Meet cute
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A meet-cute is a convention of screwball comedies and their heirs, the romantic comedies, the contrived encounter of two potential romantic partners in unusual or comic circumstances, a comic situation contrived by the filmmakers entirely in order to bring them together. During a "meet-cute", scriptwriters often create a humorous sense of awkwardness between the two potential partners by depicting an initial clash of personalities or beliefs, an embarrassing situation, or by introducing a comical misunderstanding or mistaken identity situation. Sometimes the term is used without a hyphen (a "meet cute"), or as a verb, as in "to meet-cute."
In most screwball comedies and many romantic comedies, the potential couple comprises polar opposites, two people of completely different temperaments, situations, social statuses, or all three (It Happened One Night), who would not have anything to do with each other under normal circumstances. The meet-cute provides the opportunity.
In this genre, the chemistry of the lead characters is typically established quickly and firmly. The subject matter of romantic comedies are the obstacles that the potential pair must face before they can acknowledge, fulfill, or consummate their love, and the audience must care about the relationship enough to finish the movie. The meet-cute, by virtue of its unusual situation, helps to fix the potential relationship in the viewers' minds, and the spark of the meeting is the impetus by which initial vicissitudes of the developing relationship are overcome.
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[edit] Use of "meet cute" situations
Certain movies are entirely driven by the meet-cute situation; circumstances throw the couple together for the span of the movie. However, movies in which the situation is the main feature, rather than the romance, are not considered "meet-cutes" (Some Like It Hot).
The use of the meet-cute is less marked in television series and novels, in which there is more time to establish and develop romantic relationships. In situation comedies, relationships are static and meet-cute is not necessary, though flashbacks may recall one (Bewitched, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mad About You) and lighter fare may require it.
Film critics such as Roger Ebert [1] or the Associated Press' Christy Lemire [2] popularized the term in their reviews, and may have originated the term. In Ebert's commentary for the DVD of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, he describes the scene where the African-American law student Emerson Thorne bumps into the female character Petronella Danforth. Ebert admits that he, as the screenwriter, wrote into the script a "classic Hollywood meet cute." He explains the meet cute as a scene "in which somebody runs into somebody else, and then something falls, and the two people began to talk, and their eyes meet and they realize that they are attracted to one another." The culture of the extremely compressed movie pitch meeting may have also contributed to its continuing usage.
In the 1983 episode of the television show Alice titled "Vera Gets Engaged" Alice uses the term to describe Vera's meeting with the policeman who gave her a jaywalking ticket and then later in the episode asked her to marry him.
While the device seems clichéd today, it may be a victim of the decline of rigid class consciousness in the United States since its heyday during the Great Depression. Screwball comedy, which made heavy use of these contrivances, also peaked during this period.[3]
[edit] Cultural references
In the film The Holiday (2006), Eli Wallach's character Arthur Abbott (a retired Hollywood screenwriter) described a meet-cute by saying "Say a man and a woman both need something to sleep in and both go to the same men's pajama department. The man says to the salesman Ted, I just need bottoms, and the woman says, I just need a top. They look at each other and that's the meet-cute." It's a reference to the film Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938) by Ernst Lubitsch with Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper, and the writers Charlton Andrews, Charles Brackett, Alfred Savoir and Billy Wilder.
[edit] Examples
Examples of couples "meeting cute" in romantic comedy films include:
- It Happened One Night throws runaway heiress Ellie (Claudette Colbert) and world-weary ex-reporter Peter (Clark Gable) together in a dispute over the last seat on a bus.
- In Bringing Up Baby, nervous paleontologist David (Cary Grant) finds that his golf ball and his car get inadvertently driven by strong-willed heiress Susan (Katharine Hepburn).
- In My Man Godfrey ditzy socialite Irene (Carole Lombard), following her sister to a dump, chooses Godfrey (William Powell) to be her "forgotten man" for a charity scavenger hunt.
- In Singin' in the Rain, the character played by Gene Kelly is running through the street to try to escape from his fans. He is jumping from the roofs of cars and taxis, and he accidentally lands into a woman's convertible (Debbie Reynolds). Even though they do not get along at first, a romance ensues.
- In Notting Hill, the character played by Hugh Grant accidentally spills orange juice on the character played by Julia Roberts, which leads them into a conversation.
- In Reality Bites, Winona Ryder and Ben Stiller meet after she causes him to crash his convertible when she tosses a cigarette into it from her car at a stoplight.
- In Serendipity, the characters played by John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale coincidentally grab the same pair of gloves at a Bloomingdale's store.
- In The Wedding Planner, the character played by Matthew McConaughey saves a woman's life (Jennifer Lopez) when a runaway dumpster is heading towards her.
- In The Holiday, Kate Winslet's character, Iris Simpkins, and Jack Black's character, Miles, "...meet-cute after she swaps her London home for the Los Angeles digs" of Amanda Woods, the character played by Cameron Diaz [4], while Diaz "meets cute" the Jude Law character, Graham Simpkins (Iris' brother).
- Working Girl
Examples of a "meet-cute" in television are also recognizable in:
- In "Grey's Anatomy" pilot, indecisive Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) sleeps with Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) the night before she starts interning at Seattle Grace Hospital, and doesn't realize until she arrives in the morning that Derek is her boss.
- the pilot of "Chuck", where the eponymous lead is holding on a telephone waiting for someone, riffing off his best friend's comment about "Vicky Vale", only to look up and find co-lead Yvonne Strahovski standing at his counter with an ostensibly broken cellphone. "It's from Batman." "Yeah; cause that makes it better".
[edit] References
- ^ Three to Tango "meet-cute" by Roger Ebert
- ^ Google Cache of Christy Lemire article
- ^ Maurice Charney, Comedy High and Low
- ^ MSNBC article by Christy Lemire
