and director try to differentiate themselves. Every actor brings something new, every setting, every meet-cute, and even every audience member. Hallmark movies push me to my rom-com limits, but I know many people who adore those and that is what makes them special.
About a decade ago, many critics and viewers deemed the romantic-comedy “dead.” As I was twelve, I could not partake in this conversation, but the epic rise and fall of the genre remains curious to me. I could write a whole separate essay about 2004 being the Last Great Year of the Rom-Com, though that is by no means to insinuate it “died” afterwards. It merely took on a new shape for the new century. The Switch (2010), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), and Sleeping With Other People (2015) are fantastic examples of this new form.
If we want to get vindictive, we can blame streaming services for ruining yet another seemingly permanent facet of the film industry. Netflix churns out soulless rom-coms for sport. Nobody’s trying anything new or adding an ounce of creativity; they are carbon copies of each other meant merely for profit. Despite the streaming service hurdle and sullied reputation, I believe rom-coms are back in a big way. Palm Springs (2020), I Want You Back (2022), and Rye Lane (2023) prove my point. Those films invent a new way to express that old, familiar pattern.
The same goes for Meg Ryan’s What Happens Later. She co-wrote, directed, and starred in it — opposite David Duchovny — crediting her years of working with Nora Ephron as inspiration. What makes this rom-com special is its insistence that it is not a rom-com. Ryan plays Willa, a lonely woman who describes herself as “woo-woo” and carries around a rain stick, and Duchovny plays Bill, a straight-laced finance guy who was once madly in love with Willa. They run into each other at the airport when their connections get canceled because of a freak snow storm. The film is 90 minutes of banter while Willa and Bill mindlessly wander the airport. It’s not a perfect story (some of the dialogue admittedly made me squirm), but it’s charming and nostalgic. Not often do we see a film featuring actors in their 60s given the space to reflect on their regrets, what ifs, and little joys.
In the last 24 hours, I’ve read countless interviews of Meg Ryan explaining how What Happens Later came to fruition. She said, in one New York Times article, she waited years for a story like this to come to her and it just happened to take the shape of a romantic-comedy. The film is dedicated to Nora Ephron, which could move me to tears if I dwelled on it. When asked what she learned about the genre from Ephron in another interview, Ryan answered: “I once heard Hugh Grant say something about rom-coms being a balloon in a world of pins. And it's true, like you don't want it to be a world of pins. You want to keep the balloons floating in that. And Nora was great at that, keeping it pin-free.”
To keep a balloon floating in a world of pins.
It is a perfect metaphor to me. Though it might prove a delusional goal, just attempting it, or simply hoping for it, is enough.