“They don’t make movies about girls like us.” That’s what the character Natalie hears from her mother when she’s just an eager child, pressing her nose against the TV to watch the guy get the girl in a romantic comedy. In the opening scene of the new comedy Isn’t It Romantic, which recently landed on Netflix and this week became the platform’s third-most-streamed film ever, we quickly understand two things: we have all internalised ideas about romance from movies, and so has the character we’re about to spend 90 minutes with.
Romantic comedies offer up fantasies for our consumption. To win in a rom-com, a straight, usually white, almost always thin woman is singled out, plucked from obscurity to become a princess or pop star, or simply chosen by a handsome lead whose attention and affection is all she needs and desires. These women are seen and made to feel special.
Natalie is played by Rebel Wilson, the Australian actor who has staked a claim on portraying ballsy, scene-stealing characters in Hollywood comedies like Bridesmaids and Pitch Perfect. We are not accustomed to seeing plus-size women like Wilson outside tagalong best friend roles. On screen, fat women are rarely visible at all, and when they are they most commonly serve as some kind of warning against eternal loneliness or symbol of a moral failing.
Rebel Wilson drew ire from Twitter for claiming, when the trailer for Isn’t It Romantic premiered, that she was the first plus-sized lead in a romantic comedy, ignoring the work of actors like Queen Latifah and Ricki Lake. But just because she wasn’t the first doesn’t make the list that came before her glaringly short. Actors who look like her – or like the millions of women around the world who pay for Netflix subscriptions or cinema tickets – aren’t often the point around which a romantic plotline orbits.
In Isn’t It Romantic, Natalie is a cynic of the very genre we’re watching. She recognises and resents the tired rom-com cliches in movies her friend loves: the flamboyant gay best friend with no agency of his own, the slow-motion run to stop a wedding, the surprise realisation that the lead is in love with the best friend who has been under their nose the whole time.
But when she hits her head during a particularly violent mugging on the New York City subway and awakens in the rose-coloured world of romantic comedies, she becomes the kind of girl who gets to steal focus and fall in love on screen – but is understandably sceptical about it.
“I hit my head really hard and I woke up in this alternate universe,” Natalie says, attempting to explain how baffling this new world is to her. “People are treating me like I’m special. And I’m not special.”
This kind of concussion fairytale has become something of a trope recently. In 2018’s I Feel Pretty, Amy Schumer played a character called Renee who is sheepish and self-conscious, working in a basement and insisting it’s her presence in group photos that stops her friends finding success on dating apps. After knocking herself unconscious during an especially humiliating SoulCycle class, Renee looks in the mirror and for once likes what she sees. She is now wildly confident, brazenly hitting on men, entering wet T-shirt contents and reminding everyone she encounters that she’s worthy and wonderful.
When doing press for the film, Schumer stressed how important it was that we, the viewer, never saw what Renee saw in the mirror; we don’t know if she saw a supermodel staring back at her or if she simply rewired the way she felt about herself, exactly as she was. But either way, her newfound perspective drastically alters the way she participates in the world.
On paper these films reinforce an insulting idea: that only with temporary brain damage or in an alternate universe (whose rules and boundaries are shaky at best) can regular women be valued and desirable. When their trailers were first shared online, both films received torrents of backlash – some of which was fair criticism reaffirming how harmful it can be to remind women that they cannot be the heroes of their own stories without first pulling some kind of mask over either their own or the world’s collective eyes.
But in practice, there’s something really essential at play in these films. They force us to reckon with the reality of a world that tells girls from birth that their value is in their ability to attract and retain a (handsome, white, male) partner, but that only those thin and pretty and nonthreatening enough will be able to win that prize.
By allowing Renee to realise she was worthy all along, by allowing Natalie to realise she was the object of her best friend’s attention and had the potential to succeed at her job from the beginning – but that neither of those things define her – these films are carving new ground in the romantic comedy canon. And they do it all without having their characters undergo major weight-loss journeys or other montage-based makeovers to get there.
And while framing “liking yourself” as the ultimate goal for characters like Renee and Natalie paints a pretty grim picture of reality – that baseline acceptance is so fantastical an idea for women who aren’t wafer-thin or covergirl gorgeous – it is a shockingly radical act to put a woman with a body like Rebel Wilson’s in the starring role of a film like this without making it the focus, or the part of herself that requires “fixing” in order for her to find happiness. It might have taken a concussion to get her there, but Natalie experiences a world where she is valid, and her “happily ever after” is with herself, just as she is.
• Brodie Lancaster is the author of No Way! Okay, Fine. She’s a critic and the editor of Filmme Fatales, a zine about women in film
