Abstract
The Proposal is part of a cluster of recessionary romances that appeared after the global financial crash in which certitudes about gender and class are subject to revision. The film devotes itself to the symbolical resolution of two pressing social concerns in its formation of a protagonist couple: the first of these is the increasingly evident lack of upward mobility in a tight economy and the second is the perceived rising professional power of women. Despite its anxieties about meritocratic reward, The Proposal retains a degree of optimism that has proved elusive in most of the films that follow it.
In this chapter I situate the film in relation to its “chick flick” predecessors, contemporaries and successors. I then move to suggest that The Proposal’s age-disproportionate romance is largely a ruse, an effort to particularize a star-driven romance narrative at a time when “chick flicks” had fallen into commercial disrepute. Transparently designating its beautiful female star “mature” while relying heavily on her youthful appearance it generated a contradiction that audiences were expected to see through. In a similar way, The Proposal effects a substitution of an “angry” man of color for a sanguine one in a way that reveals its commitment to racial and class hegemonies. Thus, while providing the transgressive frisson of an age discrepant romance the film is equally as notable for its presentation of the destabilizing effects it associates with trafficking beyond whiteness.
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Notes
- 1.
AT&T had entered into a media partnership with cinema media vendor NCM (National CineMedia) which enabled AT&T to run 90-second films, such as this one during the previews of general release films. See “Top Spot of the Week: BBDO, Director Daniel Wolfe Team on ‘Surprise’ for AT &T.”
- 2.
IMDB lists the film as the 16th highest grossing domestic release of the year. It outperformed emergent franchise films like Fast & Furious, auteur fare including Inglourious Basterds and critically praised dramas such as Up in the Air. See https://www.imdb.com/search/title?year=2009,2009&sort=boxoffice_gross_us,desc. The year’s 8th highest grossing film was The Blind Side for which Bullock would win the Oscar. For my purposes here the “chick flick’s” most recognizable and predominant form is that of a studio released star vehicle with female focalization and dilemmas of work and romantic partnership narratively foregrounded.
- 3.
The character’s Canadianness is a bit of an in-joke given Bullock’s long-established “America’s Sweetheart” status and the fact that her co-star, Ryan Reynolds, actually is Canadian. The film’s national/racial economy is hinted at in Margaret’s response when informed she will be deported: “It’s not like I’m an immigrant or something, I’m from Canada.”
- 4.
From the back cover of Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in The Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to do About It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution P, 2017).
- 5.
Obst, Lynda. “In Defense of the Chick Flick.” The Atlantic, April 1, 2010.
- 6.
In a taste of things to come 2009 was also the release year of Chinese romantic comedy Sophie’s Revenge a significant hit that established the viability of Chinese chick flicks.
- 7.
This idea was explored in an early draft of Suzanne Leonard’s “Weddings, Anti-Heroines, and Postfeminist Cynicism”. In The Wedding Spectacle Across Contemporary Media and Cultures (Eds.), Helen Wood, Jilly Boyce Kay & Melanie Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 53–65.
- 8.
The film further illustrates that having conspicuously failed to generate new stars, the genre is now recycling them.
- 9.
Indeed, there are occasional calls for its revival. For instance, in August 2018, Kyle Buchanan wrote in The New York Times that “audiences are starved for a good romantic comedy” and that “The genre that minted stars like Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock has fallen into disrepair. As studios began squeezing midbudget movies out of summer slates stocked with expensive superhero movies and dirt-cheap horror entries, the rom-com was first to go.” See “Summer Movie Scorecard: Some Crazy Rich Hits and Shocking Misses.”
- 10.
Orr, Christopher. “Isn’t It Romantic Fails as Both Rom-Com and Satire.” The Atlantic Feb. 2, 2019.
- 11.
Amanda Hess. “‘I Feel Pretty’ and the Rise of Beauty-Standard Denialism.” The New York Times. April 23, 2018. A related film is 2019’s weight loss comedy Brittany Runs a Marathon whose thematics of female self-care operate similarly but lacking a significant star whose bodily recognizability is key to her appeal, the film is free to stage a physical metamorphosis.
- 12.
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, p. 72.
- 13.
Jia Tolentino, Jia. “Always Be Optimizing.” In Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion (New York: Random House, 2019), p. 80.
- 14.
Noting that nearly all of the town’s businesses feature the name “Paxton,” Margaret asks “Who are you people?” and later demands of Andrew “Why didn’t you tell me you’re some kind of an Alaskan Kennedy?”
- 15.
Josephine Dolan and Estella Tincknell. “Introduction.” In Aging Femininities, Troubling Representation, Josephine Dolan & Estella Tincknell (eds.). (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars P, 2012), pp. x–xi.
- 16.
It is clear that The Proposal wants to position Gammy as a figure of racial authenticity and it is careful about doing so, designating her Native ancestry as Tlingit (a tribe associated with the Pacific Northwest) rather than the more localized Sitka. Any reference to the local indigenous people would trouble the film’s confident association between Sitka and the Paxton family, raising even if only implicitly uncomfortable questions of historical dispossession and diminishing the town’s status as a hometown for Andrew.
- 17.
Kristen Anderson Wagner. “‘With Age Comes Wisdom:’ Joan Rivers, Betty White and the Aging Comedienne.” Feminist Media Histories 3:2 (2017), p. 150.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 142.
- 19.
In this way the film strikingly resembles Moonstruck (1987) which rejects an older man in favour of his younger brother as the right romantic partner for Cher’s Loretta Castorini. Loretta’s mother hopes her 37-year-old daughter will have a baby and the film celebrates the passion and vitality of Loretta’s romance with Ronnie, seeing his brother Johnny as an insufficiently modern figure to update the family.
- 20.
Russell Meeuf. “Betty White: Bawdy Grandmas, Aging in America and ‘Prefeminist’ Fantasies.” In Rebellious Bodies: Stardom, Citizenship and the New Body Politics (Austin: U of Texas P, 2017), p. 163.
- 21.
Julie Jones, “Sandra Bullock is People’s 2015 World’s Most Beautiful Woman!” People.com April 22, 2015. https://people.com/celebrity/worlds-most-beautiful-2015-sandra-bullock-is-peoples-pick/.
- 22.
This became a structuring element in an interview related to the film that Bullock gave to The Today Show’s Matt Lauer in which the journalist gloated at the outset “I’ve seen you naked,” and told her “You’re naked for most of this movie.” Lauer’s lascivious approach to the interview led to its digital recirculation years later after revelations of his sexual misconduct surfaced and he was fired from his long-time position on the morning show.
- 23.
Billy Stevenson. “Divorce.” Nov. 14, 2018. https://cinematelevisionmusic.wordpress.com/2018/11/14/divorce-hbo-2016-2018/.
- 24.
Further bolstering the sense that The Proposal takes matters of family continuity and procreation rather seriously, Gammy’s performance here is also a kind of fertility ritual on Margaret’s behalf. The older woman exhorts Margaret “We must give thanks and ask that your loins be abundantly fertile.”
- 25.
The song stands in implicit contrast to a much older and lighter-spirited rap/hip hop song “It Takes Two” by Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock which is invoked in a scene the previous evening in which Margaret reveals personal details to Andrew as they share a bedroom in his parents’ house. Margaret mentions that the first concert she ever attended was a Base and Rock show and then she and Andrew sing a bit of “It Takes Two” exhibiting a warm, playful rapport while the song’s lyrical emphasis on coupledom thematizes the changing stakes of Margaret and Andrew’s relationship.
- 26.
The power of “the hometown” in the postfeminist romance is a subject I have written about in What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of the Self in Postfeminism. Where the hometown is conventionally the purview of a female character The Proposal introduces an innovative maneuver in linking it to a male protagonist.
- 27.
The film makes a number of references to the punishing pace of corporate life at Ruick & Hart. In an early scene Margaret cavalierly tells Andrew that she will need him to work over the weekend, initially making it impossible for him to visit his family as planned. When she later asks him why he hasn’t visited them more regularly his reply “I haven’t had a lot of vacation time the last three years” draws the brusque response “Oh stop complaining.”
Acknowledgments
I thank Suzanne Leonard and the participants of the interdisciplinary research seminar (particularly Lee Flamand and Ali Tuzcu) at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin for their feedback on an early draft of this article. At a later stage, I was grateful to have the opportunity to present this work at the University of Zaragoza where colleagues including Celestino Deleyto and Beatriz Oria provided useful reactions and thoughts.
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Negra, D. (2020). Age Disproportion in the Post-Epitaph Chick Flick: Reading The Proposal. In: Gwynne, J., Richardson, N. (eds) Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_4
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